Whipped Cream Difficulties

Col. Robert L. Stirm (USAF – ret.). He was 92.

You may not recognize the name, but you probably recognize the photo.

That’s his 15-year old daughter Lorrie in front. His wife is wearing the corsage. The photographer, Slava Veder, won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography.

His will to survive as a P.O.W., he later said, was built on memories of his domestic life and the hope of returning one day to his family. Those thoughts sustained him after he was shot down and forced to eject from his F-105 Thunderchief during a bombing mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 27, 1967, and they continued to sustain him in prison camps, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was starved, tortured and subjected to mock executions.
He held the rank of major at the time he was taken prisoner and was eventually elevated to colonel. He was among 591 American prisoners of war released as part of Operation Homecoming after the Paris Peace Accords ended the United States involvement in the Vietnam War.

The photo sort of hides what was really going on.

Three days before he landed at Travis Air Force Base, he was handed what he described as a “Dear John” letter from his wife.
“I have changed drastically — forced into a situation where I finally had to grow up,” his wife of 18 years wrote. “Bob, I feel sure that in your heart you know we can’t make it together — and it doesn’t make sense to be unhappy when you can do something about it. Life is too short.”
“I love you — we all love you,” she continued, “but you must remember how very unhappy we were together.”

Her daughter says she had an affair while Col. Strim was in captivity.

Despite the painful letter to her husband, Loretta Stirm offered to try to make her marriage work, her daughter said.

They divorced in 1974.

Colonel Stirm kept several copies of the picture autographed by Mr. Veder, but, while his children displayed them, he did not.

…

He said little about Vietnam after returning home, Ms. Stirm Kitching said, but he told a story about a fellow P.O.W., John S. McCain, the Navy pilot and future U.S. senator, who told a joke by tapping on the wall in code to Colonel Stirm in an adjacent cell. “My dad said it was the first time he laughed in jail,” she said, adding, “I wish I knew the joke.”

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