Photo By Jorge Garcia | Staff, faculty and the Corps of Cadets filled the West Point Club Grand Ballroom to...... read more read more
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Bracing For Impact
On July 3, 1972, Marion Tony Marshall was a captain and a co-pilot in the Air Force on his 266th combat flying mission in southeast Asia. He and an unnamed pilot flew over North Vietnam in an F-4 Phantom II aircraft.
During the Vietnam War, the Air Force suffered the highest aircraft losses, with adversaries gunning down 382 F-4s. Including other operational losses, 445 F-4s in total had fallen. Moreover, the Navy and Marines combined put the number at 671 fallen F-4s, according to Air & Space Force Magazine.
At the time, Marshall had no idea he would forever be linked to those grim statistics.
"My pilot was known to be a maverick," Marshall explained. "... on the last pass, it's surmised he was going down to strafe, which is to shoot the (enemy) target up with the gun. I told him before the flight not to do it. He went ahead and did it anyway, even though he said he wouldn't."
The two Airmen were orbiting while marking their targets. The enemy personnel below them were armed with 2,000-pound bombs.
"We were going to take the target out, but why would you want to lead the assault with an (M-61 Vulcan) 20-millimeter gatling gun? Because he liked shooting the gun," Marshall said. "That was his downfall. He had said he would never be taken alive. The tape we had shows us going down. We should have pulled up after a rocket hit the ground calling corrections off smoke."
He was still proceeding downhill, so Marshall had to assume the pilot was going down and straight to the target.
"Now, he didn't have time to tell me he was going to pull the handles, and like an idiot, I was in the back (cockpit) changing the roll of film, not paying attention," Marshall said. "So next thing I know, I heard something explode, which was my canopy leaving the airplane."
The pilot was forced to eject and leave the airplane. Otherwise, he and Marshall would have caught fire in his cockpit.
He remembered a flash of white as he and the pilot ejected out of the cockpits while hearing and feeling the jolting impact of the explosion.
The U.S. military personnel who reviewed the tape and audio of the crash figured the pilot and Marshall were falling at 550 knots at an altitude of 3,500 feet.
It all happened within a split second. Marshall immediately went into shock. Then, within the short span of ejecting from the cockpit and landing on the ground, he felt he had an out-of-body experience.
"The next thing I know there's six or seven guys with AK-47s pointed at me." Marshall said. "So I gave up, and they ended up playing with the zippers and velcro tape on my flight suit because they had never seen those things. They had never seen a black man."
Unsung heroes paving the way
Silence filled the West Point Club’s Grand Ballroom as Marshall continued to tell his story to an audience of staff, faculty and the Corps of Cadets during the annual Black History Month Observance on Feb. 16 at the U.S. Military Academy. This observance runs through the entire month of February and celebrates African Americans' contributions to our nation.
"Black history is important, but we should celebrate forgotten history, which is predominantly black history," Marshall said. "... There are many aspects of history that have been forgotten because the winners write the history and whether it's a combative or economic war, whoever writes the history tends to forget and overlook many people."
Marshall addressed our forgotten history, mentioning names such as Eugene Bullard, who distinguished himself by becoming the first black military pilot and the only black pilot who fought during World War I.
Bessie Coleman was the first African-American woman to hold a pilot's license and the first African American to receive an international pilot's license.
"When Eugene Bullard came back (to America), they wouldn't let him join the Air Force for years and years then you got Alfred "Chief" Anderson (known as the father of black aviation), Bessie Coleman and the Tuskegee Airmen, you know blacks can't fly," Marshall said sarcastically.
Marshall added that the lack of African-American contributions to the country was felt not only in the history books but also in films.
"When Patton was giving his speech to the Third Army at the beginning of the movie, historically, there was a bunch of black troops in the Third Army, but there are no blacks in the movie except for one guy who was his valet. There were no blacks in Saving Private Ryan, the Longest Day--none of those films--we're just forgotten."
Growing up in Washington D.C., there were no heroes or heroines in books or on television that looked like him. Yet, the DC comic book character, Superman, would inspire his fervent desire to one day take flight and protect the nation. Moreover, his mother and others in his community would also serve as the leading men and women he'd aspire to emulate.
