"Guys were doing everything in order to get on the flight schedule, in order to be on a combat mission. It wasnt the type of thing that people were pretending to be sick or something. It was just the other way, people would fly while they were sick, or anyway, just to get on the schedule, to go up and participate in something that we believed in very strongly. The freedom of a nation that were our friends, the freedom of a nation that couldnt determine that freedom by themselves. And so, I believed very strongly in what I was doing over there, it was simply to protect an emerging nation from the clutches of militant Communism."
Brigadier General James Robinson "Robbie" Risner was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force, and a senior leader among U.S. prisoners of war during the Vietnam War.
"We were highly combat ready. We believed that the North Vietnamese, who were Communists led by the old atheist dictator, Ho Chi Minh, wanted to take over the rest of Southeast Asia. In other words, his doctrine was the same as Mao Tse Tungs and all of the rest of the militant Communists. We didnt want this to happen."
"During the whole period of time we were in prison we heard of protests. Of course, the Vietnamese exposed us to four hours minimum of propaganda a day because we had slave speakers in every cell. There was no way to get away from that. So, they dreamed up all kinds of wild tales. If 200 people marched on Washington, they made it 200,000. We learned how to deal with the numbers. Of course, every protest, every anti-war speech made by a person such as McGovern, Jane Fonda, Galbraith, all of those only encouraged the Vietnamese, prolonged the war, worsened our condition and cost the lives of more Americans on the battlefield."