First U.S. Military POW in Southeast Asia Since World War II

March 23, 1961

Overview

Seven of the eight U.S. crewmen aboard a C-47 aircraft are killed when the Pathet Lao—Laotian Communist insurgents allied with North Vietnam— shoot them down over the Plain of Jars using antiaircraft artillery. Army Major Lawrence R. Bailey survives and is subsequently captured, becoming the first American prisoner of war in Southeast Asia since the end of World War II.

Bailey is held and interrogated for 17 months. He is released in August 1962, and President John F. Kennedy presents him with the Bronze Star.1

¹Stuart I. Rochester and Frederick Kiley, Honor Bound: The History of American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia, 1961–1973 (Washington, D.C., Naval Institute Press, 2007), 29, 33–36, 281 (though there are other prisoners in 1954, they were not “truly” POWs, according to p. 29, due to their short captivity and good treatment); “Bailey Gets Bronze Star,” in The Schenectady Gazette, August 28, 1962, p.1 (accessed via Google News, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1917&dat=19620828&id=3WItAAAAIBAJ&sjid=FokFAAAAIBAJ&pg=4975,3903175 (link is external) 4/9/14); William J. Rust, So Much To Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy in Laos (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2014), 163–64; Lawrence R. Bailey, Solitary Survivor: The First American POW in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, Inc., 1995), xviii–xix.