Proud Ex-POW’s Story Is Devoid of Bitterness

He woke while falling through the sky. He jerked the rip cord of his chute, but it was too late for a safe landing. His leg snapped. People were shooting at him.

He tried to run, but his useless leg wouldn’t move. He was thrown on the back of a truck. Eventually he was sent to prison. For five months he sat alone in pitch blackness with a cast on his leg.

Stephen Long was a prisoner of war for four years, shot down over Laos during the Vietnam War. He could be angry or bitter, like many of the veterans he addressed at a reunion of the Special Operations Assn.

Instead, Long is thankful.

“I have a lovely wife and a lovely family,” he said. “But that POW experience was the biggest thing in my life. It changed me. And it’s up to you to make it a change for the better.”

Unlike his audience, Long wasn’t in Special Operations. But in 1969, he was on a secret Air Force assignment over Laos, mapping sites for dropping listening devices.

It was Long’s first mission. His plane was shot down about 100 miles northeast of the Laotian capital, Vientiane. His North Vietnamese captors took him to Hanoi.

After 30 weeks in darkened solitary, he was moved to another cell. This one had light.

Then the tapping began, and a voice whispered through the wall. It explained a kind of Morse code the prisoners used to communicate.

“You could put your ear next to any wall and it sounded like Western Union,” Long said.

He passed the days creating new professions. One week he was a lawyer. Day one was law school. Day two, he took the bar exam. By week’s end, he had his own practice.

He was freed only because fellow prisoners who were exchanged for North Vietnamese POWs in 1973 told American officials there were four men who’d been shot down over Laos still at the Hanoi prison.

The four were released after U.S. military commanders threatened a bombing strike, Long said.

“It was the happiest day of my life. The scariest too because I had no idea what the future would hold for me.”

His wife had divorced him. Her letter, placed in his military file, told him so. He didn’t blame her. “She was young,” he said. “She pressed on with her life.”

But just as he had in prison, through hunger and beatings, Long refused to despair.

“I couldn’t sleep more than three hours a night,” he said. “Life was great. It is great. And it is beautiful.”

He stayed in the military, flying until he retired in 1987. He remarried and has two grown children. Now he is an activist for veterans’ rights.

In a hallway outside the reunion hospitality suite, the genteel former pilot said he understands covert warfare and the soul-robbing toll it takes on those who wage it.

“These guys have a camaraderie and a respect for each other,” he said, pointing down the hall. “I think that most of those missions were for the best of our country. Maybe not all of them, but most of them.”