Man Meets Vietnam Veteran POW Bracelet Worn 50 Years Ago

'Bond between strangers': Vietnam POW bracelet to unite pair after decades
FOX News
By Cristina Corbin
Published April 04, 2015

Raymond Schrump is seen here as a POW in Vietnam.

The former U.S. Army major was held captive from 1968 to 1971.

(WRAL.com)

Harold Flowers was 13 when his parents gave him a POW bracelet during the Vietnam War in 1968 – a metal band bearing the name of a U.S. soldier captured by the North Vietnamese.

Nearly 50 years later, Flowers, of Angier, N.C., tracked down the man whose name he wore around his wrist: 83-year-old former U.S. Army Major Raymond Schrump, a Purple Heart recipient who spent nearly five years in an enemy prison camp.

On Saturday, the two will meet for the first time, and Flowers will give Schrump the bracelet he has kept all these years – a bracelet Schrump said represents a "bond between strangers."

"I feel like I've known this man all my life and I haven't met him yet," Schrump told FoxNews.com Thursday.

Schrump, severely malnourished, weighed just 86 pounds at the time of his rescue on Feb. 12, 1971, when he and 27 other American prisoners were flown by U.S. helicopters to Saigon. He was then taken to a U.S. base in the Philippines and, after recovering from a bout with malaria, flown to California and then eventually Fort Bragg, where he was reunited with his family at a nearby hospital.
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