Jon Reynolds, 84, Vietnam POW for more than 7 years
Jon A. Reynolds, a retired Air Force brigadier general who spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war after the aircraft he was piloting was shot down over North Vietnam in 1965, died April 16 at his home in Bethesda, Md. He was 84.
The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Emilee Reynolds.
Reynolds — then a captain — was based in Thailand and on his second tour of duty in Southeast Asia when his F-105 Thunderchief was struck by North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire on Nov. 28, 1965. After he ejected from the cockpit, his parachute became entangled in a tree.
He was captured and taken to the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” the first of nine prison camps in which he was held. His injuries, which included a fractured jaw and two broken shoulders, were so severe that he could not feed or clean himself.
The prisoners were kept isolated from one another but could communicate by whispers and by tapping on walls. One asked Reynolds why guards entered his cell several times a day. Only then did he explain the extent of his injuries and that the guards were feeding him.
Not long afterward, Reynolds’s captors tried to get him to write a letter denouncing the U.S. war effort in Vietnam. When he refused, he was denied food for eight days.
Through wall-tapping, he was told to wait in his cell until the guard fell asleep after lunch. A fellow POW, Robert “Percy” Purcell, would arrange to get him some food.
“As the afternoon grew quiet, I heard scratching on the ceiling and dust and dirt were soon falling from around the single lightbulb in the ceiling of my room,” Reynolds wrote in a 2013 remembrance of Purcell for the Air Force Association. “Soon the bulb and wire dropped down a couple of feet, which was then followed by a series of long slender pieces of stale bread. My first food in eight days! Through the hole where the lightbulb had been, I saw the smiling face of Percy. He whispered a few words of encouragement, waved, and then he was gone, off to get back to his cell before his absence was discovered.”