Volume 21, Number 3 · March 7, 1974
On Colonel Risner
By Mary McCarthy
In Chapter XIX of The Passing of the Night, Colonel Risner describes a meeting with me in the Hanoi camp called the Plantation. This was on April 1, 1968—the day the bombing stopped over most of North Vietnam. I have spoken of the meeting in my book Hanoi. Two captured pilots were brought into a living-room to talk to me, one after the other. Risner was the first. In my text I said 'the second prisoner,' but that referred to the order in which I took them up: I started my account with quotations from the other pilot, much younger than Risner and eager to know how the Chicago Cubs were doing. He was a rather nice ordinary boy from an Irish Catholic background.
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