It is Hanoi, 1966. These flickering black-and-white images, preserved on video, are a time capsule from a world locked in a "cold war" that lasted half a century, and at the center of each frame of film is a crew-cut young man from Louisiana, his badly broken left arm dangling awkwardly in an improvised sling. He is a long way from home and wonders if he would be better off dead. Standing on the bed of a Soviet army truck, he is surrounded by boys in uniform carrying rifles. His face is bruised, and blood flows from gashes on his head. Towering over his shorter captors, he ducks bricks and rocks thrown by the crowd but still tries to hold himself like an American officer and pilot. A press conference waits at the end of the truck ride, and the glaring lights of television cameras will be the closest he comes to seeing daylight for the next 143 days. He doesn’t know it yet, but for Murphy Neal Jones, now a prisoner of war, freedom is another six-and-one-half years away.

We’re going to have a good year this year," Neal Jones says with a booming voice.

Jones is upbeat about Tulane football’s spring recruiting prospects after its undefeated 1998 season. "We’ve got two quarterbacks we’re talking to who look really good. This one kid from West Virginia is unbelievable."

With his silver hair, outgoing manner and linebacker’s build, Jones (A&S ’60) looks every inch a former athlete turned director of development for Tulane athletics. A native of Baton Rouge, Jones was a two-way standout for Tulane from 1957 to 1960, playing nearly every minute of some games as starting center and linebacker. While his teammates included other stars–Richie Petitbon (BBA ’60) and Tommy Mason (A&S ’61), for example–the Green Wave often played in the shadow of Louisiana State University, led by Jones’ high school football rival, 1959 Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. But with or without a championship season, football gave Jones and his teammates the highlights of their college days and lessons that would last a lifetime.

"I was fortunate to have very good coaches through high school and college who were like fathers to me," says Jones. "They taught me some things about teamwork and dedication. And it was a lot of fun."

Football wasn’t the only thing on his mind at Tulane. He married his high school sweetheart from Baton Rouge, Glenda Blythe Jones, during his freshman year. His sights set on being a fighter pilot since he was in the first grade, he also was a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps and was commissioned an Air Force second lieutenant when he graduated in May 1960. He earned his pilot’s wings in August 1961.

While Jones has added a bit to his college playing weight, at age 61 his 6-foot-2-inch frame is still imposing. His body, though, has scars–damage done when he was a young man and that shows most readily in his walk. Cartilage and ligaments are

torn in both knees–inconveniences compared to some of his other wounds. While often a hallmark of a career in football, his decades-old injuries aren’t the result of crashing pads and helmets, but of one fateful morning over Hanoi during the height of the Vietnam War and the following six-and-one-half years he spent in North Vietnamese prison camps.

Last October, Neal and Glenda Jones returned to Vietnam with 13 other former prisoners of war and their families for a journey they hoped would help both of them heal.

"It was fun, an emotional trip, but also a good emotion," says Jones. He had hoped to meet the Vietnamese doctor who set his broken arm and to retrieve the engraved .45 automatic pistol he surrendered to his captors the day he was shot down. While he found neither, they both found new friends and perhaps closed the circle of a path that started nearly 35 years ago.

Also on the trip were Carl Warden (B ’61)–a fellow teammate and ROTC cadet at Tulane–his wife, Vickie, and her parents, Jim and Coc Reynolds. Vickie Warden’s brother, Randy Reynolds, was a 19-year-old Marine killed in South Viet-nam in 1969. They hoped to find the spot where their brother and son had died so many years ago.

The long, strange trip that would carry Neal Jones back to Vietnam started on the morning of June 29, 1966. On his third tour of combat in the war, Jones, 28, flew his F-105 fighter from an air base in Thailand on a mission to bomb a petroleum-storage facility on the outskirts of Hanoi, the first U.S. bombing raid over the North Vietnamese capital.

Just before dropping his payload, his fighter took a direct hit from an 85-mm anti-aircraft round. Ejecting through his canopy at only 300 feet, his parachute opened an instant before he slammed into the ground, a violent landing that blew

out both knees, cracked three vertebrae in his neck, dislocated his left shoulder and broke his left arm. His right leg was full of shrapnel from the anti-aircraft round. Still strapped into his parachute, Jones watched as 30 North Vietnamese soldiers closed in on the crash site. Pulling the .45 automatic he carried as a sidearm, he thought over his situation for half a second, then handed it, butt first, to the first soldier who approached him.

"I decided I was no John Wayne," Jones says, although he punched and flattened another Vietnamese soldier who mauled his injured arm while he was being pulled from his harness. In a remarkable twist of fate, former Green Wave teammate Terry Terrebonne–part of an elite Marine long-range reconnaissance team working covertly on the outskirts of the city–saw Jones’ plane go down. (Terrebonne [A&S ’63] was executive director of the T Club when he died from a heart attack in 1992.)

Jones’ days as an athlete and his training as an Air Force officer would be crucial to his survival during the 2,420 days to follow. Nothing, though, could fully prepare him.

Within hours of his capture, he was beaten, subjected to a mock execution, and paraded through the streets of Hanoi in the back of an army truck. His wounds untreated, he fought to keep himself conscious as angry mobs pelted him with rocks. A Japanese news crew filmed the parade as well as the following news conference, where Jones was paraded before more cameras. In a few days the footage would be broadcast around the world.

At one point in the proceedings, he stood at attention and fired off a salute. "People asked me who I was saluting," Jones says. "I was saluting my country, and I was trying to look as military as I could. I was told from the time that I was first interrogated that I was not a prisoner of war but a war criminal and had no rights under the Geneva agreements. That was my way of showing them that I was in fact a prisoner of war. I was really hurting bad."

Jones’ broken arm would go untreated for more than four years before a North Vietnamese doctor finally set it. In his job for Tulane athletics, Jones is always immaculately dressed and groomed, often in a Tulane sports shirt or sweater, so few peo-ple notice that his left arm is four inches shorter than his right. "The doctor took a couple of inches of bone off both sides of the break," says Jones. "They operated on about six of us at the same time. There had been a bombing halt and they were thinking about the end of the war and our release. It was sort of like the ‘gastro-politics’ they practiced–the food always got better whenever it looked like they might be letting us go."

At the air base in Japan where they had been stationed, Glenda Jones, then 26,

was awakened by a phone call at 5:30 the morning after his capture. Waiting for confirmation that Jones was now a prisoner of war, Air Force officials told her simply that her husband had been shot down over Vietnam. She found out that he was still alive later that day, when she heard the news on Armed Forces Radio.

Within the month, she returned to Louisiana with their two children, 6-year-old Neal and 3-year-old Darla.

"I was fortunate," Glenda Jones says. "I had my mom there when I came home to Baton Rouge. Maybe I was just naive, but I always thought Neal was coming home. I dealt with it, saying, ‘When he gets back, this is what we’re going to do.’ It never dawned on me that he might not come back."

After his appearance at the news conference, Jones was thrown into the infamous Hoa Lo prison–built by French colonialists, it became known to Americans as the Hanoi Hilton–where after 10 days of beatings and torture he was forced to sign papers condemning U.S. actions in Vietnam. A doctor wanted to amputate his infected leg, but Jones refused.

Placed in a solitary cell, he thought he was dying as his leg turned black and swelled to three times its normal size. Hope came from an unexpected source.

"I heard a voice come from another cell that said, ‘Where is Neal Jones?’ It was a friend, another Air Force pilot, Dave Hatcher, who had been shot down a few days earlier. We weren’t allowed to be talking, but he gave me a piece of advice that probably saved my life: ‘There is only one thing to do–pray a lot.’"