TERRY, ROSS RANDLE
Name: Ross Randle Terry
Rank/Branch: O3/United States Navy, Nav
Unit: VF 154
Date of Birth:
Home City of Record: Lake Jackson FL
Date of Loss: 09 October 1966
Country of Loss: North Vietnam
Loss Coordinates: 203100N 1055000E
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F4B #152993
Missions: 20
Incident No: 0490
Other Personnel in Incident: Charles Tanner, returnee
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK March 1997 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
Charles Tanner was flying an F-4B from VF-154 off the USS Coral Sea.
Commander Ross Terry was flying as the Radar Intercept Officer. They were
shot down and captured near Phu Ly, North Vietnam on 9 October 1966. They
were not injured prior to capture.
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).
UPDATE - 09/95 by the P.O.W. NETWORK, Skidmore, MO
ROSS R. TERRY
Commander - United States Navy
Shot Down: October 9, 1966
Released: March 4, 1973
A Technicolor personalized American "Welcome Home in America," could not be
more fitting to any American POW who has just arrived from a black and white
world outside our great shores.
We American POWs stand proud to have assisted you, the American people, and
our great government, to honor and uphold our commitments to freedom-seeking
people of foreign soils. We stand tall alongside you in raising the Stars and
Stripes just a little higher so that all may see.
December 1996
Ross Terry retired from the United States Navy as a Captain. He and his wife
Susan reside in Florida.
----------------------
VIETNAM magazine
October 1994
LIFE ON HOLD
When Navy Lieutenant Ross Terry's F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber was shot down
over North Vietnam, his life went on hold for the next 78 months.
By Art Giberson
Twenty-eight years ago, Navy Captain Ross Randle Terry, then a lieutenant,
was flying in F-4 Phantoms as a radar intercept officer with VF- 154,
deployed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea (CV-43). Terry and his
pilot, Lieutenant Commander Neils Tanner, were only mildly apprehensive as
they relaxed in the ready room and listened to the briefing officer detail
their planned strike on the railroad yards at Phu Ly, some 20 miles south of
Hanoi. Terry and Tanner were assigned the task of flak suppression. Their
mission was to take out an 85mm flak site, a ring of 85mm anti-aircraft guns
around the rail yard, to lessen the danger to the American attack aircraft
as they made their bombing runs on the yard. When the ship's meteorologist
stepped forward to give his portion of the briefing, he merely confirmed
what the airmen already knew. "Yankee Station" (the Seventh Fleet's
operational area in the Gulf of Tonkin) and most of North Vietnam were under
a heavy overcast that Sunday, October 9, 1966.
The briefing over, Terry and Tanner, as they had done dozens of times
before, climbed into their F-4 and prepared for launch. They fully expected
to be back on board Coral Sea in plenty of time for the evening movie in the
wardroom. Tanner gave a thumbs up to the catapult officer, and a few seconds
later, the F-4 was hurled off the flight deck into the overcast skies of the
Gulf of Tonkin. The drop of the "cat" officer's arm performed a double
function that cloudy October Sunday. It signaled the launch of Terry and
Tanner's F-4 Phantom and put life as they had known it on hold for the next
seven years.
[Tanner and Terry had agreed earlier that if they should be hit they would
try for Laos rather than fly over a very heavily fortified bridge in an
attempt to make it back to the gulf.] 'The "Golden BB"' [flak] destroyed our
hydraulics, causing Neils to lose control of launch the aircraft. The plane
pitched upward, rolled, and went into about a 135-degree bank with a
60-degree nose-down angle. Our speed was around Mach 1.3 when I ejected."
"We broke through the overcast and dove on the target," Captain Terry
recalls. "Just as we released our bombs we felt a thump' in the midsection
of the aircraft. Neils pulled off, fired off the afterburner and tried to
make it to Laos.
At that angle and speed, the force of the ejection was so great that the
pressure stripped the helmet, oxygen mask and most of the survival gear from
Terry's body and tore three panels from his parachute. Ironically, the
Sugarland, Texas, native credits the damaged chute with saving his life.
