SMITH, WAYNE OGDEN
Name:Wayne Ogden Smith Rank/Branch: United States Air Force/O2 Unit: Date of Birth: 10 August 1943 Home City of Record: Largo FL Date of Loss: 18 January 1968 Country of Loss: North Vietnam Loss Coordinates: 211800 North 1061200 East Status (in 1973): Returnee Category: Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: F4D Missions: Other Personnel in Incident: Refno:
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA families, published sources, interviews.
REMARKS: 730314 RELEASED BY DRV
SOURCE: WE CAME HOME copyright 1977 Captain and Mrs. Frederic A Wyatt (USNR Ret), Barbara Powers Wyatt, Editor P.O.W. Publications, 10250 Moorpark St., Toluca Lake, CA 91602 Text is reproduced as found in the original publication (including date and spelling errors).
WAYNE OGDEN SMITH
Captain - United States Air Force
Shot Down: January 18, 1968
Released: March 14, 1973
BIOGRAPHY: Captain Wayne O. Smith was born on 10 August 1943 and attended high school in Louisville, Kentucky, then entered the US Air Force Academy in the summer of 1961 and graduated in June 1965. He attended pilot training at Moody AFB, Valdosta, Georgia and was awarded his wings in September 1966 with class 67-B. He spent his first operational assignment with the 33rd Tactical Fighter Wing at Eglin AFB, Florida. While there he married his pretty brunette wife, Margaret Jean Frazier of Dunedin, Florida. He deployed with his squadron of F-4Ds to Ubon, Thailand in July 1967 and after 69 combat missions over North Vietnam, he was shot down on 18 January 1968.
Captain Smith is now residing with his wife, Jean, in Clearwater, Florida. They have no children (a temporary situation, assures Captain Smith). For the moment they are accompanied by their two happy toy poodles, "Jolie" and "Snooper." Captain Smith has not made any firm decisions concerning his future career. "About my future," he said, "I made one decision while I was in North Vietnam, and that was not to make any firm decisions until I could investigate every opportunity and then, with the help of my wife, decide. My goal is happiness and satisfaction that comes with accomplishment."
MESSAGE: As many other returned POWs may tell you, I do not believe my long detention in North Vietnam was a complete loss. My greatest gain was a new appreciation for the things in life we usually take for granted. Freedom, first of all, is really a very precious thing. I feel I learned a great deal about human nature and myself especially, under trying circumstances. I also became aware of my spiritual needs as a prisoner. Without references to knowledge or facts, I was forced to assess my total accumulation of knowledge and I became aware of how small this sum was. We picked each other's brains to quench our thirst for knowledge but could never really be confident of our facts. Now, in my second shot at life, I will attempt, through books and/or educational institutions, to fill the many holes and answer the many questions I could not answer as a prisoner of war.
Now that I have returned I am continuing to learn a great deal as a result of our tragic circumstances. I can now better appreciate what the wives of the POWs and MlAs have gone through. Words cannot express my gratitude and respect for their support and efforts while we were being detained, as well as my gratitude and respect for all the fine Americans who were so genuinely concerned. I have received letters from people I do not know and from children who probably can't really comprehend what a POW is. Some letters I can't finish reading without tears welling in my eyes. There are so many wonderful Americans in this country and now I am learning from them.
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Wayne and his family currently reside in IA. ---------------------------------------------
Posted on: Monday, 31 July 2006, 03:00 CDT
'Hanoi Hilton' Memories: EX-POW RECOUNTS CODE THAT KEPT PRISONERS' SPIRITS HIGH By Greg Kocher, The Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Jul. 31--The numbers and alphabet that Wayne Ogden Smith learned as a student in Richmond became instrumental in keeping his sanity during five years and two months as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
While a POW at the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" -- the same prison that held John McCain, now a U.S. senator from Arizona -- Smith tapped messages to prisoners in neighboring cells as a means of communication.
"It was a 24-hour-a-day exercise," Smith said in a phone interview from his Naples, Fla., home. "We tapped a huge amount of knowledge through those walls. The key was, we wanted to make sure that we ... leaned on each other and kept our spirits up. We wanted to make sure that we were positive. Your well-being was the first order of business."
Now a retired corporate executive, Smith, 62, will return to Richmond this week to be the keynote speaker for the Kentucky Veterans Welcome Home, an event that invites veterans to partake of four days of entertainment, military displays and recognition.
"Welcome home" will have special significance for Smith. It will be his first trip to Madison County since his grandfather's funeral in 1967.
Smith grew up on his maternal grandparents' farm outside Richmond, near Lake Reba. His father had abandoned the family when Wayne was 2; his mother worked at JCPenney.
