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Re: Across the Years... Two Generations of POWs Meet

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: August 12, 2003

"KATHLEEN MERRYMAN; The News Tribune

William Jones beams in the photograph taken earlier this month at the Buffalo Soldiers' annual convention in Houston. Seated next to him is a celebrity, Spc. Shoshana Johnson, who was captured by Iraqi forces near Nasiriyah on March 23, and released three weeks later.

The 30-year-old single mother was a guest of honor at the reunion.

"I had the opportunity to have a picture taken with the first black lady who was a POW in Operation Iraqi Freedom," Jones, who is 85, said softly and proudly.

They did not have time to talk at any length, just time enough for him to wish her well, to say he hopes she writes a book and to mention that he, too, had been held prisoner half a century ago.

Back at the office of Jones Glass & Used Materials at 1912 S. Wilkeson St., the week after the nation ducked through a brief remembrance of the Korean War, Jones shared his part in the conflict that chewed up soldiers by the hundreds of thousands and resolved itself into nothing more solid than a grim standoff.

Reared in Kansas, he was 19 when he enlisted in the U.S. Army before World War II.

"At the time, they had all black troops and all white troops," he said of the segregated Army.

He first trained with the cavalry, the men who took "We can. We will," as their motto and called themselves Buffalo Soldiers, the name the Plains Indians gave to the black cavalry regiments that served in the West in the decades after the Civil War.

Hastily trained as engineers, they were shipped out to North Africa.

"We built runways for the B-17s," he said. "Our troop could lay down a runway in three days. We moved from Africa all the way to the top of Italy on the same job. Then we went to the Pacific, Manila."

After V-J Day, Jones remained in the military, married, had a son, Willie, and was stationed at Fort Lewis.

"Everything was going good until June 1950," he said. "North Korea invaded South Korea."

Jones does not remember the name of the town where his division docked. He does remember the welcome.

"We got off the ship fighting," he said. "The first night we got off, we were shooting artillery. Within two days, we had the North Koreans moving. The Second Division went practically all the way to the Yalu River. There they came at us like people at the Puyallup. Thousands of them. We were no match for them."

All around him, troops retreated until the 200 men in his unit were stranded.

"They sacrificed our unit. You have to give up something to save the many," he said, with no trace of bitterness. "We had to split up to try to get back to any friendly army."

There were four of them at first.

"We had to leave one behind." Jones said. "He took sick and told us to go ahead, get back if we could. We didn't hear from him again."

Out of ammunition, the three remaining soldiers were captured Dec. 1, 1950, and pushed into a group of prisoners who were kept moving through a network of mountain caves. They ate boiled dried corn and a millet gruel so gritty it wore down their teeth. They suffered cold in the winter, insects in the summer and floods in between.

On any night, eight to 10 men died.

This went on, Jones said, for two years, until international pressure forced the North Koreans to settle prisoners into more humane camps.

He had been there a year when word arrived that hostilities had ended, and the POWs would be released within a month.

On Oct. 12, 1953, Tacoma welcomed 23 former prisoners home with a ceremony, a parade and a front page photo in the paper.

In it, the men stand together, some smiling bashfully.

Jones is near the center of the photo, looking awkward, uneasy in celebrity, an ordinary man home from three years in hell.


Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677
kathleen.merryman@mail.tribnet.com
The News Tribune ©2003 Tacoma News, Inc."