"There must have been at least a thousand people on the ground, many of them
shooting at me. The missing panels caused my descent to be much faster than
it normally would have been, causing those people shooting at me to miss."
(Terry believes that many American airmen were killed as they parachuted to
earth, and because of that, he does not believe there are any American
fliers left alive in North Vietnam.)
"I hit the ground and was immediately surrounded by a swarm of North
Vietnamese civilians shouting and waving guns, clubs and knifes. I remember
this one guy ran up and was about to cut my throat," the captain says,
gently rubbing a finger over a still visible scar on his neck, "when two
military guys fired their AK-47s over the crowd's head. The knifewielding
civilian backed off. Remembering what we had been told, I fished out my
Geneva Convention card and tried to give it to the soldiers. They took the
card, cut it into pieces and threw it on the ground. My shoes were then
taken away, I was stripped down to my shorts and led through a little
outlying village and put in a cave. People then lined up and filed past to
get a took at this tall, white, red-haired guy. I sort of felt like
something in a zoo," Terry recalls. "These people hated us. Even though
they had never seen an American before, Ho Chi Minh had kept them worked up.
They really believed that we were warmongers who had come to kill them." A
short time after being put in the cave, Terry was visited by an English-
speaking interpreter who demanded to know not only his name, rank and serv-
ice number but also what type of aircraft he had been flying, what ship he
had flown from and how he was shot down. Terry, in accordance with the
Geneva Convention and the Code of Conduct gave only his name, rank, service
number and date of birth. When it became obvious to his captors that they
would get no further information from the lanky American flier, they tied
him up by the elbows and dragged him around the cave. "At this point of my
capture," says Terry, "I was mostly scared. I didn't know what to expect.
The pain hadn't really set in yet because of the newness of where I was and
what was going on. That evening, they took me through another crowd,
dragged me up on a makeshift stage and beat me down on my knees to the
delight of the screaming crowd. "Kneeling there on my knees, my hands tied
behind my back, I noticed this one guy standing at the edge of the crowd.
He stood out by the fact he wasn't taking part in the screaming and clap-
ping. He was also holding a three-foot sword. I thought, 'Man, that guy is
going to try and kill me.' The crowd worked itself into a frenzy, so to
protect me, the guards grabbed me and tossed me into the back of a truck.
The truck had bamboo slats around the bed and I remember leaning against
them when I had this strange feeling that something was about to happen. It
was like a little voice telling me to fall down and roll to the middle of
the truck bed. Just as I dropped, the quiet man with the sword drove it
through the bamboo slats, just were I had been standing." Leaving the
village, Terry and his captors traveled most of the night, and around 5
a.m. they arrived at "Heartbreak Hotel," one of several prison compounds in
the Hanoi area. There he was put in shackles, and the interrogation and
torture started up again: What is the name of your ship? What kind of
aircraft do you fly? What was your target? How many airplanes do you have
on your ship? How were you shot down?
After about eight hours of continuous torture, Terry told his interrogators
that he had been shot down by a MiG. "After that amount of time you're
hurting enough that you begin to rationalize," says Terry. "Maybe if you can
give them some worthless information you can get them off of your back for a
little while. The story about being shot down by a MiG was apparently what
they wanted to hear because the beating stopped.
"Even through I had a brief reprieve I didn't feel a whole lot better. By
telling them that I had been shot down by a MiG, in my mind I had gone
beyond name, rank, service number and date of birth. At that point in time
I really felt that I had somehow betrayed the code and I was the only one to
have done such a thing.
"I was then taken to a little room with stocks in it. They put one leg in
the stocks, handcuffed me and put my arms in another set of stocks so that I
was in a bent-up position. After a few days and nights like that, it begins
to get your attention. And you start to wonder how long you can hold out if
they want something more from you. Sure enough, after a while they were
back. Fortunately, a voice from the other side of the room called out:
'Don't let them permanently injure you. just fight the best you can."'
