Coming Up Slowly

At a sprawling U.S. Army hospital in Tokyo last week, the American war prisoners returned by the Communists were recovering from their ordeal. The wards swarmed with doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, intelligence officers. Some of the returnees sunbathed on foam-rubber mattresses and went to the hospital movies at night. Many were still numb and apathetic. They were slowly getting used to freedom again, like deep-sea divers coming up foot by foot for fear of the bends.

"They just don't seem to care," said a hospital aide. "They're not interested in the PX, they don't want to read books or newspapers, they're not even interested in their mail. If we ask them if they want to go home, they say yes, they want to go home. They never say, 'When are you gonna get me out of this place?' "

Insistent Questions. Newsmen were not allowed in the Tokyo hospital wards, but U.S. correspondents had got in their licks at Freedom Village in Munsan. Somehow a headline-hunting competition for "atrocity" stories had started. Most of the voluminous file of atrocity stories last week was highly exaggerated, and the total impression was wholly false. Under press interrogation at Munsan, prisoners talked of cruelty only when pressed by leading, insistent questions. Most of the prisoners said they had not actually seen their comrades murdered or subjected to deliberate physical cruelty.

And when successive prisoners talked of deaths in prison camps, some newsmen piled statistic on to statistic of "atrocity deaths" without checking how much they overlapped.

There had been plenty of real tragedy in North Korea in the first days of the war; most of the hardships reflected atrocious conditions more than systematically barbarous treatment. The prisoners said they had seen hundreds of their comrades die of cold, forced marches, undernourishment, disease, inadequate or nonexistent medical care. Private William J. Prabucki of Pittsburgh, captured with about 1,000 others at Kunu (where the U.S. 2nd Division was torn to pieces late in 1959), made forced marches of 30 miles a night. By day as many as 30 men were jammed into rooms, only 20 ft. square, and fed only cracked corn and millet. Prabucki had seen many Americans die, in a place called "Death Valley," of exposure and lack of medical care. Corporal Joseph Jewell of Norwood, Ohio lived in Death Valley from December to April. Half of one foot was gangrenous, and the Communists amputated it with a hacksaw blade and no anesthetics (having no anesthetics and no surgical instruments). To keep him from screaming, he said, "they gave me a twig to chew on."

After the Chinese Reds entered the war, the situation in the North Korean stockades improved.

Fear for the "Populace." In Washington the Pentagon, which scarcely lets a gun be fired in Korea without its express O.K., was in one of its periodic tizzies over a different matter altogether: the possible extent of "brainwashing" or Red indoctrination among the returnees. Nearly all the returned prisoners had attended ideology classes, some voluntarily, and no doubt the Communists had taken that fact into consideration in selecting them for return. The prisoners had been told that the South Koreans had started the war by attacking North Korea; they had been shown the faked Communist evidence of U.S. "germ war." The admirals and generals were afraid that some of these lies would stick with the returnees, that when they got home, their opinions would have a bad effect on the "populace" (Pentagon word for the U.S. public). A few prisoners were known to have been infected with Communism even before they were captured. Nine were apparently card-carrying party members, and one deserted to the enemy as soon as he reached the front line. But on the whole, the Pentagon's flap over Red indoctrination seemed as exaggerated as the atrocity stories.

"Bug Dust." What was the average U.S. prisoner's life like in North Korea? It was like this:

He got up at 5:30 a.m., went outside for a short period of physical exercise, then was allowed to wash. Breakfast was at 7. Details were picked to collect firewood and rations (rice, peas, beans, occasionally pork, bread made of rice flour and potatoes, and a mixture of ground millet, corn and soybeans, which was universally called "bug dust").

In the afternoons they could play outdoor games (there was an intercamp "Olympics" last summer) or cards, or read. The sparse prison libraries contained some English books, mostly Communist tracts, and many camps distributed the New York and London Daily Worker and English-language papers from Shanghai. In some camps the P.W.s built their own recreation halls, staged all-male square dances. At 9 they went to bed, slept on straw mats with blankets which were often lice-infested.

The P.W.s sometimes put on their own plays, were shown Chinese propaganda films. Some camps were surrounded by barbed wire or pole fences, some had only guards to prevent escapes, others were located in towns and the prisoners lived in Korean houses. Once a week they were given writing materials. They did their own laundry; they ate out of iron bowls, with enamel cups and spoons.

The complete story, with all of the details accurately filled in, remains to be told. Said a private from Louisiana: "I have quite a lot of things on my chest. If I said everything, it might make it tough on my buddies."

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