News-Info-Alerts

Re: The Sound of Freedom

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 12, 2003

"Jets held ex-POW's 'sound of freedom'

by AMY MARTINEZ STARKE


Ted Harris bought wonderful sailing yachts and built dream houses brick by brick and furnished them. He bought all the cattle ranches in Texas and sold beef, always when the market was high.

Ted created this fantasy life while sitting in a dirty hole and trying to stay sane while blindfolded, burned and beaten as a prisoner of war kept in solitary confinement in North Korea and China for 14 months. Interrogators sometimes put him in a box and pounded on it for hours; he once had to dig his own grave.

He lost 75 pounds. His captors offered him release if he would confess to participating in germ warfare. But the B-29 pilot hadn't, and he wasn't going to say he had.

"I signed nothing, admitted nothing," he later said proudly. "I would not confess to false charges."

He was the last man out during repatriation of POWs after the Korean War ended. "I'm the last man?" Ted asked in surprise, as he climbed out of the truck.

Ted Harris, retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, died of cancer one day -- Sept. 5, 2003 -- before the 50th anniversary of his release.

The Air Force created a recruiting poster with his picture on it, beside a picture of Patrick Henry, using him as an example for military resistance: "If I can't go back with my self-respect, I won't go back at all," he said. The poster is hanging in his den.

His wife, Betty, wrote him letters for every day of his captivity; he had no need to read them. He was grateful to be back, and that chapter was done, behind him.

His ordeal left him afraid of little, with little patience for "whiners," corporate politics or religious hypocrisy. He said what he thought and bruised a few egos along the way. Problems seemed to roll off him. "Not to worry," he would say. Seeing Sophia Loren, sitting by herself at a party in Italy, he figured what the heck and asked her to dance, and she did.

Ted was an only child. The Gresham Union High School football jock married Betty Maley, the drum majorette, in 1942 after his graduation in 1941. He never went to college; the war needed him, and he became a dashing aviation cadet. He was twice shot down in Europe but evaded capture.

He left the service in 1945; he and Betty had a daughter and moved to Los Angeles. But he volunteered for recall during the Korean War. He was shot down and captured on a reconnaissance mission July 3, 1952.

After his release, he flew almost every plane the Air Force had. He thought the Soviet Union was a threat and that he had to safeguard democracy. Jet aircraft noise for him was the "sound of freedom."

He wanted to volunteer for Vietnam, but his wife said no, that he had done his duty. Although he loved flying, he hated military bureaucracy: "Let's just get in and get the job done and get out," he would say. He retired from the Air Force in 1975 and with his wife moved back to Gresham.

After so much Air Force travel, the couple stayed home a lot. He watched "JAG," read Tom Clancy and read the "Left Behind" series aloud to his wife in the evening.

He had every line of the TV show "Hogan's Heroes" memorized and didn't seem to resent his captors: They were only doing their jobs.

He felt lucky that he had not been an earthbound "ground pounder": He had worn silver wings and was a pilot, wheels up, racing around the big silvery clouds, listening to the wind racing around his plane.

Amy Martinez Starke: 503-221-8534; amystarke@news.oregonian.com

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