BLISS, RONALD GLENN
Name: Ronald Glenn Bliss
Rank/Branch: United States Air Force/O2
Unit: 33 TFS
Date of Birth: 22 March 1943
Home City of Record: San Diego CA
Date of Loss: 04 September 1966
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 211600 North 1055100 East
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F105D
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident:
Refno: 0446
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews.
REMARKS: 730304 RELEASED BY DRV
SOURCE: WE CAME HOME copyright 1977
Captain and Mrs. Frederic A Wyatt (USNR Ret), Barbara Powers Wyatt, Editor
P.O.W. Publications, 10250 Moorpark St., Toluca Lake, CA 91602
Text is reproduced as found in the original publication (including date and
spelling errors).
RONALD G. BLISS
Captain - United States Air Force
Shot Down: September 4, 1966
Released: March 4, 1973
Having graduated from the United States Air Force Academy in 1964, and after a
brief two months vacation in Europe, I entered Pilot training in August 1964
at Reese Air Force Base, Texas. There I met a pretty young coed at Texas Tech
named Charlene Wallace. After one year of courtship, we were married at my
next duty station, Las Vegas, Nevada. Having spent part of my honeymoon at
survival school at Reno, Nevada, I returned to Nellis AFB, Nevada to enter
F-105 training.
Just prior to departing for Thailand, our son Erik was born. The next time I
would see him I would find him almost seven years old!
I arrived in Southeast Asia in June of 1966, after a week in the Philippines
for jungle survival school. Seventy-five days later, my F-105 was in flames
over Hanoi and I soon found myself in the prison of that same city.
As I left the dark cells of Hanoi, I returned to discover the cohesive bonds
of my family were perhaps even stronger. Our son Erik was just completing the
first grade; Charlene was an experienced mathematics teacher in a junior high
school of Temple, Texas-her home.
The roots of life have been deeply implanted during an era of imprisonment. If
knowledge and empathy are virtues, then I should be pursuing a noble course.
Soon we'll all return to Texas where I'll enter the Baylor Law School. But
knowledge by itself is sterile without faith, inspiration, and work. Life is
for those who are strong enough to really live it; and I am not ready to die.
November 1996
Ronald Bliss and his wife Charlene live in Texas.
TEXAS LAWYER, September 27, 1999
Patent Bliss
IP Lawyer and Former POW Ron Bliss Learned the Hard Way How to Be a Leader
by NATHAN KOPPEL
It has been a whirlwind lately for Ron Bliss.
The Houston lawyer is featured in "Return With Honor," a critically
acclaimed documentary on Vietnam prisoners of war that opened in Houston
Sept. 17 following earlier runs in Washington, D.C., New York and Los
Angeles. Besides the usual opening night and premiere parties that
accompany a film, Bliss has had to contend with a horde of local and
national media outlets clamoring to talk to him about his experiences in
Vietnam. He says he hardly remembers what it is like to practice law.
The attention is well-deserved. It is impossible to watch "Return With
Honor" and the POWs' accounts of the humiliation and torture they suffered
and not think of Bliss as a hero.
While he may be a media darling, Bliss, 56, has earned a deeper,
more-lasting admiration among the people who know him first and foremost
as an intellectual property lawyer.
His colleagues at Fulbright & Jaworski in Houston praise him as a source
of constant humor and positive energy. As head of the firm's IP department
since 1987, he is also credited with spearheading his department's
explosion from about seven to 70 lawyers.
"It is a hot [IP] market," says Jim Repass, a partner in the firm's
18-lawyer IP section in Houston. "We have lost folks like everyone. But
one of the things that we have going for us, whether we are trying to hire
people initially or keep those people, is that they aren't going to find
another Ron."
One of Bliss' signature habits, says John Mings, a fellow IP partner in
Houston, is to make daily rounds through the section and joke with
everyone on the staff, from partners to file clerks.
"I've never met a hipper IP lawyer than Ron. They are usually such stiff
cats," he says.
Bliss says he tries to lead Fulbright's IP section, not merely administer
it, by inspiring team members to maximize their potential. He also takes
team morale very seriously. In fact, he has done such a good job of
conveying his mantra "life is too important to take seriously," he says,
that he sometimes steps aside and lets others beat the drum.
"One of the associates will come into my office at an appropriate time,"
Bliss says. "He can kind of sense it and say, 'Now hear this: We are
going to have an attitude adjustment at the Four Seasons [Hotel] bar at 5
o'clock. Be there, Bliss is buying.' "
This is not to suggest that Bliss has become superfluous. When he was out
for six months in late 1998 and early 1999 undergoing successful treatment
for melanoma, it nearly crippled the section, says Repass.
