News-Info-Alerts

Re: Korean War POW Shares His Story

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: September 25, 2003

"Former POW shares story here


Many a night, troubled by dreams and nightmares, I woke, asking 'why me?''' said former prisoner of war Richard Bassett, in reference to why his life was spared while others died during the Korean War. In response to his haunting question, he rationalized an answer: ''God is not finished with me.''

During his remarks as guest speaker during Prisoner of War - Missing in Action Day at the chapel here last week, Bassett, a former U. S. Army rifleman, recounted his experiences while captive during the Korean War. ''You can't forget it,'' he said. ''You can't forget it.''

While on patrol in Korea on Oct. 16, 1951, in front of the main line of resistance, the enemy ambushed Bassett's squad and ''opened up with everything they had.'' The first two men died quickly and a third received wounds in a firefight that seemed to last an ''eternity.'' Bassett, the fifth man in the squad, saw the fourth soldier nearby, surrounded by Chinese soldiers, his hands raised in surrender. Shortly thereafter, Bassett raised his hands to surrender as well.

''When you've lost your freedom, you've lost it all,'' he said.

For the next 22 months and six days, he endured countless atrocities and great suffering during his captivity. The Chinese took away his uniform, gave him a lice infested, ill-fitting North Korean uniform, and marched and trucked him away from the front. Along the way, American planes strafed his convoy.

''You could see the tracer bullets coming in and we had nowhere to go,'' he said. ''It was a lonesome, lonesome feeling.''

Ultimately, Bassett wound up in a place called Camp Five, where he lived with 14 other prisoners in a small, cold mud hut where they ate what he called ''bird seed, dog food, and cattle feed.'' They survived off approximately 750-800 calories a day.''

''It was not enough to keep you healthy or well,'' said Bassett. The inadequate diet caused the men to have chronic dysentery, night blindness, and cracked skin.

Over the course of his incarceration as a POW, Bassett's captors regularly interrogated him, subjected him to communist propaganda, and told him lies about how the Americans were being gravely defeated in the war. Lies he said ''we didn't believe.''

Bassett was one of the last POWs to be released from Camp Five. On the day of his release, August 12, 1953, he said, ''I saw that American flag and boo-hoo'd. I'm not ashamed to admit. I was free, I was free.''

While Bassett survived his POW ordeal and returned to America, rolls still list over 8,000 Americans as MIA during the Korean War.

Bassett enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve Corps in 1945 and was called to active duty on January 3, 1951. After completing basic training at Ft. Jackson, S.C., he was assigned as a rifleman for the 25th Infantry, 14th Regiment, 3rd Battalion, I Company, 1st Squadron in Korea. He married his wife, Valdeen Martha Banks, in 1957. Bassett served as an educator for 31 years in St. Johns County, Florida.

You can read Bassett's memoirs about his POW experience in a book entitled ''And the Wind Blew Cold.''
  
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