David Baker POW pilot 1946-2009

[Michel]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/magazine/2009-lives-to-remember/baker.html
An Air Force captain cooked up a way to help fellow POWs survive the
Cambodian jungle
DAVID E. BAKER
1946-2009
On June 27, 1972, U.S. Air Force Capt. David E. Baker flew his O-2
Skymaster over Cambodia in an attack on North Vietnamese supply
stashes. As a forward air controller during this Vietnam War mission,
he traveled low and slow, marking targets and coordinating airstrikes
in his prop-driven plane.
The North Vietnamese, using a heat-seeking, shoulder-fired missile,
struck Baker's plane. He parachuted from the plummeting Skymaster only
to land amid enemy fire. Using the sole weapon he had on him, a .38
caliber pistol, he temporarily held off the opposing forces, finally
succumbing when a shot through his leg from an AK-47 perforated his
femoral artery.
"When we first saw him, he was in what I call a North Vietnamese
ambulance -- two bicycles with a vertical pole on each one, a hammock
slung between them and David in the hammock," says retired Army Capt.
George Wanat, who had been held with six other American soldiers in
five-by-seven foot tiger cages deep in the Cambodian jungle for
several months when Baker joined them. "We weren't allowed to talk or
signal anyone at that point. All I could do was give the thumbs up
when he made eye contact."
North Vietnamese medics had stemmed the arterial bleeding, Wanat
recalls, but Baker was clearly in agony. No one expected him to
survive. After five months of captivity in isolation, Wanat and Baker
were moved into the same cage. "It was like heaven," Wanat recalls.
Forget the cramped space, the leaky leaf roof, the inadequate bamboo-
and-gourd that served as a toilet, and the triple canopy jungle that
blocked the sky. "I hadn't talked to anybody in five months. It was
great. We just started talking and didn't stop talking for the next
five months."
The seven Americans knew they were probably being kept alive as pawns
who might be traded in a prisoner exchange, Wanat said, but conditions
were brutal: "We were on a Russian prison diet, with just enough
calories to keep us alive. Barely."
They subsisted on meager portions of rice and pork fat and were always
starving. "You would think of food before you would think of your
loved ones because you were so hungry all the time," he said.
So a game developed. Baker, whose father was a gourmet chef and who
was a good cook himself, made up menus.
"I'd call over to his cage in the afternoon and say, 'Dave, what are
we having for dinner?' " recalls fellow POW Sgt. Ken Wallingford, who
is retired from the Army and lives in Texas. "He'd go into a long
dissertation about how we were having this for an appetizer and that
for a main course and this for dessert."
"It was beef Wellington and brie cheese and fine wine," recalls Wanat.
"Every afternoon, these exotic menus." Sometimes, Baker recited from
memory the menu from the Old Homestead Diner near where he lived in
Huntington, Long Island.
The monologues distracted and sustained them, Wallingford says. "He
was encouraging us, 'Let's fantasize for a few minutes, guys, about
what we could have in the real world.' "
After the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the prisoners were released.
Baker's calf had swelled to the size of a football, and he still could
not walk, so the six American POWs used a makeshift stretcher crafted
of bamboo and a blanket to carry him down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the
release point miles away in Loc Ninh, Vietnam.
Baker, who had joined the Air Force in 1969 and trained as a pilot at
Webb Air Force Base in Big Spring, Tex., remained in the service and
continued to fly. Before retiring in 1997, he became the only Vietnam
War-era POW to fly missions in the Persian Gulf War.
After Baker died last Jan. 29 of congestive heart failure at age 62,
the men who had survived with him in the jungle of Cambodia reunited
for the first time in 36 years. But on May 13 last year, it was a
horse-drawn caisson that carried Baker, as the surviving POWs walked
with him in the bright sunlight of Arlington National Cemetery.
"It was so important for us five remaining prisoners to come to his
funeral and symbolically walk behind the caisson to the burial site,"
Wallingford says. "Because we carried him out of the jungle, we are
going to carry him to his last resting place." One of the men came
from as far away as Thailand.
Buried along with Baker was a memory box containing the POW bracelet
Florida resident Judy Sanchez wore during Baker's imprisonment and had
recently sent to him, along with the prison "pajamas" he wore
throughout his captivity.
Baker's wife, Carol, his two grown sons and 7-year-old granddaughter
were joined by more than 200 friends and colleagues, whom Baker had
befriended at his military postings all over the world, as a defense
analyst for various financial firms, and as a longtime Mitchellville
resident.
Afterward, the five POWs gathered at the officers' club and toasted
their friend over an elegant dinner of fish, roast beef, dips and
cheeses. He would have approved of the spread.