Terry knew then that he was not alone and was not the only person to
fabricate a story for the North Vietnamese, so he stuck to his MiG story.
After a few more days he was reunited with Lt. Cmdr. Tanner and
transferred to "the Zoo." The Zoo, according to Terry, was a former French
motion-picture studio that had been converted into a cell block. During its
heyday as a movie studio, the cells had been used for film storage. Vents
were used to keep air steadily flowing through the small rooms, thereby
keeping the film at a fairly constant temperature. The Vietnamese had long
since plugged up the vents, turning the former lockers into ovens. From
having been shackled for so long, neither Terry nor Tanner were able to use
their hands. Still, they helped one another as best they could.
By now the two VF-154 fliers had been confined long enough to learn the tap
code-a modified form of Morse Code the POWs used to communicate-and day by
day learned a little more about their surroundings and the identity of some
of their fellow POWs. They also learned that the Vietnamese used whatever
information-true or otherwise-they could extract from them for propaganda
purposes.
As the days, weeks and months went by, more and more pressure was applied to
try and pry information from Terry, Tanner and the other POWs at the Zoo.
Often, under threat of death, they were forced to write or dictate
"confessions."
One of those "confessions" made it to the Paris peace talks and bought Terry
and Tanner a severe beating and months of solitary confinement.
"It's not something I would necessarily recommend to a future POW," said
Terry, "but Neils and I dreamed up what we called the 'Clark Kent & Ben
Casey Caper.' We decided to confess.'Our hands were still in such bad shape
that neither of us could write, so we dictated our confessions.' I was Clark
Kent and Neils was Ben Casey. According to our confessions, Kent was
supposedly a Navy lieutenant flying off of a carrier. He had become
disenchanted with American policy and said the war was immoral and illegal,
and he was therefore turning in his wings.
"Casey, also a Navy flier, was supposedly being divorced by his wife because
of his involvement in the Vietnam War. The guard wrote down everything just
the way we told it to him, buzz words and all. It was later shipped off to
Paris where peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam were
taking place. For about two months after the 'confession' they pretty much
left us alone. By that I mean we weren't beaten as often.
"The so-called confession was later read to the international press by an
Englishman named Bertrand Russell who was conducting a so-called war crimes
tribunal. Welt, as soon as the press heard the names Clark Kent and Ben
Casey, they stampeded for the telephones. That, of course, gave Russell and
his tribunal, as well as the North Vietnamese government, a black eye.
"As soon as the word got back to where we were, there were a lot of sudden
changes at the Zoo," says Terry. "Interrogators were changed, guards were
transferred, and Neils and I got the hell beat out of us. Neils was sent
to another prison, called Alcatraz, and I was put in a little place called
the Outhouse. For the next six months or so we sat in solitary in stocks
and cuffs."
After the stocks and cuffs were finally removed, Terry remained in solitary
for another 18 months. While living alone, he managed to make a couple of
new friends with whom he passed the time of day. His "friends" were named
"Myself" and "I." Captain Terry recalls that during those 18 months he,
Myself and I, designed and built houses, played cards and in general
searched for ways to keep from going insane. "The guards would hear me
talking to myself and put a finger to their heads and make circular motions,
to indicate that I had gone crazy."
During his years as a prisoner of war, Terry said he and his fellow Vietnam
POWs lived under extremely harsh conditions. Their lives were continually
threatened and they were frequently beaten and tortured. But intermixed
with the harshness and brutality were also moments of kindness and
compassion. "I remember one Christmas," Terry recalls, "when the Rabbit la
guard so nicknamed bqcause of his ears] brought me in for a quiz and held a
picture of a lady and five young girls up in front of me. I knew I had four
girls but not five. Susan [Terry's wife] was about two months pregnant when
I deployed, and the baby was born after I was shot down. That, of course,
was a very welcome Christmas present."
Terry was allowed to keep the family picture, which had come in a letter,
but he was not as lucky with other packages from home, particularly those
containing food. "As our time in captivity stretched out, mail and packages
came more frequently. But packages with food in them were usually
confiscated by the guards."
