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Fifty years ago, at the end of a nearly seven-year stint in an infamous hospital, Colonel James Lamar stumbled upon the Hanoi Hilton in North Vietnam using cards made of toilet paper and chips made of matchsticks. I was playing poker with my fellow POWs. prisoner of war camp.
Today, Lamar, 94, enjoys taking turns playing Texas Hold’em against college students, tech buddies, retirees and fellow veterans at the Texas Card House in Austin, the state capital.
Lamar detailed the day he was shot down in Vietnam and his experience as a POW in an interview with Fox News Digital at The Cardhouse.
After three years in the Navy Reserve, Lamar joined the Air Force in 1948 and completed his pilot training in 1949. He was deployed in combat squadrons in Japan shortly before the outbreak of the Korean War and from 1950 to 1951 he flew 100 combat missions in the conflict.
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After returning from South Korea, Lamar served in various pilot instructor roles before being deployed to Thailand at the start of the Vietnam War.
“When I got the news that we were going, I immediately got a hunch that something was going to happen. I would be shot down, killed, taken prisoner. It would happen.” said Lamar.
Sure enough, on May 6, 1965, during Lamar’s 101st mission in North Vietnam, he was shot down during a bombing raid on a railway yard.
“We arrived at the target area and I was the first to enter,” Lamar said. “When I rolled up to 12,000 feet and rolled and put my head down, I wish I was in a different place because the flak (anti-aircraft fire) was just a solid layer underneath me. — Boom — I was It hit and my plane hit the fuselage forward of the cockpit, but the cockpit immediately caught fire.”
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Lamar stopped diving and began jinking left and right to avoid further anti-aircraft fire, radioing his team that he was heading for a safe relief area about 50 miles away.
“Shortly after I said that, I heard my number 4 man, very excited. ’” recalls Lamar.
“So I reached for the steering wheel…the left canopy moved and the right steering wheel moved. Then all sorts of bad things can happen. That’s when I jumped out faster than the speed of sound.
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Lamar wakes up with a broken arm and a parachute hanging from a tree. A group of Vietnamese farmers eventually found him, took him to a military garrison, and handed him over to the North Vietnamese Army.
After failing to get any information from Lamar, the soldiers took him to Hoa Lo Prison. An American POW jokingly called it the “Hanoi Hilton,” where he spent nearly seven of his years.
During his first years in the camp, prisoners of war subjected him to varying degrees of mental and physical abuse, but the American understood that he could safely communicate during lunch when the guards took a break. Did.
“One midday call I told everyone I was feeling very depressed. What are you doing to combat depression? Jerry Denton (another POW) said, ‘Jim, you let me tell you what is doing please pray you keep believing in God your country and your family and you live day by day day by day it is you is the way to get over it,” recalls Lamar.
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“And he was right. My depression was lifted and I started living one day at a time. And that’s how I got a total of 2,400 days plus a few odd days.”
Lamarr was finally released on February 12, 1973, along with hundreds of other prisoners of war in Operation Homecoming.