Former Pilot Shares Experience As Pow Motivational Speaker Taps Harrowing Five Years In Vietnam To Inspire Others

Dave Carey stood in the middle of the rice paddy, a crowd of armed North Vietnamese rushing toward him. He expected to be a dead man.

It was early morning on Aug. 31, 1963, and Carey, an A-4 pilot, had been on his way to bomb a railroad bridge near Haiphong when he was hit by a surface-to-air missile.

“I zigged when I should have zagged and the missile took the tail off my airplane,” Carey said.

Unable to control his craft, he ejected and parachuted into a small village.

So began more than five years as a prisoner of war, which he describes as “hours and hours of boredom interspersed with moments of sheer terror.”

Carey, 55, has turned his horrible experience into something positive. He travels the country giving motivational talks to corporations and other organizations. Carey will be speaking at the 8:30 and 11 a.m. worship services Sunday at First Presbyterian Church, 318 S. Cedar.

Other pilots saw Carey land safely, but there was nothing they could do.

“I talked to one of the guys who flew over,” Carey said. “It was a very short conversation. He said, ‘You know we cannot come get you.’ At which point I couldn’t think of anything clever to say and he said, ‘I’ll see you when this is all over,’ and he flew away.”

His captors tortured him initially to get tactical information, such as what locations in Hanoi would be targeted and when. When the pain got so bad he feared he’d go insane, he decided to hold out as long as he could, then lie.

“They’d ask me questions, and I’d make something up,” Carey said. When they asked him for names of men in his unit, he gave them the lineup of the Pittsburgh Pirates. They faithfully wrote the information down.

When they finally left him alone, it took him months to recover. “I couldn’t get up off the floor,” Carey said. “My arms didn’t work for months. I ate by just wiggling around on the floor and sticking my face in a bowl of rice.”

Carey was released during “Operation Homecoming” in 1973, but didn’t believe it when his captors first told him that he would be going home. “They had messed with us a lot,” Carey said.

Then one day he and his fellow prisoners were loaded into a truck and taken to the Hanoi airport, where an Air Force plane waited.

“All bedlam broke loose. When we took off it was the most euphoric, chaotic …” Carey paused, searching for the right words. “It was wonderful.”

Six months after his release, Carey returned to flying. He retired from the Navy in 1986 with the rank of captain and started his speaking career on the advice of friends who said he should talk about his experiences.

When he talks about being a prisoner of war, Carey doesn’t focus on the torture or the beatings, but on less horrifying moments.

“We had an entertainment schedule,” said Carey. He and his cellmates, usually about seven or eight, would hold meetings to plan their lineup.

“We always had 100 percent attendance at our meetings,” joked Carey. “We would talk about movies, movie stars, authors, books. You let slip you’d read a book, we’ll schedule you to tell us about the book. And we can do it whenever, next week, next month, six months from now, next year. We were into long-range planning.”

Carey sees his speaking as a catharsis.

“It’s been good for me and people seem to get something out of it. People just take a lot from it. They feel good. They get pumped up.

“It’s very rewarding.”