
U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Harlan Chapman’s F-8E “Crusader” fighter jet spun so violently that he could not reach the ejection handles over his head. “I was sure I was going to die,” he told an interviewer in 2018. Chapman was attacking targets deep in North Vietnam on Nov. 5, 1965, along with 31 other strike fighters, when enemy anti-aircraft fire tore into his Crusader. He blacked out, and when he woke up, he found himself floating to the ground under his parachute. After landing in a rice paddy up to his knees in mud, North Vietnamese soldiers quickly surrounded him. The first Marine shot down in the Vietnam War, Chapman became the war’s longest-held Marine POW—enduring more than seven years in North Vietnamese prison camps before his release on Feb. 12, 1973.