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Re: Remembering a Fallen Comrade

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: July 23, 2003

"Ex-POW remembers fallen comrade


By JEFF LESTER, Senior Writer

Wood Avenue was lined with people, gathered to watch a parade from Big Stone Gap High School to Bullitt Park in honor of three men. It was the first week of October 1953. The young men stood tall in their uniforms, but the clothes hung slack on their frail, emaciated frames. There were two Marines, James Kiser and Ray Thompson, and one soldier, Charles Ray Rines. Four years earlier, Rines weighed 158 pounds when he left his home in the Southern community, bound for Ft. Knox and basic training. But as he stood before the welcoming crowd that day in 1953, only 88 pounds of flesh and skin stretched tight against his bones.

Rines had been a free man for one month. He was home at last, a survivor of three years in a North Korean prisoner-of-war camp. The other men had also just been freed from captivity.

"My heart wasn't in that parade at all," Rines remembered during a phone interview from his Florida home last week.

Drawing pure oxygen into his weakened lungs, the 71-year-old man thought back to what the parade watchers saw as a moment of triumph for three young warriors, three who had survived an unthinkable ordeal of horror, torture and starvation.

As the crowd watched him and his colleagues, Rines could not savor the victory of survival. His mind was flooded with the memory of three comrades who would never see home again - Ronnie Barker, Guy Booth and Jack Tye.

Barker had been Rines' next-door neighbor on 3rd Avenue East. He was 17 when he left home to serve his country. He was 18 when he went to sleep for the last time, in a hut guarded by North Korean and Chinese communist troops.

After 18 more years of military service and 32 years of civilian life, after two marriages, children and grandchildren, Rines continues to ask a question that has no answer - why was it him who got to come home, and not Barker?

FRIENDS, COMRADES

Barker and Rines knew each other about one year when they enlisted in 1949. They would horse around, go to movies together and flirt with the girls.

Barker got a job delivering for a bakery. He was always bringing Rines' mother pies and cupcakes, Rines recalled.

Barker's sister, Iris Raymer, still lives just a couple of blocks from where they grew up. She had six brothers, all of whom eventually joined the military.

The kids would hang out on the street, she remembered, playing hide-and-seek or playing ball. The Barker kids and Rines would often get treated to a big meal by neighbor Anna Fletcher, who they nicknamed "Ma."

Ronnie never liked school that much, Raymer remembered. One day, a teacher slapped him, and he made up his mind not to go back, she said. At 17 years old, he decided to enlist.

Their mother tried to talk him out of it, but he was determined, and she finally signed the consent papers, Raymer said.

Barker and Rines had a farewell party with a few neighborhood girls. They played the kissing game "post office," Rines recalled. "There was no drinking."

After three months of basic training, Barker and Rines left Ft. Knox. Within months, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, and Barker talked Rines into volunteering for the U.S. invasion force sent in June 1950 to repel the communist aggression.

The pair, barely old enough to be called men, ended up in the Army's 2nd Infantry Division, as U.S. and United Nations forces pushed the communists from the Korean peninsula's southern tip almost to the Yalu River, North Korea's border with China.

In mid-September, Rines was hit in the shoulder by shrapnel during his unit's second attempt to capture a steep hill in far North Korea. "It wasn't bad enough for me to get sent back," he said.

The next day, Barker was wounded badly enough to be sent to a hospital in Japan for weeks. He returned to the fight in October.

CAPTIVES

By late November, the 2nd Infantry held strong positions at Kunu-ri, near the Ch'ongch'on River. Supreme allied commander Gen. Douglas McArthur intended to wipe out remaining North Korean forces, reunify the two embattled nations and send most of his troops home by Christmas.

Raymer still has a faded letter her brother wrote to "Ma" Fletcher on Nov. 10. Barker told her that the troops were living on stew, and once he got home he expected to get one of her delicious meals of fried chicken, biscuits and gravy. He told her that the fighting was rough, but she shouldn't worry. And he wrote that he saw the end in sight - he expected to be on a ship for home by Dec. 2.

A week before Barker wrote his letter, Chinese forces had entered the war with lighting attacks on U.S. troops not far away. Then the Chinese seemed to simply disappear.

McArthur believed only about 34,000 Chinese troops were in North Korea. In fact, ten times that many were hiding in the mountains.

The full Chinese force hurled itself at the 8th Army, which included the 2nd Infantry, on Nov. 25. By Nov. 28, U.S. troops could no longer hold their positions and began a fighting retreat down a road headed southwest. Units began to break down, and individual soldiers had to escape on their own.

