After nearly six years of cruel treatment as a POW in the Vietnam War, Air Force fighter pilot Robert Stirm bounded off a military plane in Fairfield and straight into the arms of his teenage daughter Lorrie, with his wife and their three other kids running to join them. That ecstatic moment, captured by an Associated Press photographer, appeared on newspaper covers nationwide and in Life magazine — and came to embody the end of U.S. involvement in the long and brutal war.
The image, titled “Burst of Joy,” won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography in 1974. But the familial joy in that homecoming image belied a harsher reality.
Three days before his arrival, while on a layover in the Philippines, Stirm had received a “Dear John” letter from his wife, Loretta, revealing that she had been unfaithful during his captivity and that she considered their marriage to be over after 19 years. Still, she wore a smile and a big corsage, all while carrying a secret she’d withheld from their four giddy children as they greeted their heroic father on the tarmac at Travis Air Force Base on March 17, 1973…