U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Harlan Chapman’s F-8E “Crusader” fighter jet spun so violently that he could not reach the ejection handles over his head. “I was sure I was going to die,” he told an interviewer in 2018. Chapman was attacking targets deep in North Vietnam on Nov. 5, 1965, along with 31 other strike fighters, when enemy anti-aircraft fire tore into his Crusader. He blacked out, and when he woke up, he found himself floating to the ground under his parachute. After landing in a rice paddy up to his knees in mud, North Vietnamese soldiers quickly surrounded him. The first Marine shot down in the Vietnam War, Chapman became the war’s longest-held Marine POW—enduring more than seven years in North Vietnamese prison camps before his release on Feb. 12, 1973.
On Oct. 20, 2025, Chapman’s family and friends gathered in Section 84 of Arlington National Cemetery to say goodbye to a man who, as he told his interviewer, never considered himself a hero, but “just an American POW.” At the service, U.S. Navy Chaplain (Cmdr.) Trenten Long emphasized that Chapman earned his place at Arlington’s hallowed grounds. “It took a lot of sacrifice,” Long said, “and now he comes to his final resting place.”
During Chapman’s imprisonment in Hoa Lo Prison, the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” he suffered through interrogations and torture. While not allowed to talk to prisoners in other cells, he spoke to them in low tones when the guards took naps. Eventually, he and the other prisoners communicated through a tap code. After being transferred to other prisons, he taught the code to fellow prisoners at those sites.
Once, when guards caught Chapman communicating with another prisoner, they tortured him for two days and left him bound in solitary confinement for another five days. After he was returned to his cell, his cellmate, Navy Lt. J.G. Rod Knusten, fed him, brushed his teeth and helped him function until the guards removed his bindings. Yet despite enduring additional interrogations and beatings throughout the years of his captivity, he adhered to the military Code of Conduct, refusing to provide any useful information to the North Vietnamese.
In 1972, Chapman and other prisoners were returned to the Hanoi Hilton, where their treatment improved. Then, in late January 1973, the guards gathered the prisoners and read aloud the Paris Peace Accords, which officially ended U.S. involvement in Vietnam. On Feb. 12, Chapman and other inmates were marched, without notice, to an airfield where a U.S. Air Force transport soon landed. After spending 2,657 days in captivity and having lost 45 pounds, Chapman returned home.
Chapman’s release happened so quickly that when his aircraft touched down at Travis Air Force Base in California, his family could not make it to the base to greet him. The next day, his parents, siblings and son, Harlan Jr., visited him in the hospital. His wife had already informed him that she had moved on. He did not blame her. He had been away for nine years of their twelve years of marriage.
A month later, while visiting his parents in Colorado, Chapman met Frances “Fran” Hessel, one of his niece’s friends. They started dating a few months later and married in 1974. Chapman took Fran to POW reunions and even returned with her to Vietnam, where they visited the prisons in which he had been held and tortured.
At the funeral service, Lt. Col. Matthew Simard presented Fran with the flag, but she asked him to give it to Harlan Jr., who was sitting next to her. “He missed all those years with his dad, and he suffered far more,” she told Simard. “I want him to have it.” Fran hugged Harlan Jr. as he accepted the flag. After the service, Fran said that Chapman had always been reluctant to talk about his POW experience. “If you had a question, he would be very happy to answer your question,” she said, “but he didn’t consider it social conversation.”
Fran added that Chapman’s time as a POW did not haunt him or seem to affect his behavior, but he had a saying that put perspective on his life. Having spent seven years in prison cells with doors without doorknobs, he would say, according to Fran, “If there was a doorknob on the inside of the room, it was a good day.”
