Retired Colonel Robert L. Stirm, an Air Force pilot whose return home to his family after more than five years of captivity in North Vietnam was the subject of a jubilant Pulitzer Prize-winning photo — an image that hid the painful truth about his marriage ending, died on Nov. 11 in Fairfield, Calif. He was 92.
His death, in a senior living community, was confirmed by his daughter, Lorrie Stirm Kitching.
On March 17, 1973, then-Lieutenant Colonel Stirm arrived home with 19 other former prisoners of war to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. Lorrie, who was 15 at the time and his eldest daughter, raced to him on the tarmac in a moment immortalized by a photojournalist: Grinning ecstatically, she had her arms outstretched for a hug, and her feet were off the ground as if levitating.
“It was like when you’re a little kid, and Santa is going to be coming, and you know it’s going to be amazing but you don’t know how amazing it’s going to be,” Ms. Stirm Kitching, now 68, said in an interview.
Her sister and two brothers also hurried toward their father, smiling, as did their mother, Loretta, who wore a large corsage for the occasion.
Slava Veder, an Associated Press photographer known as Sal, was on assignment to cover the reunions and rushed to a makeshift darkroom inside a women’s bathroom on the base after rival photographers from United Press International took the men’s bathroom.
“It was a hell of a moment and, in that moment, you are grabbed,” said Mr. Veder, who is now 99. “It was overwhelming.”
His published photograph, titled “Burst of Joy,” appeared in newspapers across the country and was awarded the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Lt. Col. Stirm, dressed in his military uniform, back to the camera, face unseen, served as a representative of every serviceman who returned to loved ones from Vietnam, Mr. Veder told Smithsonian Magazine in 2005.
Donald M. Goldstein, a co-author of “The Vietnam War: The Story and Photographs” (1997), described the moment to the magazine as “a hero’s welcome for guys who weren’t always seen or treated as heroes.” After a lost war that “tore us apart,” Mr. Goldstein said, “it was finally over, and the country could start healing.”
For Colonel Stirm, the joyous homecoming captured on camera obscured the agonizing reality he had braced for on the flight home: the dissolution of his marriage.
His will to survive as a P.O.W., he later said, was built on memories of his domestic life and the hope of returning one day to his family. Those thoughts sustained him after he was shot down and was forced to eject from his F-105 Thunderchief during a bombing mission over North Vietnam on Oct. 27, 1967, and they continued to sustain him in prison camps, including the notorious “Hanoi Hilton,” where he was starved, tortured and subjected to mock executions.
He held the rank of major at the time he was taken prisoner and was eventually elevated to colonel. He was among 591 American prisoners of war released as part of Operation Homecoming after the Paris Peace Accords ended the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Three days before he landed at Travis Air Force Base, he was handed what he described as a “Dear John” letter from his wife.
“I have changed drastically — forced into a situation where I finally had to grow up,” his wife of 18 years wrote. “Bob, I feel sure that in your heart you know we can’t make it together — and it doesn’t make sense to be unhappy when you can do something about it. Life is too short.”
“I love you — we all love you,” she continued, “but you must remember how very unhappy we were together.”
Ms. Stirm Kitching said her mother acknowledged in the letter of having an affair during her husband’s captivity that ended before his return.
“She was a really great mother,” Ms. Stirm Kitching added, recalling that she led the family in nightly prayers for Colonel Stirm’s safe return and kept his memory alive for the children by explaining, when asked, the date and place and circumstance of each photograph of him that hung on a wall in the family room.
The affair, Ms. Stirm Kitching said, was a “sad, unfortunate thing.”
“She met somebody who pursued her and called her and sent her flowers,” she said. “She was feeling like, ‘Oh gosh, I’ve been this mom, just taking care of my kids, making sure they’re good and growing up well, and then somebody wants to pay attention to me.’”
Despite the painful letter to her husband, Loretta Stirm offered to try to make her marriage work, her daughter said.
Colonel Stirm later told The Associated Press that he had found it impossible to forgive his wife for the affair. Days after a bitter divorce in 1974 that made the news, both remarried. Colonel Stirm kept several copies of the picture autographed by Mr. Veder but, while his children displayed them, he did not.
Robert Lewis Stirm was born on March 22, 1933, in San Francisco and grew up in Hillsborough, Calif. His father, H. Glenn Stirm, owned a steel-fabrication business. His mother, Virginia (Lewis) Stirm, ran the household.
He joined the Air Force aviation cadet program in 1953, graduated from the University of Colorado in 1954 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and earned his pilot wings in 1959. After numerous postings and advanced training, he served as an F-105 pilot with the 333rd Tactical Fighter Squadron at Takhli Royal Thai Air Force in Thailand from August 1967 until he was shot down that October.
He said little about Vietnam after returning home, Ms. Stirm Kitching said, but he told a story about a fellow P.O.W., John S. McCain, the Navy pilot and future U.S. senator, who told a joke by tapping on the wall in code to Colonel Stirm in an adjacent cell. “My Dad said it was the first time he laughed in jail,” she said, adding, “I wish I knew the joke.”
Colonel Stirm retired from the Air Force in 1977 and worked as a corporate pilot and in the family steel-fabrication business. His military decorations included three awards of the Silver Star as well as two awards of the Legion of Merit and the Distinguished Flying Cross.
His marriages to Loretta Mrosko and Nancy Smith ended in divorce.
In addition to his daughter Lorrie, he is survived by two other children, Cynthia Pierson and Roger Stirm; three sisters, Virginia Hall, Marjorie Stirm and Nancy Stirm Bronstein; a brother, John Stirm; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. His son Dr. Robert “Bo” Stirm Jr., a dentist, died in 2023.
In 2005, Ms. Stirm Kitching told Smithsonian Magazine that when she looked at the Pulitzer-winning photograph, she felt fortunate because many families had not been reunited during or after the Vietnam War.
Today, she said, she feels “joy and happiness” when seeing herself, always running to hug her father, whom she called her hero. She keeps the photo in the foyer of her home near San Francisco. When guests arrive, she said, she likes to tell them, “This is my way to welcome you; I’m so happy you’re here.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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