Texas veteran shot down in Vietnam on 7 a long time as POW at 'Hanoi Hilton' prison camp: 'You keep faith'

Five decades in the past, Col. James Lamar was participating in poker in opposition to fellow prisoners of war with cards created of rest room paper and chips manufactured of matchsticks at the "Hanoi Hilton" in North Vietnam on the tail conclude of his virtually 7-year stint at the infamous prison camp. 

These days, 94-12 months-aged Lamar enjoys actively playing Texas Hold 'em against a rotating cast of faculty students, tech bros, retirees and fellow veterans who regular Texas Card Dwelling in the state funds of Austin. 

Lamar in depth the day he got shot down in Vietnam and his encounter as a prisoner of war in an interview with G3 Box News Digital at the card dwelling. 

Col. James Lamar in the 1950s when he was a pilot teacher at an Air Force foundation in Arizona.  (G3 Box News Electronic)

Lamar joined the Air Drive in 1948 following 3 yrs in the Naval Reserve and finished pilot teaching in 1949. He was deployed to a fighter squadron in Japan just prior to the Korean War broke out and flew 100 beat missions in that conflict in 1950-51. 

WORLD WAR II'S D-Working day: Photographs Reveal WORLD'S Major AMPHIBIOUS INVASION

Right after returning from Korea, Lamar served in different pilot teacher roles prior to deploying to Thailand at the get started of the Vietnam War. 

"When we received the news that we have been heading to go, I got an immediate premonition that anything was heading to occur to me — I would be shot down, killed, prisoner — I failed to know what, but I knew a thing undesirable was going to happen," Lamar stated. 

Col. James Lamar shares his tale with G3 Box News Digital at Texas Card Property in Austin, Texas.  (G3 Box News Digital)

Sure sufficient, on Lamar’s 101st mission in North Vietnam on Might 6, 1965, he was shot down all through a bombing run above a railroad yard.

"We bought to our focus on area, I was the initially 1 to go in," Lamar said. "I pulled up to 12,000 toes, rolled in excess of, and when I was headed down, I would like to have been some area else, simply because the flak (anti-plane hearth) was just a strong layer beneath me. As I dive by means of it — boom — I acquired strike, my airplane bought hit in the fuselage ahead of the cockpit, but there was an instant hearth in the cockpit."

D-Day WAR HERO DIES ON INDEPENDENCE Day AT 99 Several years OLD 

Lamar pulled out of his dive and started jinking side-to-facet to avoid even more anti-aircraft fire, then radioed his team to notify them that he was heading to a protected bailout place about 50 miles absent. 

Two F-84 jet fighters, a single of the lots of planes Lamar flew in his 3-decade armed forces vocation, fly overhead in this 1958 file picture.  (Denver Article by means of Getty Images)

"Quickly immediately after I explained that, there arrived the very thrilled voice of my No. 4 gentleman, who yelled at me, 'Get out, lead, you've got received a big hearth heading,'" Lamar recalled. 

"So I just arrived at for the handles … the remaining a single, the cover went, and the right one particular, I went. 1 trouble, the handbook on the plane explained do not eject about 525 knots, nautical miles for each hour. If you do, all sorts of undesirable matters can materialize. Perfectly, the final time I observed the airspeed tape, just just before I left that cockpit, it was likely speedily by 700 knots. So I ejected at above the speed of audio."

Final REMAINING WORLD WAR II MEDAL OF HONOR Receiver TO LIE IN HONOR AT US CAPITOL

Lamar woke up with a damaged arm and his parachute hanging from a tree. A team of Vietnamese peasants finally uncovered him and took him to a military services put up to flip him above to the North Vietnamese army, which tortured him and tried out in vain to get Lamar to lure other fighter pilots into an ambush. 

American POW soldiers inside their jail cell at the Hanoi Hilton prior to their release in 1973 in Hanoi, Vietnam.   (David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images)

Soon after failing to get any information and facts out of Lamar, the soldiers took him to Hỏa Lò Jail, which Individuals prisoners of war facetiously called the "Hanoi Hilton," exactly where he would devote just about 7 several years. 

Through the first number of yrs in the jail camp, his captors subjected him to a variety of levels of psychological and physical abuse, but the Americans figured out that they could properly communicate close to lunchtime when the guards took a break. 

"A person working day in our noon interaction, I explained to the men that I am really depressed. What do you do to fight depression? Jerry Denton (yet another prisoner of war) mentioned, 'I'll inform you what you do, Jim. You pray. You maintain religion in God, your region and your relatives. And then you dwell each and every working day, one particular working day at a time. That is the way you get by,'" Lamar recalled. 

Click on Listed here TO GET THE G3 Box News Application

"And he was correct. My melancholy lifted, and I began residing a person day at a time. And that is how I went through the overall 2,400 and some odd times."

Lamar was eventually introduced Feb. 12, 1973 with quite a few hundred other prisoners of war in Procedure Homecoming.