Kenneth Coskey, 83; former Navy pilot, Vietnam War POW
WASHINGTON — Kenneth L. Coskey, a retired Navy captain and aircraft pilot who spent five years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, died June 29 at the Avalon assisted living facility in McLean, Va., where he had lived for the last four months. He was 83.
He had Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Rosemary.
According to the Naval Historical Foundation, a nonprofit group he once helped lead, Commander Coskey was flying a night reconnaissance mission off the aircraft carrier America on Sept. 6, 1968, when his A-6A Intruder was shot down over North Vietnam.
He ejected from the aircraft and landed in thick brush, twisting a knee. He later told the Baltimore Sun that he had a broken kneecap and was beaten by villagers before being taken to Hanoi and imprisoned. He spent a year and a half in solitary confinement.
‘‘I was hungry more than anything and lonely,’’ he told the Sun in 1997, ‘‘but mostly hungry.’’ He grimly called himself a ‘‘junior member’’ of the captives he met. Floyd Thompson, who spent nine years as a prisoner in Vietnam, is widely acknowledged as the longest-serving American prisoner of war.
Commander Coskey was released with 590 other Americans in Operation Homecoming in the spring of 1973.
Commander Coskey’s medals included the Legion of Merit with combat ‘‘V,’’ three Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts.
According to the citation for the third Bronze Star, during the years when he was a POW, Commander Coskey, ‘‘through his ceaseless efforts, in an atmosphere of enemy harassment, threat of torture, and brutal treatment . . . established and maintained intracamp communications. At great risk and in spite of further cruelty, he continued to devise many unusual and ingenious methods in communications, resulting in American and Allied prisoners resisting the enemy’s demands and at the same time improving the prisoners’ morale.’
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