Compassion, of sorts, was also shown in other ways. Terry recalls one
occasion, when his wrists were sore and bleeding from being tightly shackled
for a long period of time: "This guard came in with a bowl of rice. He
uncuffed one hand, as they usually did, so that I could eat. When I was
finished, he put the cuff back on my wrist and there was only one 'click.'At
first I thought he had just made a mistake. He looked at me, placed a
finget to his lips, in a gesture to be quiet, turned and walked away." After
a good night's sleep, the first in a long time without his hands being
cuffed behind him, Terry became concerned about the guard and re-secured the
handcuffs himself.
On yet another occasion, when Terry had been beaten and forced to remain in
a kneeling position with his hands shack, led behind him, a guard brought
him a boiled potato, concealed in a tin can, and fed it to him. Afterward,
the guard lit a cigarette and held it to Terry's lips so that he could have
a few puffs. Terry said he never saw that particular guard again.
Eventually, Terry was moved from solitary to a two-man cell. "That in
itself required some adjustment," the captain explains. "After nearly two
years in solitary, I hardly knew how to talk to another human being. I was
then moved to what was called the Zoo Annex-another part of the former
studio-with five other guys." The annex had six rooms with six men to each
room. This was the first time since being shot down that the red-haired
Texan had seen so many Americans at one time.
With that many American POWs together, it was inevitable that sooner or
later an escape attempt would be made. Through their crude but effective
coiiimunication system, an escape plan was devised. It was decided the
escape would take place on a rainy night because the guards generally stayed
inside during bad weather. As the rain beat down, two POWs, both Air Force
officers, managed to get out of their cell and climb over an outer wall.
Within hours, however, they were recaptured and returned to the Zoo, where
they were brutally beaten and tortured until one of the escapees died.
Terry, the annex's senior ranking officer, and the senior officer from each
room were then put through what he refers to as "18 days of hell." "We were
literally beaten and tortured for 18 days," Terry recalls. "They would set
you in a chair, all tied up, on the top of a table and leave you there until
you fell asleep and fell off the table. The fall, of course, would cause
still more pain and sometimes broken bones. Another favorite tactic was to
strip you down and beat you across the buttocks with a fan belt until you
were bleeding. Another thing they would do is hold your legs out and strike
you in about three places across the shins with a piece of bamboo until your
legs began to swell up and then whack them again. That really gets your
attention. All the time they are beating you they are trying to get you to
tell them who ordered the escape.
"It's one thing to say something that you know is baloney and you know that
the country knows it's baloney [such as the Clark Kent and Ben Casey caper],
but it's something entirely different to say something against a man they
have their hands on," Terry explains. "Finally the beatings ended, and they
chained me to Colonel Bob Purcell. We were cuffed and manacled together and
put in a room with three other'couples,' so to speak. We stayed that way
for about three months."
After North Vietnam President Ho Chi Minh died, Terry and many of his fellow
POWs were moved to a new prison at Son Tay, a few miles northwest of Hanoi.
Unbeknown to the POWs, American Special Forces were making plans to raid Son
Tay in an attempt to rescue them. Unfortunately, the North Vietnamese moved
them just hours before the Americans arrived. The Son Tay prisoners were
relocated and put in large 50 man cells. As the war begin to wind down, the
torture and beatings became less frequent, and Terry and his fellow POWs
were allowed more time outside and given better food. They began to hear
rumors that the war was about over and they would soon be going home. On
several occasions, some of his cellmates were actually told they were going
to leave, only to be turned back at the last minute. But finally the day of
repatriation did come, and the "freedom birds" began to arrive in Hanoi.
In March 1973, Captain Terry and his squadron mate Neils Tanner were flown
to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and, finally, to NAS (Naval Air
Station) Memphis, Tenn., where they were hospitalized for more than three
months.
On September 21, 1990, 17 1/2 years after leaving Vietnam, Captain Ross
Randle Terry was awarded the POW Medal. The captain is now in the
construction business in Pensacola, Fla.
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