He recalled his teachers at Frederick Douglass High School who were all incredibly professional and great role models.
"All my teachers gained my respect. They showed me what it was like to be a positive black role model. So, I grew up wanting to be like them," Marshall said. "Even though I didn't want to be a teacher, I took their examples of character."
Marshall would often hang out in Mrs. Rich's classroom. She was a reading teacher with a kind disposition who left a profound impression on him. Every day she would teach him the meaning of a new word.
"I was in there one day, and a kid came in and said, 'Mrs. Rich, I don't have lunch money.' She reached for her pocketbook, had $1 left and gave it to the kid. I said, 'you just gave him your last dollar. Aren't you worried about this?' She says, 'if I need it, somebody will give it to me.' An example of pay it forward,” Marshall said.
His mother, a single parent with a strong-willed attitude, was the guiding force in his life.
"Her words to me about flying were 'if God had meant for you to fly, he'd given you wings and if you know what I know, you'll stay your butt on the ground,'" Marshall said. "But she took me to airports and she let me build airplanes."
Despite her statements about Marshall's ambitions, she encouraged Marshall's passion for planes and would later, in secret, impact his decision to serve in the Air Force.
Marshall wrote to members of Congress to enroll in the U.S. Air Force Academy. They answered him. The Congressman at large invited him to an interview, and he was accepted to the academy.
"… I patted myself on the back for years. 'Boy, you did good,’” he said.
Years after his mother passed away, his sister finally revealed the humbling truth.
"My sister said, 'you want to know how you really got that nomination?' She said the Congressman at large was at dinner at one of the families my mother worked for," Marshall explained. "They and my mother put in a good word to give me an interview."
Life at the U.S. Air Force Academy
One of the questions that Marshall was asked during the interview for his nomination was, "how were you going to handle prejudice at the academy."
"My response was, 'everyone at the academy would be so busy dealing with the discipline and academics they wouldn't have time to worry about it," Marshall said.
That was the case for the most part. However, there were three individuals who went out of their way to let him know that he did not belong there and he would not make it, but they were in the minority and fairly easy to avoid.
His friends came from places where they had never been around black people or minorities, and one of the more telling moments was when a cadet told Marshall, "we're great, we're super friends, but I can't take you home. My parents are just ... different."
Marshall understood that is the way their parents grew up, that's what they believed in and they were not going to change.
Marshall had other issues. At one point, he almost 'flunked out' the first semester because he didn't know how to study.
"After I almost flunked out, I figured out how to study, and that was going to bed at nine o'clock, so you're not sleeping in class," Marshall said. "The next semester, they brought in Charlie, who was country born from Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and he was also struggling in class. So I passed good study habits on to him. He started going to bed at nine o'clock. His grades raised. After I helped Charlie, his daddy wanted to adopt me."
Marshall had many roommates and friends who were from the south and some of them did not allow their friendship to go beyond the academy. "They said I couldn't meet with their parents because his daddy would kill both of us," Marshall added.
But Charlie was different. Charlie saw through racial barriers and developed a close relationship with Marshall.
"When Charlie was about to get married, he was getting married to Bonnie, she was from deep Mississippi. She was very pleasant when she came out for the visit, but she went home and told the townsfolk that Charlie wanted me to be in the wedding, they said, not only 'no' but 'hell no,'" Marshall said. "Charlie said if I was not at the wedding. There's not going to be a wedding and that was our bond. When I went down there for the wedding, everybody in town knew who I was and they had agreed to be nice."
After enduring four years of academic hurdles, some race relations and discrimination challenges, Marshall was finally commissioned into the Air Force as a second lieutenant in 1968.
"It was absolutely one of the most rewarding experiences ever," Marshall said.
Four years would pass, and Marshall ranked up to captain, deployed to Vietnam, and found himself in one of the most perilous situations he had ever faced.
Surviving the fall, overcoming the odds
Marshall was standing on a hillside watching his fellow pilot use the radio, trying to contact headquarters about the crash.
Seven Vietnamese soldiers emerged from the jungle flora with AK-47s and Vietnamese pith helmets.
