As Americans commemorate the sacrifices of our soldiers this Veterans Day, one Macon man recounts his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, which he called "an eternity away" from his boyhood Franklin home. When Tom McNish finally returned to his 400-acre boyhood home, tucked up next to a babbling brook near the top of a broad mountain holler in rural Macon County, he found seven years worth of Christmas presents sitting under a tree. But it wasn't Christmas; it was May, 1973, and McNish had just returned from six years of captivity in North Vietnamese prisons after being shot out of the sky near Hanoi. "I'm the eternal optimist," he said. "It was never a thought in my mind that I wasn't going to come back home. From the very beginning, once I figured out they weren't going to kill me, I could always figure out a reason that I would be home within six months. I had to revise that at least 11 times. Maybe more." Sept. 4, 1966 started like any other day for McNish, but after his F