My mother's cousin was in WWII but I never knew him. My mother said after he got home he was very nervous and would startle easily and always had to sit facing the door.

No, I don't.

No, I don't but knew people that fought on both sides of WWII. I had uncles that fought in the war. Then many years later our son in law had a Grandfather that was German and they came to visit us and he had fought on the German side. We enjoyed visiting with Oma and Opa.

Sue

No, I don't really, but I did meet a man who was a survivor of the Bataan Death March.

Woody was almost captured but thanks to a buddy who disobeyed an order and wouldn't leave him behind, they managed to get back to a safe area. It took 2.5 days, though. (His legs had been ripped open, they presumed by shrapnel.)

Yes, my dad.

Moni

Yes my elderly neighbor was a Filipino POW in the early 1940's. He doesn't talk about it but still has the POW license plate on his van.

He's not a very trusting type and doesn't like many people for reasons unknown. He's always liked us for some reason though. He is one of the original homeowners as are we when the neighborhood was built.

My cousin's husband was a POW during the Vietnam War.

Yes, when I was 5 or 6 my parents were friends with this other young couple. The husband Tony was a POW. He passed away a couple of years ago, but his wife is still living in Rock Island, Illinois or around there.
Leslie

No, I don't.

Yes, my Dad. He was a survivor of the Bataan Death Match and spent 3 1/2 years as a prisioner of the Japanese. He passed away in 1995 almost 50 years after he was liberated.
He suffered with post traumatic stress disorder for 50 years. He will always be my hero.

I held a yard sale last weekend and there was a mother and daughter who are Phillipino who arrived late in the day. We got to talking and I was able to tell them that Dad held the Phillipino people in the highest regard for their war efforts. We all stood there and cried and they thanked me for sharing his thoughts with them.

As a child, I met a great uncle of my mother's, who was on the Bataan Death march.
He was a broken man - physically and mentally.

Nope.

No, I don't.

I had an uncle who was on the Bataan Death March. He talked about it and never evidenced any signs of PTSD. He passed away in 1999 and had a funeral with full military honors.

Another uncle was a POW in Germany. He was missing and presumed dead. He and two other POWs escaped, and a German couple hid them in their home until they could get them to the Americans. He seldom talked about his injuries or imprisonment (except to my other uncle who had been a POW). He passed away in 2004, was cremated, with no service. Sad, because he told me he wanted a funeral with full military honors (like the other uncle), but his girlfriend didn't want to spend his money on his funeral.

The only experience I ever had with a prisoner of war involved someone I met by chance.

Roughly 30 years ago when I worked for our local newspaper, I was assigned to interview a man who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz. He was very strange, very nervous, and would only do the interview in his own apartment. I was young and naive, but smart enough to insist that my (male) photographer be allowed to accompany me.

He had a very compelling story of life in the concentration camp, remembering minute details of how he and his mother, father and siblings were seperated. He never found any of them after he was released.

I wrote the story as a five-day series, and after it was published the man went berserk. He went to our hospital, probably looking for drugs, and was waving a gun around threatening to shoot people. Totally out of his mind. Fortunately my brother-in-law was the police lieutenant on shift when the call came in, and at a family dinner we'd discussed the story and my concerns for the man because he was so emotional during the interviews. He recognized him from the picture we'd published, and was able to use that information to "talk him down" and doctors were then able to sedate him. Evidently reliving all the details for my story just sent him over the edge. Officials took him away, and I never did find out where. I think I would have been afraid to visit him anyway, because just seeing me might have triggered a recurrance.

I felt so sorry for that poor man, thinking of the horrors that were locked up in his mind. He had to deal with those demons every day.

No.......Stacy

Not POW but I knew someone in high school who is still MIA from the Viet Nam war. Lt. James Mills was shot down over Laos or Cambodia and his remains have never been found. In the early 1970s after the POWs came home, I attended a service that was in honor of Lt. Mills. It was so sad.

One of my friends (she died recently) is/was of Japanese origin. Her parents were held in the camps in Utah. They were very upset when she chose to live and work here. She never did say much about it or relate any stories they may have told her.

I'm grateful, my father received orders to England three weeks before the Bataan Death March. Men in his sqadron who were his friends used to come by in years gone by and visit with him and talk about their experiences - my mother always left the room, she found it too dreadful to hear after the first time.

No, not that I'm aware of.

No, but I take care of a lot of veterans and I'm sure there has to be one or two in there somewhere. One of our A.F. pilots was captured during the Gulf War. Didn't know him, though.

Yes.

One POW of the Germans in WW II and one POW of the Vietnamese in Vietnam.

Yes, I know an American who was captured by the Germans his "first day on the job", so to speak. He parachuted in and the wind caught him and he landed behind enemy lines. I also know another person who was in a concentration camp.

There was also a good friend of my father's who was shot down over France and believed killed. He was found by the Resistance and hidden by the French until the end of the war.
One night in the early 80's my dad got a phone call from someone in the Canadian Foreign Affairs department who had been at a cocktail party in Spain. One of the other guests in a conversation found out that this fellow was from Newfoundland and asked if he knew my dad. As quite often happens with Newfoundlanders, he said yes. Then the fellow said, "The next time you speak with him, tell him that Andy D. said Hello". Anyway, the other fellow phoned Dad when he got back to Canada and gave him the message. I was there in the room when he got the phone call. Dad turned as white as a sheet and had to sit down. The next day he phoned his friend who was living in England and they reconnected after close to 40 years.

No, but I know plenty of veterans. Dad, brother, husband.

Not that I can recall.

The Bataan Death March ... and the years following ... was hell for those who went through it.

When I went to Korea, in `53, just over 10 years later, we left Los Angeles by freighter and travelled on the Great Circle route, far north of Hawaii (put a string on a globe) ... for 18 days out of sight of land ... which gives one direct proof of how large the world is.

As we approached the Phillipines, a typhoon was building and we went down the west side of Luzon, then turned in to 30-mile long Manila Harbour ... so the first sight of land that I had in the Orient was ... Corregidor, the rocky island fortress at the outer end of the harbour ... where the last surviving U.S. Army people holed up, following the Japanese invasion.

It made a major impression on me that, apart from the results of World War II, we could not have been in that part of the world, helping people develop a better life. Had our ship been in those waters, ten years earlier ... we`d have been sunk ... or interned!

And much of our work originally, just after the Korean War, was helping people who had left their home areas as refugees, as a result of political divisions and war, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, as they tried to get their lives back in some kind of order ... in an area much of which had been badly battered, fought over 3 or 4 times.

Not a pleasant experience.

Let us commit ourselves to seeking ways to build bridges of understanding between peoples, rather than warfare.

May you have a blessed Easter ... if Easter is important to you.

ole joyful