Rank/Branch: O3/United States Navy, Nav
Home City of Record: Lake Jackson FL
Date of Loss: 09 October 1966
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 203100N 1055000E
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F4B #152993
Other Personnel in Incident: Charles Tanner,
returnee
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK March 1997
from one or more of the following: raw data from
U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence
with POW/MIA families, published sources,
interviews.
REMARKS: 730304 RELEASED BY DRV
Charles Tanner was flying an F-4B from VF-154 off
the USS Coral Sea. Commander Ross Terry was
flying as the Radar Intercept Officer. They were
shot down and captured near Phu Ly, North Vietnam
on 9 October 1966. They were not injured prior to
capture.
SOURCE: WE CAME HOME copyright 1977
Captain and Mrs. Frederic A Wyatt (USNR Ret),
Barbara Powers Wyatt, Editor P.O.W. Publications,
10250 Moorpark St., Toluca Lake, CA 91602
Text is reproduced as found in the original
publication (including date and spelling errors).
UPDATE - 09/95 by the P.O.W. NETWORK, Skidmore, MO
ROSS R. TERRY
Commander - United States Navy
Shot Down: October 9, 1966
Released: March 4, 1973
A Technicolor personalized American "Welcome Home
in America," could not be more fitting to any
American POW who has just arrived from a black and
white world outside our great shores. We American
POWs stand proud to have assisted you, the American
people, and our great government, to honor and
uphold our commitments to freedom-seeking people
of foreign soils. We stand tall alongside you in
raising the Stars and Stripes just a little
higher so that all may see.
December 1996
Ross Terry retired from the United States Navy as
a Captain. He and his wife Susan reside in Florida.
----------------------
VIETNAM magazine
October 1994
LIFE ON HOLD
When Navy Lieutenant Ross Terry's F-4 Phantom
fighter-bomber was shot downover North Vietnam, his
life went on hold for the next 78 months.
By Art Giberson
Twenty-eight years ago, Navy Captain Ross Randle
Terry, then a lieutenant, was flying in F-4 Phantoms
as a radar intercept officer with VF- 154, deployed
aboard the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea (CV-43).
Terry and his pilot, Lieutenant Commander Neils
Tanner, were only mildly apprehensive as they
relaxed in the ready room and listened to the
briefing officer detail their planned strike on the
railroad yards at Phu Ly, some 20 miles south of
Hanoi. Terry and Tanner were assigned the task of
flak suppression. Their mission was to take out an
85mm flak site, a ring of 85mm anti-aircraft guns
around the rail yard, to lessen the danger to the
American attack aircraft as they made their bombing
runs on the yard. When the ship's meteorologist
stepped forward to give his portion of the briefing,
he merely confirmed what the airmen already knew.
"Yankee Station" (the Seventh Fleet's operational
area in the Gulf of Tonkin) and most of North
Vietnam were under a heavy overcast that Sunday,
October 9, 1966. The briefing over, Terry and
Tanner, as they had done dozens of times before,
climbed into their F-4 and prepared for launch.
They fully expected to be back on board Coral Sea
in plenty of time for the evening movie in the
wardroom. Tanner gave a thumbs up to the catapult
officer, and a few seconds later, the F-4 was
hurled off the flight deck into the overcast
skies of the Gulf of Tonkin. The drop of the
"cat" officer's arm performed a double function
that cloudy October Sunday. It signaled the
launch of Terry and Tanner's F-4 Phantom and put
life as they had known it on hold for the next
seven years. [Tanner and Terry had agreed earlier
that if they should be hit they would try for
Laos rather than fly over a very heavily
fortified bridge in an attempt to make it back to
the gulf.] 'The "Golden BB"' [flak] destroyed our
hydraulics, causing Neils to lose control of
launch the aircraft. The plane pitched upward,
rolled, and went into about a 135-degree bank
with a 60-degree nose-down angle. Our speed was
around Mach 1.3 when I ejected." "We broke
through the overcast and dove on the target,"
Captain Terry recalls. "Just as we released our
bombs we felt a thump' in the midsection of the
aircraft. Neils pulled off, fired off the
afterburner and tried to make it to Laos. At that
angle and speed, the force of the ejection was so
great that the pressure stripped the helmet,
oxygen mask and most of the survival gear from
Terry's body and tore three panels from his
parachute. Ironically, the Sugarland, Texas,
native credits the damaged chute with saving his
life. "There must have been at least a thousand
people on the ground, many of them shooting at me.
