Retired Col. Robert L. Stirm, the man featured in the famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photo “Burst of Joy” died on Nov. 11 in Fairfield, California, his daughter, Lorrie Stirm Kitching confirmed to The New York Times. He was 92.
The photo itself is iconic: A seemingly anonymous freed Vietnam War prisoner of war’s back is to the camera as his gleeful family runs pell-mell toward him. The image was printed and touted across America, earning photographer Slava “Sal” Veder the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Veder’s photograph came to represent those American POWs who were, at long last, free.
The actual story behind the photo, however, was significantly less joyous than the title implied.
Then-Lt. Col. Stirm, the POW in the photo, was a fighter pilot who had been shot down over Hanoi, in what was then North Vietnam, on Oct. 27, 1967. He endured nearly six years of mock executions, torture, illness and starvation while in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” the former Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi dating from French colonial times. Throughout that ordeal, “the momentum to stay alive for my family’s sake was very strong,” Stirm told the Associated Press.
“I had four neat children and what I believed to be a neat wife that I wanted to get back to see. That’s a strong incentive,” he said.
After years of tense start-and-stop negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnamese governments, the appropriately coined “Operation Homecoming” began. Starting on Feb. 12, 1973, and continuing until March 29, almost 600 American POWs were released from North Vietnamese prisoner camps.
“Hanoi Taxis,” or C-141s, ferried the sick and wounded out first, followed by the “taxis” for those who had been imprisoned longest. Among the POW ranks were Floyd Thompson, who was shot down in 1963 and retained the undesirable title of the war’s longest-held prisoner; John McCain, the late senator and former presidential candidate; and former senator Jeremiah Denton Jr., who famously blinked out the letters T-O-R-T-U-R-E, in Morse code, while being interviewed for a propaganda film.
According to Lorrie, Stirm said very little about Vietnam upon his return home but did share his anecdote that upon Stirm’s arrival to Hanoi Hilton, McCain was able to crack a joke to the fellow P.O.W. by tapping on the wall in code.
“My dad said it was the first time he laughed in jail,” Lorrie told the New York Times, adding, “I wish I knew the joke.”
Thanks to Veder’s photo, Stirm would join the small cadre of prisoners captivating public interest but his arrival would leave him feeling anything but joyous.
Just three days before Stirm’s March 1973 arrival at Travis Air Force Base, California, he received a “Dear John” letter from his wife of 18 years, Loretta.
“I have changed drastically — forced into a situation where I finally had to grow up,” she wrote.
“Bob, I feel sure that in your heart you know we can’t make it together — and it doesn’t make sense to be unhappy when you can do something about it. Life is too short.”
“I love you — we all love you,” she continued, “but you must remember how very unhappy we were together. … I would like to see you when you come home, but will understand if you would rather not.”
Stirm was given no chance to respond and as he descended from the plane onto the tarmac for a very public reunion, there was Loretta.
“In some ways, it’s hypocritical, because my former wife had abandoned the marriage within a year or so after I was shot down,” Stirm recounted. “And she did not even have the honor and integrity to be honest with the kids. She lived a lie. This picture does not show the realities that she had accepted proposals of marriage from three different men. … It portrays [that] everybody there was happy to see me.”
Lorrie Kitching, née Stirm, who was just 9 years old when her father was shot down, later noted that her mother was quite young at the time and that raising four children on her own had taken its toll.
The pair divorced within a year, with Lorrie and her brother Robert Jr. living with Stirm. The two youngest children, Cindy and Roger, remained with Loretta. Despite the turmoil surrounding the reunion, the personal reunion that was made so public elicits a different memory for Stirm’s children — one of sheer happiness.
“It’s a wonderful piece of history that we just happened to stumble into,” Lorrie later recalled to The Roanoke Times in 1993.
“It never would have gone away in my mind, but seeing that photo brings it all back again — just all the joy that was there.”
While all four children have “Burst of Joy” hanging in their homes, it was more complicated and bittersweet for Stirm. He kept copies of the image, but none were on display. Asked why, Stirm didn’t mince words.
“Because of her.”
After his retirement from the Air Force in 1977, Stirm worked as a corporate pilot and businessman. He married two more times, both ending in divorce.
His military decorations included three awards of the Silver Star as well as two awards of the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Despite Stirm’s conflicted feelings surrounding his homecoming, for his children, that day remains life-altering.
The photo per se didn’t really change my life,” Robert Stirm Jr. told The Roanoke Times.
“It was my father coming home that changed my life.”
Claire Barrett is the Strategic Operations Editor for Sightline Media and a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.
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