"That's the end of my fight. Of course, they're very nervous because they don't know what I'm gonna do," Marshall said during an interview at the Library of Congress. "... Through sign language, I take the vest off, I take the gun off of me. Somehow I still, to this day, don't know how I convinced them that it was not loaded."
Once the captors stripped Marshall of the flight suit, there was no hostility. While the captors apprehended him, Marshall's mind went blank.
“I was in total shock. I was not expecting this. The brain just says, 'take a nap, and I'll wake you up when you're ready,’” Marshall explained. “I don't remember because we left Da Nang at two o'clock p.m. We get shut down at six. I don't remember those four hours. I don't remember the three hours on the ground after the initial crash.”
The next thing Marshall remembered was waking up in an underground bunker. His arms were tied at the elbow behind his back and he had nothing on but his underwear and a T-shirt. He shouted a four-letter word that summed up his situation when the realization hit him.
He shouted the word loud enough that someone heard it. The beam from a flashlight lit up the tunnel Marshall was in, and the Vietnamese soldier motioned for Marshall to follow him.
"'You blew it,'" Marshall thought. "You are as far as you can get from home geographically. Nobody really knows what happened to you and they're going to shoot you."
That thought angered Marshall as he pushed his body toward the Vietnamese soldier. All he could hear and feel were brass cartridges.
"The thing that made me mad was that nobody would know that I had survived the ejection and how I died. And even worse, nobody can do anything about it," Marshall said. "I was out there on my own, and was a very empty feeling."
However, the captors did not harm him. Instead, they saw Marshall and his black skin as a novelty and kept him alive.
Marshall spent five days marching to Hanoi.
During that time, he began strategizing and thinking of ways to escape.
"My first instinct was to escape. They had the radio, they had the boots, but I'm getting out of here," Marshall thought.
Before arriving in Hanoi, the Vietnamese troops stopped at an undisclosed location where they incarcerated Marshall in a straw hut.
"I decided I was leaving at night," he said. "They did the initial interrogation during the day and we sat outside. We ran inside when the air raids came. The little guard out there didn't speak much English but whenever the air raid sounded, he would say 'Nixon come,' and when it was clear, 'Nixon go.'"
Marshall added that the Vietnamese troops had an efficient system of using cowbells to warn others of an air raid.
They would ring their cowbells from hilltop to hilltop until it reached their base of operations. Usually, the sound of the ringing traveled faster than the aircraft.
Throughout the day, Marshall spent hours answering a series of questions during his interrogation.
That night, the captors placed Marshall in his room, where he slept on a board with straw matting. Finding comfort in his sleeping arrangements was the least of his worries, for he wasn't planning on staying there for too long.
He realized that when he looked outside the window and saw a canal across the road that he had a chance to escape.
"I was going to get in the canal and work my way down and I was assuming a river was down there. I couldn't see it but it had to be down there," Marshall thought. "I was going to swim out to the (U.S.) Seventh Fleet."
However, about an hour later, the captors came in with leg irons. They bound his ankles and left the hut. Marshall laid his back on the mat, thinking of plan B, however, after 15 minutes, his bones began to ache. He tried turning his body over, but the six-foot steel rod between the leg irons made that a painstaking process.
"The best I could do is have my feet horizontal and turn over on my side. I did five minutes of that and I'm back the other way," Marshall said. "Every time I did that, the clanking woke them up. So they came in and took the leg irons off – back to plan A."
But there was no plan A or B. Something happened that even Marshall did not expect.
First, a few things should be taken into account: Marshall survived a plane crash, was captured as a prisoner of war, got stripped down to his underwear, did not know where his fellow Airman was located, was filled with mental anguish at the thought of possibly being executed, and was constantly figuring out ways to escape.
So it is no surprise that when it came time to execute plan A, he simply overslept and awoke at 9 a.m. on a Sunday.
"I blew it. I started rationalizing. They'd figured I was going to do it, but I didn't do it. Now they're relaxed. I can do it tonight," Marshall said. "I had a nice quiet day. I ate, got my bearings and went to bed. I was ready to go. Then, they came in and said, 'lets go' and we got in the truck and headed off and there went my chance."
