s President Lyndon Johnson addressed a national television audience from the White House shortly before midnight on Aug. 4, 1964, Navy pilot Everett Alvarez was being briefed for a mission on the USS Constellation. A few hours earlier Alvarez had flown above a chaotic situation in the Gulf of Tonkin that led to Johnson’s speech. A few hours later he was shot down on a bombing mission near Hanoi, the first U.S. aviator taken captive. He would ultimately be the second-longest-held POW, surviving years of solitary confinement and torture before his release on Feb. 12, 1973. After his retirement from the Navy, Alvarez served as deputy director of the Peace Corps and as deputy administrator of the VA before he founded his information technology company, Alvarez and Associates, in 2004. He recently spoke with Vietnam about his path to the Navy, his mission in the Tonkin Gulf, his capture and the perilous early days of his eight-year captivity in North Vietnam.
Your upbringing is something of an American success story isn’t it?
My parents grew up during the Depression, children of Mexican immigrants. My father had a sixth-grade education and mother only went through third grade. They married very young in Salinas, Calif. When Pearl Harbor happened, my father packed up our family and moved to San Francisco to work in the shipyards there. We moved back to Salinas in 1947. I was the first in my family to complete high school. I had to work hard at part-time jobs, so I learned a work ethic. I never really knew what I wanted to do in life, but I figured out what I didn’t want to do. I went into engineering at Santa Clara University and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.
Read Full Article »