Photo By Amy Stork | CWO3 Rander receives his Prisoner of War Medal from Maj. Gen. Stanley H. Hyman, INSCOM...... read more read more
By Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
On March 16 and 27 of 1973, two Army counterintelligence agents were released from North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps as part of Operation HOMECOMING. Captured during Tet Offensive operations in Hue on February 1, 1968, the two spent more than five years as prisoners of war in North Vietnam.
On January 31, 1968, during the Lunar New Year celebration known as Tet, communist forces attacked numerous cities throughout South Vietnam simultaneously. Most of the attacks were suppressed quickly, but fighting in the town of Hue near the demilitarized zone continued into early March. In the midst of the attack in Hue, North Vietnamese forces overwhelmed five members of the local U.S. Army counterintelligence field office. Although the American soldiers put up a significant fight over a 48-hour period, four of the agents were captured and one, Cpl. Barry Wolk, was killed.
The four captured men included Capt. Theodore Gostas, special agent in charge of the Hue field office. A thirty-year-old Montana native commissioned through the ROTC program in 1961, Gostas had been a German language interpreter in Europe prior to deploying to Vietnam. He had only ten days left in his tour. Gostas’ assistant, Sgt. Donald Rander, a thirty-year-old New Yorker, had been drafted in 1961 as a military policeman before switching to counterintelligence. Also captured: Sgt. Edward Dierling, a Vietnamese linguist from New Jersey and Sgt. Robert Hayhurst, a 23-year-old Wisconsin athlete who had enlisted in 1966.
The four men joined fifteen other captives for a ten-mile march to a temporary camp near Phu Bai, where they stayed for two weeks. Gostas, ill and injured, was left behind as the others marched barefoot to another camp in North Vietnam. Along the way, Hayhurst and Dierling seized an opportunity to escape. Rander and Gostas, however, remained prisoners in a succession of North Vietnamese camps, the last being the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.” Gostas spent nearly his entire period of incarceration in solitary confinement. He recalled being severely beaten, hung from a rope for extended periods, and often denied water and rations. Rander was also subjected to inhumane and brutal treatment. During interrogations, he responded to questions about American military commanders with names from the 1951 Brooklyn Dodgers’ roster.
After the signing of the Paris peace accords in January 1973, the U.S. and North Vietnam agreed to a mass release of all POWs. Repatriation of American military POWs was known as Operation HOMECOMING. As early as November 1972, American prisoners presumed the war was ending when North Vietnamese guards began allowing prisoners to socialize and provided additional rations and medical treatment to try to disguise the brutal treatment inflicted upon them.
After 1,871 days in captivity, on March 16, 1973, Gostas was released. Promoted to major, he became an equal opportunity officer until medically retiring in 1977. In 1974, he authored and illustrated the book Prisoner to raise money to fund scholarships for children of indigent veterans. Rander was released eleven days after Gostas. Promoted to CWO3 during his incarceration, he served ten more years as an active duty CI officer and then another twenty in the Army’s Military Intelligence Civilian Excepted Career Program. He died on April 21, 2005, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
| Date Taken: | 03.16.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 03.16.2022 11:37 |
| Story ID: | 416563 |
| Location: | FORT HUACHUCA, ARIZONA, US |
| Web Views: | 304 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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