The missing panels caused my descent to be much
faster than it normally would have been, causing
those people shooting at me to miss." (Terry
believes that many American airmen were killed as
they parachuted to earth, and because of that, he
does not believe there are any American fliers
left alive in North Vietnam.) "I hit the ground
and was immediately surrounded by a swarm of
North Vietnamese civilians shouting and waving
guns, clubs and knifes. I remember this one guy
ran up and was about to cut my throat," the
captain says, gently rubbing a finger over a
still visible scar on his neck, "when two
military guys fired their AK-47s over the crowd's
head. The knifewielding civilian backed off.
Remembering what we had been told, I fished out
my Geneva Convention card and tried to give it to
the soldiers. They took the card, cut it into
pieces and threw it on the ground. My shoes were
then taken away, I was stripped down to my shorts
and led through a little outlying village and put
in a cave. People then lined up and filed past to
get a took at this tall, white, red-haired guy. I
sort of felt like something in a zoo," Terry
recalls. "These people hated us. Even though
they had never seen an American before, Ho Chi
Minh had kept them worked up. They really
believed that we were warmongers who had come to
kill them." A short time after being put in the
cave, Terry was visited by an English-speaking
interpreter who demanded to know not only his
name, rank and serv-ice number but also what type
of aircraft he had been flying, what ship he had
flown from and how he was shot down. Terry, in
accordance with the Geneva Convention and the
Code of Conduct gave only his name, rank, service
number and date of birth. When it became obvious
to his captors that they would get no further
information from the lanky American flier, they
tied him up by the elbows and dragged him around
the cave. "At this point of my capture," says
Terry, "I was mostly scared. I didn't know what
to expect. The pain hadn't really set in yet
because of the newness of where I was and what
was going on. That evening, they took me through
another crowd, dragged me up on a makeshift stage
and beat me down on my knees to the delight of
the screaming crowd. "Kneeling there on my knees,
my hands tied behind my back, I noticed this one
guy standing at the edge of the crowd. He stood
out by the fact he wasn't taking part in the
screaming and clap-ping. He was also holding a
three-foot sword. I thought, 'Man, that guy is
going to try and kill me.' The crowd worked
itself into a frenzy, so to protect me, the
guards grabbed me and tossed me into the back of
a truck. The truck had bamboo slats around the
bed and I remember leaning against them when I
had this strange feeling that something was about
to happen. It was like a little voice telling me
to fall down and roll to the middle of the truck
bed. Just as I dropped, the quiet man with the
sword drove it through the bamboo slats, just
were I had been standing." Leaving the village,
Terry and his captors traveled most of the night,
and around 5 a.m. they arrived at "Heartbreak
Hotel," one of several prison compounds in the
Hanoi area. There he was put in shackles, and the
interrogation and torture started up again: What
is the name of your ship? What kind of aircraft
do you fly? What was your target? How many
airplanes do you have on your ship? How were you
shot down? After about eight hours of continuous
torture, Terry told his interrogators that he had
been shot down by a MiG. "After that amount of
time you're hurting enough that you begin to
rationalize," says Terry. "Maybe if you can give
them some worthless information you can get them
off of your back for a little while. The story
about being shot down by a MiG was apparently
what they wanted to hear because the beating
stopped. "Even through I had a brief reprieve I
didn't feel a whole lot better. By telling them
that I had been shot down by a MiG, in my mind I
had gone beyond name, rank, service number and
date of birth. At that point in time I really
felt that I had somehow betrayed the code and I
was the only one to have done such a thing. "I was
then taken to a little room with stocks in it.
They put one leg in the stocks, handcuffed me and
put my arms in another set of stocks so that I
was in a bent-up position. After a few days and
nights like that, it begins to get your attention.
