Navy fighter pilot survived 7 years of brutal captivity in North Vietnam

Brad Smith was shot down over North Vietnam on March 25, 1966, while flying an A-4 Skyhawk fighter.

He spent the next seven years in brutal prisoner of war camps.

With those first chilling details, Smith, keynote speaker for the Patriots Day luncheon, commanded the rapt attention of a crowd of about 200 at the Manatee Performing Arts Center on Tuesday. The luncheon, honoring veterans and their spouses, was sponsored and hosted by the Kiwanis Club of Bradenton.

The Bradenton resident remembered having the tail shot off his aircraft — and bracing himself as it hurtled in flames toward the ground at 600 mph.

But said he doesn’t remember ejecting.

His next memory was of regaining consciousness while under water and fighting his way to the surface. As he looked around, he saw boats setting off from opposite sides of a mile-wide river to capture him.

Injured and armed only with a .38-caliber pistol, he quickly realized there was no way to shoot his way out of encircling enemies armed with AK-47s.

What followed was “brutal beyond belief,” including beatings, and torture, as the enemy tried to get him to reveal more than his name, rank and serial number, and with the passing years, to sign propaganda statements admitting to war crimes.

He said he ate rats, monkey, chicken heads and “any kind of bug that crawled across my plate” to survive.

Smith and the men who he met in Vietnamese prisons, such as the Hanoi Hilton, and the Briar Patch, were the strongest, toughest, most patriotic, compassionate and professional people he ever served with.

“I decided I would set goals,” Smith said of his survival strategy.

“I can last four days, then I can last four weeks, and then four months,” he said.

He and his fellow prisoners of war also learned “tap code” to communicate with each other, helping maintain order, share information and make plans.

In his first six months as a POW, Smith lost 60 pounds and was shocked to catch a reflection of his face in a pail of water, looking like a concentration camp survivor from World War II.

“You wake up in a foreign country. Everything you had is gone. All you have is you. You are wearing rags and maybe a pair of flip-flops. It’s you and your brain. You have to make the decision every morning that you are going to live,” Smith said.

Even though the POWs might have been filthy and stinking, they remained military people and organized, he said.

“We were unarmed except for our minds and our will,” he said. “We made the Vietnamese understand that they would never get anything out of us unless they tortured us, and then it wouldn’t be of any value,” Smith said.

Throughout, the POW mantra was simple: return with honor.

Jerry Koontz, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, served as emcee for Patriots Day and noted that not only did Smith survive his captivity as a POW, but he returned to active duty.

From 1974-1977, he served on the USS Saratoga, seeing duty off the coast of Lebanon, and from 1979-1981, he served aboard the USS Coral Sea in the Indian Ocean.

This story was originally published November 7, 2017 at 6:12 PM with the headline "Navy fighter pilot survived 7 years of brutal captivity in North Vietnam."