Dixon is a a veteran of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam. He was captured and reported killed in action (KIA) on May 18, 1951, one day before his scheduled return to the United States. The mixup occurred because Walter gave his field jacket containing letters from his wife to a wounded soldier who was subsequently killed and identified as Walter.<\/p>\n
He was held as a prisoner of war (POW) for 30 months. <\/p>\n
At the time of the peace talks, Dixon was incarcerated in a turnip cellar at the prison camp. He had been sentenced to life for escape attempts, building a radio and other violations. As the talks progressed his sentence was commuted to 10 years. All charges were dropped and he was released in Operation Big Switch in September 1953.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We decided to hold off until we could check further. Mary said that DPMO’s records for the Korean War are notoriously inaccurate. So, Mary checked for us, and sure enough, he was a POW from May, 1951 – Sept. 1953. A pleasant surprise for us for a change. Waynesville is indeed lucky to have this hero as their Veteran of the Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Someone sent us a link from the Waynesville Daily Guide about their Veterans’ Day events starring … Walter Dixon; Waynesville, MO 2014 Veteran of the year<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-real-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Walt](\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/Walt-Dixon-281x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n