While serving as Naval aviator during the Vietnam War, Jeremiah Denton was participating in a bombing mission over the Vietnamese city of Thanh Hoa, in which he was shot down and captured on July 18, 1965. He was held as a prisoner of war for almost eight years - four of which were spent in solitary confinement. Denton is best known for the 1966 North Vietnamese television interview he was forced to give as a prisoner, in which he ingeniously used the opportunity to communicate to American Intelligence. During the interview Denton blinked his eyes in morse code to spell out the word "T-O-R-T-U-R-E" to communicate that his captors were torturing him and his fellow POWs.