Vietnam & Back Again

Centralia Chronicle - Centralia, WA

Vietnam & Back Again
Former Prisoner of War From Winlock Will Share His Story of Five Years in Captivity
Posted July 24, 10:46 AM

By Julie McDonald
For The Chronicle

Air Force pilot Captain Edward W. Leonard Jr. had completed 257 missions when, while trying to rescue fellow pilot Kenny Fields, enemy fire shot down his A-1H Skyraider aircraft over Laos May 31, 1968.

During the successful rescue of Fields, which involved 189 sorties, enemy fire brought down seven U.S. aircraft -- and American forces rescued all but one of the pilots.

The only man left behind was Leonard, a Winlock native who broke his foot while ejecting from his damaged plane in a combat chute, shot an enemy soldier after landing, and climbed 150 feet up a tree to avoid capture.

“I was raised in the Pacific Northwest,” Leonard said in a recent telephone interview. “When you’re hiding from people when you’re a kid, you always go up a tree. People don’t look up.”

His strategy worked, too. He hovered for three days above the layered canopy of the jungle while Communist forces set up a bivouac below. But as they broke camp, one of the soldiers leaned his pack against the tree trunk and relaxed by lying on the ground nearby, smoking a cigarette. He looked up and spotted Leonard in the tree.

A Long Captivity

Leonard spent more than five years in North Vietnam as a prisoner of war, where his captors tortured him with the Vietnamese rope trick -- yanking his arms behind his back, twisting a rope until his elbows touched, then looping another rope through and lifting him off the ground.

“That was pretty brutal,” said Leonard, an Ilwaco resident who today has an artificial right shoulder, two artificial hips and two artificial knees, stemming from the torture by his captors.

Some of Leonard’s experiences are mentioned in a memoir written by Fields called “Rescue of Streetcar 304: A Navy Pilot’s Forty Hours on the Run in Laos,” published in May 2007 by the U.S. Naval Institute Press.

“It tells the story of Suzanne and myself, and how we kept trying to get married over the years,” Leonard said. “We kept doing it wrong. We had entirely too long a courtship -- 30 years.”

Surviving, Barely

Suzanne, whom he had met while attending the Air Force Academy, had planned to meet him in the Philippines, but then he was shot down in May 1968.

“I went missing in action; she didn’t know whether I was alive or dead,” Leonard said. “She said I was the only man who ever stood her up.”

Only two months earlier, Leonard’s Skyraider was severely damaged over North Vietnam, but he nursed the plane through the air for 1½ hours.

“I managed to get the thing back into Thailand before it fell out of the sky,” said Leonard, a highly decorated combat pilot. He crash-landed the plane, suffering only bruises. He returned to the cockpit the following day.

The next time his plane crashed he didn’t fare as well. But if he hadn’t been captured, Leonard said his wife -- an incurable optimist -- insists he would have been killed.

“Kenny was the eighteenth pilot that I was in on the rescue,” Leonard said. “We get 18 men out and we leave one on the ground -- those are pretty good numbers.”

‘Tortured Me Until I Was Guilty’

In the summer of 1969, after an escape in another POW camp, Leonard’s captors interrogated him about a possible escape attempt in his camp.

“They didn’t like my attitude, and that’s OK; I didn’t like theirs,” Leonard said. “There was a meeting of minds.”

In a 1977 book, “We Came Home,” Leonard is quoted as saying that his captors “tortured me until I was guilty.”

Leonard, who served as senior officer in the compound, spent 3½ years in solitary confinement. To alleviate boredom, he spent hours exercising, praying, and working mental projects, reciting during his “patriotic hour” everything from the Boy Scout oath to his commissioning at the Air Force Academy.

He was released March 28, 1973, and when he returned home to Winlock, the community honored him May 4 with a wonderful Christmas celebration -- five months late.

Among his many decorations, Leonard earned four Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, three Distinguished Flying Crosses, one Bronze Star, 21 Air Medals, and two Purple Hearts.

Life After the War

After the war, Leonard returned to flying, serving in the Air Force for 20 years before retiring as a lieutenant colonel because of physical problems. He then attended the University of Texas Law School, graduating in 1982, and worked for years as a prosecutor in Texas.

He returned to the Pacific Northwest, settling in Ilwaco in Pacific County, and began working as a criminal defense attorney in Astoria, Ore. He said he worked in the “criminal law system; I leave justice to God.” After physical problems forced him to quit his law career, he ran for mayor of Ilwaco, a position he held in 2001.

Leonard said he tries to return to Winlock at least once a year for Egg Day, although he missed the festivities this year. After his presentation in Chehalis Saturday, he’ll be speaking in Sedro-Woolley.

How does Leonard feel about his Communist captors today?

“With the exception of one individual, I have no resentment or hard feelings whatsoever,” he said. “The chief political officer enjoyed visiting pain on human beings.”

If he saw the sadistic man at a restaurant today, Leonard said he would shove a knife through his brain and then return to eating his meal.

“When you enjoy doing it (inflicting torture), that’s sick,” Leonard said. “He was very sick.”