"We were running on neutral. Leadership is hard to replace."
The Hanoi Hilton
Bliss, unfortunately, picked up his leadership skills the hard way.
On Sept. 4, 1966, about two months after landing in Vietnam, the Air Force
lieutenant was making a bombing run outside of Hanoi when his plane was
hit.
He says he punched out of the plane just below the speed of sound and when
he awoke he'd been captured. He had a dent in the back of his head and
every one of his joints was sore, but the fun, he says, was just
beginning.
Bliss was taken to a prison in Hanoi that the POWs later termed the Hanoi
Hilton. Worse still, he was jailed in the "Heartbreak Hotel," a
particularly gruesome set of cells within the prison where POWs slept with
leg irons on.
For the next 2,374 days - over six years - he would go to bed at night
wondering whether he would ever make it back to his wife, Charlene, and
young son, Erick, who was born just before Bliss left for Vietnam.
Like the other men profiled in "Return With Honor," Bliss was tortured for
tactical information. The worst torture method is what the prisoners
called the Vietnamese Rope Trick. Bliss says he suffered a version of the
rope trick, which involved guards placing him face down with his wrists
manacled behind him. They then tied his arms with rope, ran a bamboo pole
through the ropes, and cranked the pole with increasing amounts of
pressure.
Bliss' recounting of the torture, in a deep, steady voice, perfectly
captures his indomitable spirit.
"It brings everything back to a point. First your wrists, you think they
are going to break and sometimes they do, and then your elbows and
sometimes they do, and then your shoulders and sometimes they come out of
the socket. I've still got a loose left shoulder. It doesn't help my golf
game, but it is a good excuse."
Bliss was released March 4, 1973.
There are a few residual traces of anger - Bliss admits that if God were
to give him five minutes of time with a few of the guards, he could
inflict some serious bodily injury.
But, he says, he was determined when he got back that he would not become
consumed by bitterness.
He succeeded, and hit the ground running as a civilian. Just months after
returning home, he volunteered to become re-certified as a fighter pilot
at Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. He later signed up for a
training program in White Sands, N.M., where he got to defy death again by
trying out insane maneuvers in supersonic T-38s. On the final day of the
program, he took his jet up to 55,000 feet - you are not supposed to
go that high without a pressure suit, he says - where it flamed out
and dropped 15,000 feet, tail-first, before Bliss could right the craft.
Bliss then jumped into something even more harrowing. In the summer of
1974, he started his first year of law school at Baylor University and
went straight through, finishing 27 months later.
Play Ball
People who know and work with Bliss attest to the fact that he does not
spend a lot of time looking back.
Bill Pakalka, a Fulbright partner, recounts a 20-hour business trip he
took with Bliss to Chicago. Due to bad weather, their flight was re-routed
to Fort Wayne, Ind., where, Pakalka says, they did their part for the
local economy by logging a few hours at the airport bar. Later, at O'Hare
Airport, after they had missed their meeting and were faced with another
delay, they gave a boost to the Chicago economy, Pakalka says. Finally, he
says, when they got to talking about personal matters on the flight home,
Bliss mentioned the POW thing.
"Despite the significance of his experiences in Vietnam, he doesn't wear
it on his sleeve," says Pakalka.
Bliss' mental stamina, however, clearly owes something to his time in
Hanoi.
Intellectual property cases are often long, complex affairs with parties
fighting viciously over a product line that can make or a break a company.
According to colleagues, Bliss nimbly commands such matters. He can get
very aggressive, Mings says, but he never gets rattled.
"[Bliss] says, 'No matter what happens in the courtroom, no one can beat
you up over it.' " "Ron brings . . . enthusiasm to whatever he is doing,"
adds Nathan Mehan, the general manger of technology for Forth Worth-based
Union Pacific Resources Co., which has hired Bliss in two cases.
To illustrate Bliss' zest for life, Mehan tells of the time they were on
the phone trying to decide whether to hold a business meeting in Fort
Worth or Houston. After awhile, someone - Mehan won't say who - proposed
an alternate forum: Jacob's Field in Cleveland, where the Indians were
scheduled to host a day game.
Several day's later, glove in hand, Mehan met Bliss at the Cleveland
airport. With its intermittent down time, Mehan confides, a professional
baseball game is a great place to talk business.
"Why not?" Bliss nearly screams when asked about the game. "It was the
Jake. The Jake. When else are you gonna get a chance to go to the
Jake."
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