And you start to wonder how long you can hold out
if they want something more from you. Sure enough,
after a while they were back. Fortunately, a
voice from the other side of the room called out:
'Don't let them permanently injure you. just fight
the best you can."' Terry knew then that he was
not alone and was not the only person to
fabricate a story for the North Vietnamese, so he
stuck to his MiG story. After a few more days he
was reunited with Lt. Cmdr. Tanner and transferred
to "the Zoo." The Zoo, according to Terry, was a
former French motion-picture studio that had been
converted into a cell block. During its heyday as
a movie studio, the cells had been used for film
storage. Vents were used to keep air steadily
flowing through the small rooms, thereby keeping
the film at a fairly constant temperature. The
Vietnamese had long since plugged up the vents,
turning the former lockers into ovens. From
having been shackled for so long, neither Terry
nor Tanner were able to use their hands. Still,
they helped one another as best they could. By
now the two VF-154 fliers had been confined long
enough to learn the tap code-a modified form of
Morse Code the POWs used to communicate-and day
by day learned a little more about their
surroundings and the identity of some of their
fellow POWs. They also learned that the
Vietnamese used whatever information-true or
otherwise-they could extract from them for
propaganda purposes.
As the days, weeks and months went by, more and
more pressure was applied to try and pry
information from Terry, Tanner and the other POWs
at the Zoo. Often, under threat of death, they
were forced to write or dictate "confessions."
One of those "confessions" made it to the Paris
peace talks and bought Terry and Tanner a severe
beating and months of solitary confinement. "It's
not something I would necessarily recommend to a
future POW," said Terry, "but Neils and I dreamed
up what we called the 'Clark Kent & Ben Casey
Caper.' We decided to confess.'Our hands were
still in such bad shape that neither of us could
write, so we dictated our confessions.' I was
Clark Kent and Neils was Ben Casey. According to
our confessions, Kent was supposedly a Navy
lieutenant flying off of a carrier. He had become
disenchanted with American policy and said the
war was immoral and illegal, and he was therefore
turning in his wings. "Casey, also a Navy flier,
was supposedly being divorced by his wife because
of his involvement in the Vietnam War. The guard
wrote down everything just the way we told it to
him, buzz words and all. It was later shipped
off to Paris where peace talks between the United
States and North Vietnam were taking place. For
about two months after the 'confession' they
pretty much left us alone. By that I mean we
weren't beaten as often. "The so-called
confession was later read to the international
press by an Englishman named Bertrand Russell who
was conducting a so-called war crimes tribunal.
Welt, as soon as the press heard the names Clark
Kent and Ben Casey, they stampeded for the
telephones. That, of course, gave Russell and his
tribunal, as well as the North Vietnamese
government, a black eye. "As soon as the word got
back to where we were, there were a lot of sudden
changes at the Zoo," says Terry. "Interrogators
were changed, guards were transferred, and Neils
and I got the hell beat out of us. Neils was sent
to another prison, called Alcatraz, and I was put
in a little place called the Outhouse. For the
next six months or so we sat in solitary in
stocks and cuffs." After the stocks and cuffs
were finally removed, Terry remained in solitary
for another 18 months. While living alone, he
managed to make a couple of new friends with whom
he passed the time of day. His "friends" were
named "Myself" and "I." Captain Terry recalls
that during those 18 months he, Myself and I,
designed and built houses, played cards and in
general searched for ways to keep from going
insane. "The guards would hear me talking to
myself and put a finger to their heads and make
circular motions, to indicate that I had gone
crazy." During his years as a prisoner of war,
Terry said he and his fellow Vietnam POWs lived
under extremely harsh conditions. Their lives
were continually threatened and they were
frequently beaten and tortured. But intermixed
with the harshness and brutality were also
moments of kindness and compassion. "I remember
one Christmas," Terry recalls, "when the Rabbit
la guard so nicknamed bqcause of his ears] brought
me in for a quiz and held a picture of a lady and
five young girls up in front of me. I knew I had
four girls but not five. Susan [Terry's wife] was
about two months pregnant when I deployed, and the
baby was born after I was shot down. That, of
course, was a very welcome Christmas present."