Rines and Sgt. Jack Tye, of Harlan, Ky., were among thousands of troops who had to run a gauntlet of deadly Chinese fire raining down on the clogged highway to the south.

They hid from the Chinese onslaught for several days in bitter cold, their rifles too frozen to fire. Tye's feet were frostbitten. Finally, on Nov. 28, North Korean and Chinese troops ambushed and captured them.

On Dec. 2, the day he expected to get on the ship for home, Barker was captured as well.

A policeman brought a telegram to the Barker home, telling the family that he was missing in action. "Mom ran through the house, screaming and crying," Raymer recalled.

That was all the family knew of Barker's fate for nearly three years.

Rines and Tye were forced-marched through what became known as Death Valley. Gangrene set in Tye's leg. The communists would slice his feet to squeeze out the pus and eventually amputated his toes. Finally, Tye could not go on, and urged his friend to leave him behind.

Rines ended up in Camp Five, a collection of huts along the Yalu River, and was later reunited with his friend Guy Booth, of Macon, Ga.

Rines began to ask other prisoners if anyone was there from Big Stone Gap, Appalachia or nearby towns. Yes, he was told - a Barker guy, sitting in a nearby hut.

Rines snuck over and found his old friend sitting in summer-weight fatigues, combat boots and a parka. They talked about home, his mother's pinto beans, fried potatoes and cornbread.

Barker remained weak from his earlier wounds, Rines recalled.

POWs lived on a thin barley soup, seaweed and whole corn like that used to slop hogs. Lice infested their clothes and sucked their blood. The flesh began to shrink tight around their bones. While their bellies rumbled with hunger, the communists flooded their minds with endless lectures about the evil of capitalism.

Once, Rines and another friend, Harlan resident Charlie Combs, managed to lure a chicken to a fence, killed it, plucked it and started cooking it in a pot used to boil water. But a guard, nicknamed High Pockets, smelled the cooking flesh.

That was the People's Chicken, not theirs, he said, and ate the bird himself.

Thousands of men, frozen and starving, quietly drifted off to sleep and never awoke that winter, Rines said. Stronger POWs would volunteer to carry their bodies to a nearby ravine for burial.

That's how Booth died. And on March 15, 1951, Barker's struggle with pain and hunger ended the same way.

Rines endured captivity in two more POW camps.

He was finally released in September 1953, in the last big exchange of prisoners, more than two months after a cease-fire took effect.

Only about two months later, Rines re-enlisted.

Around the same time, Barker's family finally learned that he had died in the prison camp.

The pain was mixed with relief, Raymer recalled. Ronnie wasn't suffering anymore.

Later, the family got a letter from a minister who had been in the same camp. Ronnie had been praying and preaching to other POWs when he died, the man wrote.

THE WILL TO GO ON

Rines made a career of the Army and served a tour of duty in Thailand in 1964, when the U.S. was on the eve of intervening in Vietnam's civil war. He retired in 1971 as a sergeant first class, rather than accepting an assignment to Saigon, because he was divorced and believed he must stay home for his children.

Across the decades, Rines never forgot that being alive is a privilege. His memory was haunted by the faces of Barker, Booth and Tye, slowly dying in the cold of North Korea.

Rines never knew what became of Barker's remains. He finally found out last May, when he spoke to Raymer for the first time in decades.

Raymer said before they shipped out for Korea, Ronnie and her older brother J.J. made a pact - if one of them didn't survive, the other would bring him home for burial.

In January 1955, J.J. journeyed to Korea and recovered his brother's remains. Ronnie was buried in a family cemetery on a lush green hilltop in Cracker's Neck, his grave marked by a government-issued white marble footstone


After speaking to Raymer, Rines decided to send her a gift. He obtained copies of Barker's medals, ribbons and commendations, mounted them in frames and sent them to Big Stone Gap.

A few months ago, Rines arranged for a new granite headstone to be placed on the grave, with a POW medallion set in the center. He arranged for installation of a pole bearing the U.S. flag and the POW-MIA flag.

As the weight of age and poor health slowly descend on his body, Rines is determined to keep the memory of his friend alive.

Freedom is bought by the sacrifices of young men, Rines believes. There were many heroes in Korea, he explained - they never came home.

"I've enjoyed freedom," he said. "I got to have a marriage, two marriages. I had kids and grandkids. Those guys never got to have that."

Raymer knows that Rines wrestles every day with the unanswerable question, the cruel mystery of why one soldier gets to grow old while another is cut down in his youth.

"I don't know what I can do for Charles Ray, except talk to him," Raymer said sadly. "The only thing that helps is time."

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