YORBA LINDA, Calif.—Along several blocks of Yorba Linda Boulevard, hundreds of people gathered May 23 waving American flags as Vietnam War veterans drove past them in classic sports cars and large touring buses traveling towards the Nixon Library to celebrate its latest exhibit: “CAPTURED, Shot Down in Vietnam.”
“This event for our Vietnam vets is long overdue,” January, 74, of Santa Ana, who did not give her last name, told The Epoch Times. “We sent so many of our children off to a war that they never came back from.”
In front of the Nixon Library were dozens of black and white POW flags in honor of 150 servicemen in attendance for the exhibit’s opening. Each had been captured and imprisoned while serving during the war.
Though gloomy skies concealed an Air Force flyover of F-35 Lightning II fighter jets, its noise struck the audience with awe.
“Those planes really do have some ‘stealth’ technology, don’t they?” Nixon Foundation Board of Directors member James Byron joked before introducing the event’s keynote speaker, former USMC Col. Jack Brennan.
Brennan, who earned a Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his service during the war, went on to serve President Richard Nixon as his chief aide of the Marine Corps until the president’s resignation in 1974.
“I’ve been very fortunate to have been associated with former POWs for the past five decades,” Brennan said. “They’ve done so much for their country.”
At the podium, Brennan was quick to also honor military spouses, whom he said have one of the most challenging roles in the armed forces community.
“I’ve often said that the most difficult job in the military is that of being a military wife,” he said. “President Nixon as you know is a great patriot and, in his memoirs, he wrote that the POW wives were the bravest, most courageous women he had ever met.”
As the exhibit opened its doors, Nixon Library staff members led tours through aisles of Vietnam-era photos, diagrams, and other historical items, including a life-size layout of an isolation chamber which many POWs experienced while captured by communist forces.
With the Paris Peace Accords, 591 U.S. prisoners of war came home to their families when the war ended in 1973.
