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By RON COLQUITT

Air Force fighter pilots are the brave ones but their wives must be the strong ones, Dell Stone said.

Her husband, retired Air Force Col. Robert Stone of Alexander City, was critically injured when he was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. She sweated out 18 days awaiting word on his condition.

The mother of three children said famed CBS television journalist Walter Cronkite broke the news about her husband.

Mrs. Stone said in a recent interview that Cronkite didn’t mention her husband by name during his TV report of the incident. Cronkite had interviewed Toney Hanson, the heroic Navy man who helped rescue Stone from the jungle and who recently visited the Stones at their home on Lake Martin.

“He was shot down on July the second, and that night Walter Cronkite was on television and I watched it because every one of our friends were being shot down, being killed,” Mrs. Stone said.

“We watched it every minute. Toney was on television that night with Walter Cronkite and he was telling about the pilot he had picked up, and he was alive and critically injured, but never said his name.”

The next day, Mrs. Stone said she got a telegram informing her that her husband, Maj. Robert E. Stone, had been shot down over North Vietnam on July 2 and he had been critically injured with an undetermined prognosis.

“And for 18 days, his prognosis was unknown to me,” she said. “I didn’t know where he was or what condition he was in or what was going to happen to us, and I had three children,” ages 12, 9 and 5.

Mrs. Stone frantically began calling Air Force friends after her husband was shot down over North Vietnam.

“A friend was able to confirm he was in Da Nang (South Vietnam) and he was being sent to California and then to Walter Reed (a military hospital in Washington, D.C.),” she said.

Military officials later told her Stone was being transferred to a hospital at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, about an hour’s drive from Mobile.

Stone said he requested Keesler when given a choice of where he wanted to recover from his massive injuries.

After learning her husband would eventually recover, Mrs. Stone said she “was alive again. I was renewed again because I didn’t know what I was going to do. It was just very, very difficult, I can tell you.”

Stone was at the Keesler hospital for about 10 months, according to his son, who said he was happy to witness his father’s slow recovery.

Stone Jr. said he was about 16 years old when his father volunteered for another tour of duty in 1973. That year, America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was slowly ending.

Once again, Stone was stationed in Thailand but this time he flew C-130 planes to the North Vietnam border. According to the colonel, the crew of the C-130 directed air strikes throughout the war-weary country.

“I admire him the most because he went back and commanded that bomber squad in Thailand,” Stone Jr. said. “To go back after all of that, and to stay in for another series of years, that’s dedication. That’s that fighter pilot mentality.”

Mrs. Stone also had to live up to her name.