Duane W. Martin

Who was Duane W. Martin?

Duane Whitney Martin was an American Air Force officer and prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.

Martin was assigned to Detachment 1 38th Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Squadron, based at Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand. On September 20, 1965, Captain Thomas J. Curtis, Martin, Sergeant William A. Robinson crew chief, and Pararescue Specialist Arthur Black took off in their Kaman HH-43 Huskie BuNo 62-4510, callsign Dutchy 41 on a combat search and rescue mission for Essex 04, an F-105D piloted by Capt Willis E. Forby, over North Vietnam. The HH-43 was hit by ground fire and crashed in the jungle.

Curtis, Robinson, and Black were all captured by the North Vietnamese Army and taken to a POW camp in North Vietnam. They were later released during Operation Homecoming. Martin, on the other hand was captured by the Pathet Lao and taken to a POW camp in Laos. There, he joined fellow prisoners Eugene DeBruin, Pisidhi Indradat, Prasit Promsuwan, Prasit Dhanee, and Y.C. To. They were joined in February 1966 by Dieter Dengler.

On June 29, 1966, while the guards were eating, the group slipped out of their hand and foot restraints and grabbed the guard's unattended weapons. The Pathet Lao guards spotted some of the other prisoners trying to escape. Dieter fired at a machete wielding guard and Pisidhi Indradat killed the other guards. Indradat, in his own account, says he killed one guard as he reached for his rifle and says three in total were killed and the rest ran away. The seven prisoners split into three groups: Indradat, and the other Thai prisoners; DeBruin stayed with To, who had been too ill to continue with the escape; Dengler and Martin headed for the Mekong River to escape to Thailand.