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Re: Who Chepaened the Word Hero?

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 11, 2003

"Who cheapened the word hero?

Phil Hudgins phudgins@cninewspapers.com

Orson Swindle was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for six years and four months, Ben Purcell for five years and two months.

Neither one considers himself a hero.

Swindle endured torture and beatings and was hung by his thumbs after his shoulders were yanked out of socket and his arms tied behind his back.

But he says he’s not a hero.

Purcell escaped twice. He spent 58 of his 62 months as a POW in solitary confinement. The enemy considered him a troublemaker. He may have been, but he says he’s not a hero.

So who is a hero? Floyd “Jim” Thompson?

Both Swindle and Purcell knew Thompson, who was with the U.S. Army Special Forces. He was a POW two weeks shy of nine years. Nine years of cruel punishment and deprivation in South Vietnam jungles. It was the longest period of incarceration of any U.S. prisoner of war in Vietnam. And yet, apparently because of an unintentional oversight, his name was not even mentioned at the 1998 dedication of a memorial to POWs at Andersonville.

Purcell attended the ceremony, and he was disappointed he didn’t hear Thompson’s name. Jim Thompson, Swindle says, died in July of 2002 from years of physical and mental suffering and agony after he returned home.

Then there is Ev Alvarez, who was the first U.S. pilot captured in North Vietnam. Like Thompson, he spent nearly nine years as a POW. Swindle and Purcell actually were in the average group - held prisoner for five or six years.

“Most of my closest friends from the POW experience,” Swindle says, “were over there seven years and suffered unimaginably.”

But there’s a danger in calling any of these men heroes, Swindle and Purcell agree.

“You just fulfill the duty you have as an American soldier,” says Purcell, a resident of Clarkesville, and a former state legislator. “If we make prisoners of war look too much like heroes, somebody could go into combat and say, ‘Why get shot at? I’ll just give up.’” We must not “glorify the position of POW.”

And yet isn’t that what’s happening today? Soldiers who were held prisoner for three weeks are called heroes. At least one of them is talking a book deal and possibly a movie contract.

Maybe that’s what we expect today - “instant gratification,” says Swindle, a native Georgian and a member of the Federal Trade Commission in Washington.

We expect a quick war, minimal sacrifice, movie-like heroes - all harmless, patriotic, feel-good stuff.

But, he says, “We simply cannot afford to make cookie-cutter heroes. It diminishes the real heroes shamefully.”

“If anybody was a hero, it was my wife [Anne],” says Purcell. “She didn’t know if I was dead or alive for five years.”

So whom do we blame for cheapening the word “hero” and the glorification of POWs? Surely not the POWs themselves. They didn’t wish fame or the horrors of war onto themselves.

Perhaps we should begin looking for blame at home.

Does media hype sound familiar?"