--- title: Vietnam Prisoner of War: Incredible Story Behind the Photo description: He could only hope that the photograph would be published—and that it would capture his face clearly, so his family could see he was alive. canonical: https://time.com/4932924/vietnam-pow-photo-story/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-09-14T13:00:54.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:54:07.731Z article:section: History og:title: Vietnam Prisoner of War: Incredible Story Behind the Photo og:description: He could only hope that the photograph would capture his face clearly, so his family could see he was alive og:url: https://time.com/4932924/vietnam-pow-photo-story/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf55c34d2cf4119cb/6988dcf186f68e9de86e654d/waddell.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: Wayne Waddell Vietnam POW og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Vietnam Prisoner of War: Incredible Story Behind the Photo twitter:description: He could only hope that the photograph would capture his face clearly, so his family could see he was alive twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltf55c34d2cf4119cb/6988dcf186f68e9de86e654d/waddell.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # The Incredible Story Behind a Haunting Picture of a POW in Vietnam > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=f6cf8e53-c74b-411e-9201-a8986e1ebe52&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=f6cf8e53-c74b-411e-9201-a8986e1ebe52&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: the Influencers: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sebastian Junger [Watch (HLS stream): the Influencers: Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sebastian Junger](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ApkZjOyL.m3u8) (6:16)  _Published 2017-09-26. Ken Burns, Lynn Novick and Sebastian Junger on war and human nature_  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Sep 14, 2017 1:00 PM UTC  Captured U.S. pilot major Dewey Waddell is guarded by a militiawoman with a gun and a bayonet on a rice field. Vietnam, 1967. Captured U.S. pilot major Dewey Waddell is guarded by a militiawoman with a gun and a bayonet on a rice field. Vietnam, 1967. ullstein bild via Getty Images  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Sep 14, 2017 1:00 PM UTC The man in the picture keeps his eyes to the ground. Though there are no walls keeping him in — the image was taken in a rice field — there’s no mistaking that he is a prisoner. The rope that binds his arms is only just visible, but the militiawoman guarding him with her bayonet is plain to see. And yet, 50 years after that striking photograph was taken, he remembers that the event it captures held for him a secret sense of possibility. That day was a breath of relief, and cause for a silent prayer of gratitude. The man’s name is Dewey Wayne Waddell. Today, at 82, he’s retired and living in Marietta, Ga. Retired Air Force Col. Waddell (who goes by Wayne) spoke to TIME about the story behind the picture. “It’s quite a shock when you’re zooming along and then all of a sudden you’re sitting on the ground,” Waddell says of what happened on July 5, 1967, when his plane was shot down on a mission over North Vietnam. Because his parachute did not fully open when he ejected from his plane, he knew it was possible the Air Force would believe that he had died in the fall. “One of the first thoughts I had when I was sitting on the ground was, _Everybody I see from now on may be wanting to kill me._ That focuses your attention. But conveniently they didn’t try to kill me. They just wanted to capture me.” Waddell was imprisoned at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” and it was there that he recalls his captors playing him a few recorded “war crimes confessions” from other American prisoners of war. It was the era of [Bertrand Russell’s war-crimes tribunal](http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,843730,00.html), in which the philosopher led an investigation in Sweden into U.S. actions in Vietnam, and Waddell was told that these confessions would be used at the tribunal — and that, like it or not, he would be confessing. A little more than a week later, he was told that he was going somewhere “to be tested,” and that if he did not cooperate his life could not be guaranteed. He was given his own flight suit to wear, but it looked bloody; red ink had been splashed on it. “I figured I was going to a kangaroo court, where you’re guilty when you walk in, to do one of those confessions,” he recalls. “So I was very pleasantly surprised when I got up there and they took off the blindfold, to see where I was.” He says he knew right away what was going on, and why it was not a tribunal of any kind. Though there is no trace of them in the photograph made that day, there were two Caucasian men present, one with a still camera and the other shooting video. He would later find out that they were a team from East Germany, working on an East German television docu-series about the war, called [_Pilots in Pajamas_](http://arts.ucsc.edu/news%5Fevents/pilots-and-pajamas-screening-and-roundtable)_._ “They had me walk up and down the rice paddy a few times, and said, ‘Keep your head down and don’t say anything.’ But I always got right at the camera and looked up real quick, hoping that if these pictures got out somebody would recognize me,” he says. “I was looking for any way for my family to know I was alive.” That possibility — that the men with the cameras would produce some image that would make its way out into the world and into the hands of his loved ones, who might otherwise believe him dead — was enough to color the memory of that day with unexpectedly positive feelings. It helps, of course, that his plan worked. _Pilots in Pajamas_ was shown on East German television in early 1968, at which point the broadcast was picked up by U.S. military monitoring of the Communist nation’s propaganda. [Toward the end of one of the segments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq9ZOgsFRbA&feature=youtu.be&t=1h7m36s), there was Dewey Wayne Waddell, his eyes flicking up to the meet the camera, just as he had planned. “Well this thing that showed up turned out to be exactly what I’d hoped for,” he recalls. “When \[the Air Force\] saw that, they pulled off several stills and sent them to my family, who identified me of course. So that’s what changed my status from MIA to POW.” Waddell was released on March 4, 1973\. But the story of the photograph doesn’t end there. Years later, at a cartoon and photography convention, a friend of Waddell’s happened to meet the son of one of the German photographers, Thomas Billhardt, the man with the still camera. Later, on a visit to Berlin, that friend went to see Billhardt’s work — and there, hanging on the wall, was a picture of Wayne Waddell, taken the day of the _Pilots in Pajamas_ filming. The friend arranged for the former prisoner and the photographer to connect. They met in Berlin in the late 1990s at a “nice little session” that was recorded for local television and the newspaper and, upon leaving, Waddell’s wife asked to purchase the picture to take home. A few years later, Waddell was interviewed once again about his experience, this time for a piece in the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine about graduates who had been prisoners of war. The magazine ended up [using that photograph on the cover;](https://issuu.com/gtalumni/docs/2001%5F77%5F3) it also subsequently made the cover of a [book](https://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-War-POWs-We-People/dp/0756538467) about the POW experience. (It was at that point that Waddell discovered that he had been “reidentified” at some point along the way. In the caption information that travels with the photograph he is listed as “Pewey” Waddell.) In recent decades, Waddell has returned to Vietnam several times, the first time in 1994 with his wife and children. Though he says he was apprehensive as their plane neared Hanoi — it “brought back memories of high-speed run ins on bombing runs,” he says — he has fond memories of the place from later trips. He has noticed the spread of capitalism and of the English language, and found the people he met friendly and accommodating. During a visit to the Hanoi prison, when one of the Vietnamese officers present asked him what he had been thinking when he’d been there as a prisoner, Waddell responded that he’d been thinking “I sure would like to get out of here.” His hosts, he says, thought that was funny. And now, a half-century after that photograph was taken, Waddell says he’s “intrigued” to see [the nation’s eyes turn to Vietnam](http://time.com/4941025/the-vietnam-war-ken-burns-lynn-novick/) as a piece of history, as the subject of a documentary rather than daily news. “That’s an interesting thing for me, that I’ve pondered a few times. The way I’ve described it, it’s like a movie that I saw, except I was in it,” he says. “As a matter of fact, it seemed I had a starring role.” ## Transcript [ BLANK_AUDIO ] We study war because we know, obviously, it brings out the worst. But we study war because it also brings out the very, very best. [ MUSIC ] The demonstrators resisted when police attempted to arrest a young man who tried to rip down an American flag. We spent ten years working on the Vietnam war. We wake up, and our films about mass demonstrations taking place all across the United States against the current administration. About a White House obsessed with leaks, in total disarray. About a president who thinks the press is lying and making stuff up about him. About asymmetrical warfare, about huge document drops of stolen classified material into the public sphere. And about accusations that a political campaign reached out during the time of a national election to influence that campaign And we kinda go wait a second, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. A quote that's attributed to Mark Twain. This is all Vietnam and hundreds of other things rhyme, and I'm thinking what you're doing