Earlier this year, a new exhibit opened at the USS Midway Museum that remembers a certain group of POWs from the Vietnam War.
Captive Warriors: The Story of the Midway 11 includes painful personal experiences from wartime captivity. It’s a difficult exhibit not only to view, but possibly to locate. To find it, walk the aircraft carrier’s flight deck until you see a sign for AFT READY ROOMS/POW TOUR, then head down some stairs. After proceeding through several Ready Rooms, you’ll arrive.
My photographs provide an idea of what you’ll encounter. You’ll see images of the eleven USS Midway aviators who were captured during the Vietnam War, brutally beaten and imprisoned. Facing isolation and starvation in prisons like the infamous Hanoi Hilton, they endured unimaginably inhumane conditions.
You’ll learn how prisoners learned to communicate with one another by tapping code on the prison walls, how advocates in the United States including Sybil Stockdale worked to secure POW provisions in the Paris Peace Accords, and how the eleven prisoners from the USS Midway eventually returned home.
One part of the exhibit makes the horror feel very real. Visitors gaze into dark, cave-like cells to view suffering, solitary prisoners of war.
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