Terry was allowed to keep the family picture,
which had come in a letter, but he was not as
lucky with other packages from home, particularly
those containing food. "As our time in captivity
stretched out, mail and packages came more
frequently. But packages with food in them were
usually confiscated by the guards." Compassion,
of sorts, was also shown in other ways. Terry
recalls one occasion, when his wrists were sore
and bleeding from being tightly shackled for a
long period of time: "This guard came in with a
bowl of rice. He uncuffed one hand, as they
usually did, so that I could eat. When I was
finished, he put the cuff back on my wrist and
there was only one 'click.' At first I thought he
had just made a mistake. He looked at me, placed
a finget to his lips, in a gesture to be quiet,
turned and walked away." After a good night's
sleep, the first in a long time without his hands
being cuffed behind him, Terry became concerned
about the guard and re-secured the handcuffs
himself. On yet another occasion, when Terry had
been beaten and forced to remain in a kneeling
position with his hands shack, led behind him, a
guard brought him a boiled potato, concealed in a
tin can, and fed it to him. Afterward, the guard
lit a cigarette and held it to Terry's lips so
that he could have a few puffs. Terry said he
never saw that particular guard again. Eventually,
Terry was moved from solitary to a two-man cell.
"That in itself required some adjustment," the
captain explains. "After nearly two years in
solitary, I hardly knew how to talk to another
human being. I was then moved to what was called
the Zoo Annex-another part of the former studio-
with five other guys." The annex had six rooms
with six men to each room. This was the first
time since being shot down that the red-haired
Texan had seen so many Americans at one time.
With that many American POWs together, it was
inevitable that sooner or later an escape attempt
would be made. Through their crude but effective
coiiimunication system, an escape plan was
devised. It was decided the escape would take
place on a rainy night because the guards
generally stayed inside during bad weather. As
the rain beat down, two POWs, both Air Force
officers, managed to get out of their cell and
climb over an outer wall. Within hours, however,
they were recaptured and returned to the Zoo,
where they were brutally beaten and tortured
until one of the escapees died. Terry, the annex's
senior ranking officer, and the senior officer
from each room were then put through what he
refers to as "18 days of hell." "We were literally
beaten and tortured for 18 days," Terry recalls.
"They would set you in a chair, all tied up, on
the top of a table and leave you there until you
fell asleep and fell off the table. The fall, of
course, would cause still more pain and sometimes
broken bones. Another favorite tactic was to strip
you down and beat you across the buttocks with a
fan belt until you were bleeding. Another thing
they would do is hold your legs out and strike
you in about three places across the shins with a
piece of bamboo until your legs began to swell up
and then whack them again. That really gets your
attention. All the time they are beating you they
are trying to get you to tell them who ordered
the escape. "It's one thing to say something that
you know is baloney and you know that the country
knows it's baloney [such as the Clark Kent and
Ben Casey caper], but it's something entirely
different to say something against a man they
have their hands on," Terry explains. "Finally
the beatings ended, and they chained me to
Colonel Bob Purcell. We were cuffed and manacled
together and put in a room with three other
'couples,' so to speak. We stayed that way for
about three months." After North Vietnam President
Ho Chi Minh died, Terry and many of his fellow POWs
were moved to a new prison at Son Tay, a few miles
northwest of Hanoi. Unbeknown to the POWs, American
Special Forces were making plans to raid Son Tay in
an attempt to rescue them. Unfortunately, the North
Vietnamese moved them just hours before the
Americans arrived. The Son Tay prisoners were
relocated and put in large 50 man cells. As the
war begin to wind down, the torture and beatings
became less frequent, and Terry and his fellow
POWs were allowed more time outside and given
better food. They began to hear rumors that the
war was about over and they would soon be going
home. On several occasions, some of his cellmates
were actually told they were going to leave, only
to be turned back at the last minute. But finally
the day of repatriation did come, and the
"freedom birds" began to arrive in Hanoi. In
March 1973, Captain Terry and his squadron mate
Neils Tanner were flown to Clark Air Force Base
in the Philippines and, finally, to NAS (Naval
Air Station) Memphis, Tenn., where they were
hospitalized for more than three months. On
September 21, 1990, 17 1/2 years after leaving
Vietnam, Captain Ross Randle Terry was awarded
the POW Medal. The captain is now in the
construction business in Pensacola, Fla.
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