News-Info-Alerts

Re: Vietnam POW Inspires

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: July 27, 2003

"Vietnam POW inspires crowd

By CHUCK MARTIN Staff Writer Times Recorder

ZANESVILLE -- We need to change the way we see the world and the power of human potential is boundless, retired Air Force Col. Edward Hubbard told an audience of more than 130 people Monday evening.

Hubbard, in an appearance sponsored by the local Edward Jones investment office, drew on his experience as a prisoner of war in a North Vietnamese prison camp for 6 1/2 years to explain how people can expand their accomplishments despite adversity.

"I liked the talk very much," said Mary Shrader of Philo. "It was inspirational and motivational. All young people should hear this."

"I enjoyed the talk," said Bob Johnson of Zanesville. "He said a lot of things very well."

After he was shot down and captured near Hanoi in July 1966, Hubbard told the audience, all he had left was his attitude and his self-pity.

"My mother would say I was born with a bad attitude," Hubbard said.

But in December, while in solitary confinement in a small cell that took him only three steps to cross diagonally, he had to confront how to deal with his first Christmas in a cell. He remembered then, the story from his childhood about the man who had no shoes thinking he had it bad until he met a man who had no feet.

"There's always someone who has it worse," Hubbard said. "I realized that 99 percent of the people in the world had it worse because I was an American."

Until this time, Hubbard said, he had believed he would die in prison, but now, he explained, he elected to survive.

He described some of the things the prisoners did to help them survive. The most important was communicating.

At a time when they were not to make any noise heard outside their cells, they communicated by tapping on the walls, using a universal tapping code that one of them had read about being used by prisoners in earlier times.

It was a tedious process, he said, noting that "it could take all morning to tell a joke." So they improvised, abbreviating almost every word.

The ranking officer ordered regular physical conditioning and the prisoners used this to create challenges. Hubbard told how he and a Naval officer in the next cell had monthly contests doing push-ups, sit-ups and jumping rope.

"By the time I was released I held the world record for jumping rope," Hubbard said. "The Naval officer had the record, but he got out 20 days before I did."

They tapped out and memorized the entire 36 verses of Rudyard Kipling's poem "East and West" and Hubbard became fluent in Spanish by communicating with Capt. Edward Alvarez, the first Navy pilot captured in the war.

After coming home, Hubbard passed a course in Spanish without taking a class, and another prisoner got college credit for four languages: Spanish, German French and Russian.

His point was that we limit ourselves by our attitudes and we have to learn to do everything to the best of our abilities and do it better the next day.

"Everything we do in the United States, we could be doing better," Hubbard said.

We too often become convinced that a problem can't be solved, but if we would just work on improving things a little bit each day, soon the problem would be gone.

"We're limited by what we think we can do and how much effort we're willing to put into it," Hubbard said.

cmartin@nncogannett.com

©2003 Times Recorder"