Fullbore Friday

In some cohorts, heroic men are so many in number, you simply miss a few.

A giant passed in 2013 - and I feel like a lessor man for not knowing his story earlier.

James Robinson "Robbie" Risner, Colonel, USAF (Ret.)

Read it all, but this should get you started;

“Robbie” Risner was a rising star in the Air Force when he was shot down and captured Sept. 16, 1965. In the previous decade’s war, he had been a hero, downing eight enemy planes over Korea. In Vietnam, he was such a standout that his tanned, chiseled face made the cover of Time magazine with a fighter jet streaking into the sky behind him.

Unfortunately, the April 23, 1965 piece, which profiled a dozen U.S. military members in Vietnam, made its way to Risner’s captors.

It “made him their ‘prized prisoner,’ which meant more abuse,” Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, the Air Force chief of staff, wrote in a remembrance last week. Risner also came in for harsher treatment because, as a lieutenant colonel and then a full colonel, he was the top-ranking officer for most of his imprisonment, including the three years he spent in solitary confinement.

He showed up a lot in his career ... in war and peace.

Here he is as a Major in 1957;




Hat tip SAP.