Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Stirm, a former Vietnam War POW, greets well-wishers at Travis Air Force Base, Calif, on March 17, 1973. (Department of Defense)
Lt. Col. Robert Stirm, the Air Force officer whose return from captivity during the Vietnam War was captured in an iconic photograph in 1973, has died at 92, according to CBS News.
Stirm, an F-105 Thunderchief pilot shot down over North Vietnam in October 1967, spent the next 5½ years as a POW. His return to his waiting family at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., was captured by Associated Press photographer Slava Veder.
“Burst of Joy,” which depicts Stirm’s then 15-year-old daughter Lorrie Stirm running toward him, arms wide, won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1974.
Associated Press photographer Sal Veder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of former POW Lt. Col. Robert Stirm greeting his family at Travis Air Force Base, Calif., on March 17, 1973, after being released from captivity in Vietnam. (Sal Veder/AP)
The photograph came to epitomize the end of the Vietnam era with the return of America’s POWs.
Stirm died Tuesday morning, Veterans Day, the network reported Thursday.
Stirm survived gunshot wounds, illness, starvation, torture, bad treatment and mock executions during his time in North Vietnamese prison camps, including the Hoa Lo Prison, dubbed the Hanoi Hilton, by its inmates, according to a January 2005 article in Smithsonian magazine.
Stirm was shot down a day after Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, a Navy pilot, was also captured. McCain later served as a U.S. senator from Arizona and was the 2008 Republican candidate for president.
“He told me a great story that the first time he ever laughed in jail was a joke that John McCain had tapped through the wall. They were sharing a wall while they were both in solitary confinement, while they were in, uh, Son Tây,” Stirm’s daughter, now Lorrie Kitching, said during a May 2024 broadcast of “Antiques Roadshow” on PBS.
Well-wishers wait to greet Air Force Lt. Col. Robert Stirm, a former Vietnam War POW, at Travis Air Force Base, Calif, in March 1973. (Department of Defense)
Stirm, a native of San Mateo, Calif., retired from the Air Force in 1977 after 25 years of service and joined Ferry Steel Products, the business his grandfather started in San Francisco, according to an AP report in July 1993. He left that business to work as a corporate pilot but returned to the steel company later.
Stirm and his wife, Loretta, divorced a year after his return, according to the AP report.
Their son, Dr. Robert Stirm Jr., a dentist, who also appeared in the photograph, died in January 2023, according to his obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle.
