HomeMy WebLinkAboutAl Meyer BBV Radio Transcription #3City of College Station
Heritage Programs Oral History
Interviewee: Al Meyer
Interviewer: Tom Turbiville
Transcriber: Brooke Linsenbardt
Place: College Station, Texas
Project: Veterans of the Valley
00:00: Tom Turbiville (TT): Alton Meyer lives with his wife Bobby, in rural Brazos County. He’s thankful every day that he was able to grow old with his family, his children, his grandchildren.
It may have well not turned out that way, Lieutenant Colonel Al Meyer was an electronics’ warfare officer, when his plane was shot down. He was captured. He spent the next six years
as a Vietnam P.O.W. Hi I’m Tom Turbiville. This is Bravo Brazos Valley brought to by Mees and Associates and today we conclude the story of P.O.W. Al Meyer. There’s so much to recall
about his years in captivity. Two years his status was Missing in Action, as far as his family knew. He remembers the interrogation in Vietnam.
00:43: Al Meyer (AM): When I got there, you know, they, they tried to do things to me and I’d pass out. You know, you can’t torture someone that, that, that’s unconscious. And so they
kept telling me that if I didn’t talk them, I wouldn’t get any medical care and then I was gonna die. So I held out for a while and then I figured, “Well I don’t have anything to lose
but my life,” and so I’ll talk to them and then I started to tell them that I’m, that first question was what kind of airplane was I in. I told them, “105.” And then the next question
was, “D-model or F-model.” The D-model being the single seat and the F-model being the two-seat. And I told him, “D-model” because I had decided I was going to tell them that I was
F-105 pilot rather than an E.W.O. because I figured they’d have fewer questions for a pilot than they would an E.W.O. And so he, he immediately told me that I was lying to him because
he knew that I was from an F-105S and that I was an E.W.O. and he had just talked to my pilot Major Dudash.
TT: The Hanoi Hilton was his home for a while. That’s where the interrogation got more intense.
01:38: AM: You would go to interrogation room, you stayed there until they finished interrogating you and then they would take you to, to what they call “Heartbreak Hotel.” And th-,
it, it was a real heartbreaker because here you finally came to the real-, realization of what had happened to you and so on. And I stayed there, I, I don’t remember how long, three
or four days. And just I was lying on the floor since I was in a body cast from my, from my chest all the way down to the bottom of my foot.
TT: Finally after six years, Al Meyer was released. But even that was no smooth operation.
02:10: AM: Bro-, we were in a camp up on the Chinese border and they took us to Hanoi. And, we were in Hanoi and they, they read the agreements to us that, that they had made in, in
Paris about releasing P.O.W.s and each of us was given a copy of these agreements. And
so we knew when we were gonna come home, pretty much. I was very solidly in the second group. It was gonna be sick and wounded first and then it was gonna be by date of capture. And
so I was pretty solidly in the middle of the second group depending on how many sick and wounded there were gonna be. And I think there were thirty-some sick and wounded. And then February
the 12th, the first group went home.
TT: But for the second group, Al Meyer’s group, well there was a delay.
02:54: AM: They lined us up in a courtyard one night and the [inaudible] commander told us that you know, today was the day for you to go home, but United States is not living up to
the agreements so you’re not gonna get to go home. And so morale dropped and about a week later, you know, things started getting a little better. And the, uh that Sunday, March the
4th, the 141 showed up and they took us to the airport and we get on the 141s and flew from, from Hanoi to Clark Air Base in the Philippines.
TT: We thank Al Meyer, we salute him for his service, we regret the six years lost. Please thank a veteran today. I’m Tom Turbiville, this is Bravo Brazos Valley.
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