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Re: Ex-POWs Speak of Survival

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: March 29, 2003

"Ex-POWs fear troops' fate
By Jeremy Craig | Staff Writer

Some Augusta-area former prisoners of war say they know firsthand what American soldiers recently imprisoned by the Iraqi government are going through.

But they said they fear that young men and women captured by Iraqi forces will probably face a much worse experience.

According to The Associated Press, two Marines captured after an Apache helicopter crash and five Army soldiers captured during an ambush near An Nasiriyah, Iraq, are being held by the Iraqi regime.

"We are dealing with a totally different situation," said Ken Badke, who was a POW during the Korean War.

Amy Yarsinske, a former military intelligence officer living in Norfolk, Va., has written and investigated the military's prisoner of war and missing in action activities for the past 10 years. She said the brutality of the Iraqi regime makes it easy to believe that American prisoners of war will be tortured far worse than in other wars.

"It always comes down to who captures you," Ms. Yarsinske said. "POWs from the first gulf war will tell you that if you're captured by field soldiers or the populous that you've just bombed, they'll hold you in a village and do unspeakable things to you."

Former POWs, she said, will always remember what happened to them.

Mr. Badke, who helped to develop the Goshen Plantation community in south Augusta, can recall the exact length of his imprisonment - 33 months, 10 days.

Ms. Yarsinske said keeping focused on the primary objective of any POW - to live - is key to survival.

"Once POWs get over the initial shock, they realize their situation," she said, "and they can try to regroup mentally."

While Mr. Badke was a prisoner of the North Koreans and Chinese, starvation and cold killed many of his comrades, he said.

One morning, Mr. Badke said, the guards threw him out of a mud hut into a stack of bodies in the snow because they thought he was dead.

"I can remember in my own mind telling them, 'I'm glad you can't hurt me anymore, I'm dead,"' Mr. Badke said.

Bernard Porter, a World War II Army veteran, was held captive in Adolf Hitler's Germany for seven months near the end of the war.

Mr. Porter said what kept him going was the fact that he and his wife were expecting a child.

Quinn Hedke, who was captured by the Viet Cong and, later, Cambodian forces during the Vietnam War, said that, when he was a POW, he was more worried about his family than himself.

"Sometimes I wished I was 18 years old and single," Mr. Hedke said, "but I was married and had three children. You worry more about your family because they don't know your status."

Mr. Badke also said he was tortured by the North Korean and Chinese soldiers who ran the prison camps.

"They would starve you or make you stand out on the ice, holding a log straight over your head," Mr. Badke said. "If your arms came down at all, they would beat you."

But as a peace settlement was being reached later, his captors stopped the torture, he said.

He worries that prisoners of the Iraqi war won't be so lucky.

"A man like Saddam Hussein doesn't care about international law," Mr. Badke said.

Reach Jeremy Craig at (706) 823-3409 or at jeremy.craig@augustachronicle.com.

© 2003 The Augusta Chronicle. "