Three days passed, and Marshall sat outside beside the Vietnamese soldier guarding him. Another soldier tears ran past Marshall and his guard heading inside a building. Marshall looked in and watched as Vietnam troops conversed with a sense of desperation. The soldier ran back out and returns with a senior leader who orders Marshall's guard to bring him in. The guard grabbed Marshall by his collar — they all ran inside. After a few words with his boss, the guard took Marshall to the back room, which was filled with survival equipment. The guard sat Marshall down, brought his index finger to his lips, to silence him, and made a throat-slitting gesture with his finger, silently stating, 'or you will die.'
"We sat there. Then, 10 minutes later, the door burst open and about 10 male voices came in a very excited conversation," Marshall explained. "What I surmise is some of the villagers have found out I was there. They wanted to take out their frustrations on me and the militia were protecting me."
Eventually, the villagers’ hostility simmered down and there was even a point when the captors used Marshall to promote that Vietnam was winning the war.
“Every day they would bring me out, get all the women and kids out there and give them a big rallying speech telling the villagers how good they were doing and that they're winning the war," Marshall said. "Then he looks to me and says, 'you know they hate you because you killed their brothers, fathers and their sons.”
The only villagers that could get close to Marshall were older women.
"This one old lady with the beetle black teeth and a sickle in her hand was looking at my face and it was very difficult to maintain my composure," Marshall added.
Despite the rising tensions, Marshall, over time, adjusted to the regimented conditions imposed upon him.
It even reached the point where Marshall felt he could risk outwitting, withholding information, and lying to the senior leaders.
During one interrogation, Marshall decided to see how far he could take it.
"What was your mission," the interrogator asked.
"To take pictures," Marshall responded.
Then, the interrogator caught Marshall in a lie about the number of squadrons at his base.
"Then he asked me, 'who's your wing commander?'"
He gave the interrogator the name of an Airman who had completed a tour a month prior and returned home.
“The guy pulled a list and said, 'you're doing OK, now,’” Marshall said. “We went on like that. So I got a feel for what he knew, what I could get away with. And I said, Well, I'm a combat photographer. This is my first mission. I really don't know anything.”
After some time, the interrogation was finally over, and that's when Marshall started building a rapport with the interrogator.
"We were pretty well done with the interrogation and they started talking about Angela Davis and how they really admire her, and said ‘I've got a girlfriend who looks exactly like Angela Davis,’” Marshall added.
The captors were intrigued because in their society, their parents chose the spouse. They did not have girlfriends.
“I invented 14 different girlfriends by name," Marshall said. "I got bored with that story and I created a wife and a child."
His mother sent him a picture of his goddaughter before the crash. The captors presumed that the photo corroborated his story about having a child.
"When they released me, they gave me my wedding ring, even though I was single. The story behind that is they were anal about record keeping," Marshall explained. "If there was a crash site, they gathered up the shoe laces, photos, the teeth, everything they could put them in a warehouse in Hanoi. When they released me they went to that warehouse, pulled out my things and the last story I told him was I was married. So they said here's your wedding ring. It turns out it was my pilot's.”
It was presumed that the pilot was shot due to no records of him ever returning home.
"They gave me his wedding ring and the curious thing was they never came back and said, 'this doesn't jive with what you said yesterday.’ They never did. And I was really shocked when they handed me the wedding ring because I didn't let on. I just took it," Marshall said.
From July 3, 1972, to March 29, 1973, Marshall was held captive as a POW.
It would only take 50 years for his story to find its way to West Point and leave a profound impression on the cadets in the audience.
“I appreciate him coming in and being a role model, being so transparent and vulnerable with us. Because at the end of the day, he was a leader to Airmen and he went through his own experiences and he could have kept those to himself because those are his experiences,” Class of 2025 Cadet Elijah Banks said. “But he decided to put himself on a pedestal and allow us to learn and then pass on his story and then emulate what he did with the future generations.”
Marshall went on to enjoy a storied career in the Air Force and retired as a lieutenant colonel.
“If I had to do it all over again, I would do it exactly the same,” Marshall concluded. “I wouldn't change a thing.”
| Date Taken: | 02.23.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 03.03.2023 11:58 |
| Story ID: | 439641 |
| Location: | WEST POINT, NEW YORK, US |
| Web Views: | 562 |
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