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Retired Navy Capt. Dave Carey speaks in Monticello about life after his plane was shot down in North Vietnam nearly six decades ago.
Episode 2612 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a story about POW Vietnam Vet Dave Carey. The featured story appeared in the News-Gazette of Champaign, Illinois and was titled: Surviving and thriving: Vietnam POW recounts harrowing tales during Monticello visit. By Nora Maberry-Daniels nmaberry@news-gazette.com. She is editor of the Piatt County Journal-Republican, a Community Media Group newspaper.
Dave Carey, recently spoke to a group in Monticello about his experiences as a POW in North Vietnam. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy and was a carrier-based pilot during the Vietnam War.
On Aug. 31, 1967, he was 30 miles off the coast of Vietnam on what he remembers being a hazy day. The pilots manned their airplanes at 7 a.m. Their target that day was a small airport bridge. In the air they went, crossing from over the water to over the beach. That’s when the shooting started.
“They fired in succession from way out in front of us two surface-to-air missiles,” Carey said. The first missile missed his plane. The second did not. There was a huge explosion that destroyed the entire tail section of his plane, which was on its back, spinning and tumbling through the air.
Carey ejected and landed in a small Vietnamese village, where he “started running across the rice paddy.” He was quickly captured, tortured and taken to Hanoi where he spent the next five years in a North Vietnamese POW prison.
Carey was ultimately released during Operation Homecoming on March 14, 1973. When he and other POWs returned home, they weren’t met with the same animosity that other soldiers returning from Vietnam experienced.
Despite his rough treatment in North Vietnam, he sympathized with his fellow Vietnam Vets with this declaration: “We came back home completely different than the troops, The way the troops came home from Vietnam was a disgrace. Those folks went because we made them, and then when they came back, we spit on them. It is absolutely a disgrace.”
Dave Carey believes that people can survive anything.
Listen to episode 2612 and discover more about POW Vietnam Vet Dave Carey’s story.