and the kind of stuff you're trying to grapple with seems almost exactly the same thing we're trying to grapple with. But specifically about who these people are that we make Do the fighting that we ask to put their lives on the line. Well, you know I'm anthropologist and I look at all my journalism and film making through that lens. We're a dominant species because we're capable of organized aggression against enemies, we are mean. [ FOREIGN ] [ SOUND ] And I think you have this dynamic tension in human society which is why you keep getting these stories repeated over and over and over again You have the sort of the collective will of the people and there's a certain sense of egalitarianism and fairness. And then you have a very necessary sort of hierarchical structure that keeps order in society. And people in power then resort to a kind of top- down hierarchy and abuse it. If war is human behavior, human nature on steroids, then Also it shows the exaggerated positiveness of our species because in these moments of our worst behaviour we also see this empathetic tendencies, the love. The lost soldiers that I know of [ UNKNOWN ]. Right. A lot of people that I know who look through catastrophes. [ INAUDIBLE ] I know a woman who [ INAUDIBLE ] my first [ INAUDIBLE ] early 90's Right . >> Now decades later, I interviewed her and she said a lot of people in [ UNKNOWN ] missed the war - >> Yes, right . >> Because it brought everyone together [ MUSIC ] You know, from the Vietnam era as you were talking I'm thinking it's not just soldiers who feel that way, it's people who protested the war. They were part of something that was deeply meaningful to them and they thought they sacrificed. Some of them went to jail, went to Canada. You know, really committed themselves in a deep way to something they though was right. It didn't involve aggression in the way that Going to wars but there was a sense of life being higher, more powerful, more [ UNKNOWN ] like I was saying. [ UNKNOWN ] primarily two things a sense of meeting within our community and closeness and the closer you get to a catastrophe, to a disaster, to a war. The more people depend on you and vice versa. And that's what humans are evolved for. You clearly have studied this. I wanna know stuff to do. I don't mean no more wars. We know that's never gonna happen because, as you suggest, people are kind of excited about that stuff. But what is it that we and do? I mean we remember that sense of collective solidarity in a Few weeks post 9 / 11 that got squandered by the hierarchy that said go shopping, rather than please pay 50 cents more a gallon per gas. Right. Please don't do this. Please do this All of which every single American would have done. Done with glee but now we just got a kind of political sense in which we don't ask anything of Americans, we want to cut their taxes even more we want to do all this stuff and have the same smoke and mirrors. I'm not suggesting a political answer from you but there's a social and human set of actions, perhaps is the way to say it, that might help This. Psychologists will tell you the more you sacrifice for something the more you value it and the problem in modern America one says very lucky that we're such a wealthy safe nation that we don't require individual sacrifice of anyone. In some sense that's very lucky. But in other sense is actually not very good for us. I'm against the draft, I think it's [ UNKNOWN ] for someone to fight a war that they don't believe in but I would be completely for national service. Yeah, we agree completely. Yes. [ CROSSTALK ] And if you do that, because people are sacrificing a year or two of their lives towards this collective goal of having this nation You raise the value of the nation in people's hearts and that's when you start to feel a real part of something. I mean, just thinking about Vietnam and we've been thinking about it for so long that the lack of [ UNKNOWN ] was usually traumatic for soldiers and for the people on the other side, too. That the country didn't know there was such incredible. Profound cognitive dissonance That's right. About what we were doing. And it was on every level. Modern society is easy on the body and hard on the mind. Most of the country, Democrat or Republican, either way, I think most people want a kind of collective good for country Yes, I agree. Right? The country has to come up with norms of behavior that confront and contradict what has happened in our political world. In a crisis obviously, we've seen in Texas, people do that immediately. Right. Right, no black, white, rich, poor, no one cares. Right. That's humans at their best. But can we achieve that without the hurricane, without the war, without the fight, can we do it? I think we can, but we have to espouse it in a proactive way. Well, it seems like counting on the politicians to beat in the lead on that is probably unlikely, but it can bubble up through the way people tell stories and the way human experiences [ CROSSTALK ]. [ CROSSTALK ]. 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