Capt. Edward Brudno, Pw Who Shunned Happy Homecoming, Dead at 33

Home towns across the country have honored their returned prisoners of the Vietnam War with enthusiastic celebrations to manifest their joy in having them back after their ordeals in enemy military prison camps. But Air Force Capt. Edward Brudno would have none of those happy homecomings. His father, Dr. James C. Brudno, an internist in Quincy, Mass., told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “He wants no part of anything like that. He’s been through too much. When his health gets better he will go back to graduate school for his master’s, probably in electronics and possibly in aviation.”

This statement was made several weeks ago. Yesterday Capt. Brudno, who at the age of 33 was the oldest of the Jewish prisoners back from Vietnam and one of the longest-held captives–89 months–of the 566 returned PWs, was found dead in the home of his wife’s family in Harrison, N.Y., apparently a suicide. Funeral services will be held Friday morning in Quincy, Mass. at Temple Beth El. Funeral services were delayed because of Shavuot.

Born June 4, 1940, in Quincy, Mass., he was 25 when his fighter F3C jet was shot down Oct. 18, 1965 over North Vietnam and he was captured. He joined the Air Force in April 1963, the same year that he was graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In those 7 1/2 dreary years in prison camps, only one letter was received by him from his wife, Debra, to whom he had been married only three months when he left for Southeast Asia. Not more than two letters reached him from his parents, his father said.

For long periods he was in solitary confinement and no news of any kind was allowed to be given him. Thus he wasn’t even aware of the Six-Day War until more than four years afterwards. Like learning about America putting men on the moon, the news came to him and others accidentally. “Sometimes Hanoi’s propaganda backfired and news they wanted to conceal slipped through,” his father said.

As soon as he was able to leave Westover Air Force Base in Mass., where he arrived after his release in Hanoi, Capt. Brudno and his wife vanished to pick up the threads of their life together. “I don’t know where they are,” Dr. Brudno said at the time of the interview. The bride Capt. Brudno had left behind when he went to war is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Milton Gitenstein. She was a teacher in Harrison, N.Y. when Capt. Brudno returned to her.

Capt. Brudno was “always very interested in Jewish culture,” his father said. After his Bar Mitzvah at Beth El Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in Quincy, he continued in Hebrew school. In a letter from him in prison camp that arrived about four years ago, he asked his parents for literature to learn more about his heritage. Dr. Brudno said he sent his son the Five Books of Moses but the prisoner never received them.