Smith and his sister attended the Training School at Eastern Kentucky State Teachers' College, the forerunner of today's Model Laboratory School at Eastern Kentucky University.
After attending grades 1 through 8 in Richmond, the family moved to Louisville, where Smith graduated from Eastern High School in 1961.
He went through pilot training at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Ga., graduating a few years before George W. Bush.
Smith had flown 21 missions over Laos, and was on his 69th mission over North Vietnam when he was shot down on Jan. 16, 1968. He ejected from the plane and landed in a tree 12 feet off the ground and about 25 miles outside of Hanoi.
He was initially interrogated and beaten in the French-built prison, Hoa Lo, which the POWs had nicknamed "the Hanoi Hilton." Later he was blindfolded and taken to a location known as "the Plantation," where he was put into solitary confinement.
"That's when you became pretty depressed and feeling sorry for yourself," Smith said. "I heard this scratching on the wall but I couldn't make out what it was."
Some weeks later he was moved to a location known as "the Warehouse." He was put in a windowless 8-by-10 room with a wooden door and small peephole, one hanging lightbulb and brick walls covered with plaster. A 5-gallon bucket was the bathroom.
He found a way to relay notes with the bucket. He was given the job of dumping the contents into a cesspool, and switched lids to send notes to other prisoners. The pencil-scratched notes were written on coarse toilet paper, then folded and stuffed into the lids.
It was also in this location that he was given the key to the scratching and tapping. A fellow prisoner yelled to him through a common drain, "Hey, new guy! Tap code: Five rows, five columns, C and K are the same."
The taps were based on dividing the alphabet into five columns with A, F, L, Q and V the key letters.
Prisoners would tap once for the five letters in the A column, twice for the letters in the F column, and so on. After indicating the column, they would pause for a beat, then tap one through five times to indicate the right letter.
To tap the name "Wayne," for example, would be 5-2, 1-1, 5-4, 3-3 and 1-5.
"We could use that with a lot of variations," Smith said. "The most bizarre one was in a place where they didn't have any adjoining walls so they had a hard time communicating through the walls."
The guards were always coughing and hacking, so the prisoners used coughing, spitting and sneezing as a form of communication.
Messages typically ended with "GBU," for "God bless you." To communicate that meant two coughs-two coughs for "G," two coughs for "B," and a wretching as though trying to hack up expectorant for "U."
"We had our own little shorthand," Smith said.
"What we did later was like going from the telegraph to the Internet. Somebody discovered that if you put your little tin cup up against the wall, you could yell through that cup and it had such a muffled sound that the guards couldn't hear you. So we could actually talk through it.
"I still have my cup today. And it's got all these little holes in it. And that made it not functional, so I had to take some rubber from my shoes and stuff them in the holes so I could use it to drink with."
Communication was not only restorative to the soul of a lonely prisoner. It was important for other reasons.
"We had to make sure that we had memory banks of all those who were known alive. We had to memorize all the names and their conditions, in case any of us made it back," he said.
Smith was finally released on March 14, 1973, having spent 1,882 days in captivity. His captors gave him a pair of trousers, shoes and a little jacket and put him on a bus to an airport.
"They read off our names and an airman grabbed me by the arm and escorted me up the ramp," Smith said. "The engines never stopped. We were pretty subdued at that point. I don't know why. All the people in crisp uniforms were thrilled and shaking hands and all that.
"But I tell you, it didn't really become reality until the plane left Vietnam and went over the Gulf of Tonkin, and the captain came over the intercom and said, 'Feet wet, gentlemen. Welcome home.' And then there was this roar" of jubilation.
"Feet wet" was a phrase that meant you were over water and no guns were shooting at you, Smith said.
After the war, Smith was a pilot for Eastern Airlines. He joined Air Products and Chemicals and held a number of executive assignments around the country over 16 years.
He became president of B.F. Goodrich Chemicals, and retired in 1999 as executive vice president of MidAmerican Energy, a company later bought by billionaire Warren Buffett.
Today, Smith keeps busy with various community boards and activities in Naples, where he lives with his wife, Jean. His son, Shawn, and daughter, Shannon, live nearby.
He has never returned to Vietnam.
"I don't have any nightmares about it," he said. "I think when I talk about it it's therapy. I don't think there is any such thing as a normal person. We're all abnormal; it's just a matter of degree. So I think for those who were relatively stable, it probably strengthens you. And for those who were pretty unstable it had the opposite effect."
Reach Greg Kocher in the Nicholasville bureau at (859) 885-5775 or gkocher1@herald-leader.com [mailto:gkocher1@herald-leader.com].
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