On this episode of Our American Stories, retired U.S. Navy Captain Mike McDaniel takes us back to the day he was a third-grade boy sitting on his bed when his mother told him his father had been shot down during the Vietnam War. His father was Eugene “Red” McDaniel, the famed Navy pilot who disappeared on his 81st combat mission and would spend nearly six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

Mike reflects on what it meant to grow up as the son of a missing serviceman and how his family endured the harrowing ordeal together, sustained by a deep faith and the hope that his father would one day come home.

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