Meet James Cook, whose salute as he exited POW camp in Vietnam was immortalized in photos

Air Force gunner James Cook was called in so quickly on Dec. 26, 1972, he left his lucky hat behind.

Cook liked his job. He liked sitting alone in the tail of the B-52 bomber, arming the guns and directing the pilot to evade incoming missiles. He liked serving his country. Cook, 31, a technical sergeant from North Carolina, told his girlfriend of one year, Doris Sloan, that if his plane ever went down, he hoped he would die with it.

But that night, everything went wrong. The plane took off late and alone. An engine caught on fire. Then a missile hit them, and another. Cook tried to eject, but the speed of the falling plane held him in.

Thrown from the plane at last, he came to in a creek, surrounded by water and pain.

His legs didn’t work. Neither did his dominant right arm. He heard voices. Footsteps. He hollered out to North Vietnamese soldiers, who began shooting.

“Oh goody,” he thought. “I survived landing and now I’m going to get shot.”

They wired his ankles and wrists together, put him in a motorcycle sidecar and drove him to Hoa Lò Prison, an infamous site U.S. soldiers nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton.”

No, they didn’t kill him. But for a man gravely injured, a trip to this POW camp amounted to much the same thing.

Surviving through gallows humor and Kool-Aid jam

Fellow prisoners kept him alive. The experience was so gruesome and painful, Cook had to laugh. Flat on his back with casts on both legs, he had to pee into a bucket, which once toppled over on him.

One Vietnamese officer used to waggle his useless toes. He seemed to think it was funny.

Cook escaped from the POW camp, but only in his dreams. He hallucinated that he was beamed up to a spaceship and brought to America to eat peach ice cream, then rushed back before early-morning check. When he regained consciousness, he could still taste the peaches.

Weeks passed. Cook started hearing rumors about talks in Paris. Mail started coming. Other prisoners received food packages. They made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, substituting bread and jelly with crackers and packs of Kool-Aid mix, and shared them with him.

On Feb. 12, Cook’s keepers carried him out on a stretcher, over a pontoon crossing that replaced a bombed-out bridge to the airport.

He was being freed, sent home. For years afterward, Cook dreamed that the American plane took off without him.

Sliding in and out of consciousness, Cook still grasped the significance of his release. Landing in California, he tussled to be taken out to salute and touch the American flag with his left hand — he couldn’t use his right. Later, in Texas, it was sleeting. He asked for a minute outside the plane, where he stuck his tongue out and let the sleet fall into his mouth.

It felt like home.

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Sloan, then 37, was divorced with two teenage daughters. Early in the relationship, she learned that Cook hadn’t received a single letter in his time in the service – not from his mother, not from his small children, not from his wife, from whom he was separated. She wrote to Cook every week. Because the couple wasn't married, the military didn't alert Sloan when Cook's plane went down.

Home in Wilmington, North Carolina, Sloan saw a photo in the newspaper – Cook saluting the flag from his stretcher. The boniness of his wrist told her he was badly hurt.

Recovery, with ether and whiskey

In Denver, doctors cleaned out Cook's shattered, infected legs and a sore on his back that reached the bone. The wounds were so nasty, the hospital had to burn the surgical gowns.

Sedated, Cook thrashed and yelled out nonsense, staff told him later. The bright lights triggered memories of Hanoi’s interrogation room.

Cook’s wife asked him to reconcile, for the children. Sloan swallowed and bore it.

“I’d never said ‘I love you,’ he’d never said ‘I love you,’ and you know, as long as it’s private, that that’s OK,” she said.

Two weeks later, he called and said his wife had changed her mind because he could never be a husband and a father again.

Cook survived through phone calls to Sloan and gallows humor. A doctor bribed him to try crutches by promising him a nightly tot of Canadian Club.

One night, Cook’s left thigh got itchy. After scratching it, the attendants saw red streaks. Alarmed, doctors cut off his cast to find — “it’s gross talk,” he warned — maggots. They doused his leg with ether and refused him a cigarette lest he blow everyone up. The next day, they said, they would amputate.

Cook called Sloan. After a bit, he hung up, then called back. And again. They talked all night long, even though she had to work in the morning.

Eventually they amputated the other leg as well.

Cook and Sloan started to talk marriage. But, he asked, did she want a man without legs?

She had kept a piece of paper under her bedroom mirror that listed the qualities she wanted in a man. She told him she didn’t see “legs” anywhere on it. 

They got married when he was released from the hospital, 16 months after he was carried in.

Fifty years and three or four pairs of prosthetics later, Cook is 81 and retired. Living in Hampstead, N.C., he and Mrs. Doris dote on their first great-grandchild and their fluffy dog. In his 60s, he went to railroad school, to show himself that he could. 

The U.S. flag means as much to Cook now as it did the day he saluted it with his left hand.

“It’s freedom and the ability to make something of yourself,” he said. “And there are people who do care about you.”

They remember: Five decades after America's withdrawal from Vietnam War

Editor’s Note

To find subjects for this project, we began with the photos. We combed through the Associated Press archives, the Library of Congress, Getty, the National Archives and the U.S. Department of Defense Flickr collection, among other photo collections, looking for historic moments, visually striking shots, Southern residents, women and Black veterans.

Where the subjects in the photo were bylined, we checked a range of directories, including Google, Ancestry’s Military Records collection, Lexis-Nexis public records, Together We Served, Legacy and Facebook, using a variety of spellings. We put out the word to various veterans’ groups and historians for specific military divisions and operations, prisoners of war, the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center and Operation Homecoming.

In the end, we were able to track down three living veterans. If you know anything about Lt. AL Walker, please let us know.

Danielle Dreilinger is an American South storytelling reporter and the author of the book “The Secret History of Home Economics.” You can reach her at ddreilinger@gannett.com or 919-236-3141.