Wife of fighter pilot in VietNam by Mike Hastie

The Wife of a fighter pilot
in Viet Nam


by Mike Hastie

I met this woman when I spoke at a private college near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 2008. She came up to me and talked about her husband having been a Navy fighter pilot during the Viet Nam War. He had two tours in Viet Nam. When he came back from Viet Nam the second time, he was very depressed. A couple of his fellow pilots had committed suicide as a result of their guilt in the targets they hit in Viet Nam. Her husband told her some similar stories about his own guilt, and shame. At the time they had a son who was a couple of years old, and she was pregnant again.

One day before her second child was born, her husband walked out of the house and never came home. She never heard from him again. For years she tried to locate him, even hired a private detective. No one in her husband's family ever heard from him again. He disappeared in the early 1970s. By 2008, he had been missing for 35 years.

Toward the end of the Viet Nam War, some B-52 pilots refused to go on bombing missions, because they knew they would be killing innocent people. I have a Viet Nam veteran friend who had a job giving bombing coordinates to B-52 pilots when they were on their bombing missions. When he finally realized the pilots were bombing civilian targets, he walked into his commanding officer's office, and told him his tour of duty in Viet Nam was officially over.

The military threatened him with jail and court martial. He still refused to do his insane job of helping kill innocent people. He was eventually sent to an Army hospital back in the U.S. and treated on a psychiatric ward. Can you imagine, the military put him on a psychiatric ward because he was severally depressed about not wanting to kill innocent people. Eventually, he was discharged from the military for mental health reasons. ( The military's opinion. ) In reality, the U.S. Government should have been on that psychiatric ward, because they were a threat to mankind. It is a great truth that has great silence.



Mike Hastie
Viet Nam Veteran
September 7, 2018
Full Disclosure


Please visit the Vietnam Full Disclosure website.