POW survivors ponder freedom's price
Memorial Day time to reflect on sacrifices
Art Thomason, The Arizona Republic
Jack Bomar, like many of his peers, has every reason to regret the loss of Memorial Day's true meaning for many Americans.
"The commercialism?" Bomar asked rhetorically. "I don't like it."
"They should at least think a little bit about the supreme price a lot of war veterans paid, why they're in those cemeteries and why it's called Memorial Day."
That's why Bomar, a tall, retired Air Force colonel with a ruddy complexion and a non-stop sense of humor, will join his peers Monday morning to lay wreathes in tribute to 2,500 veterans buried in an east Mesa cemetery.
"There'll be a lot of people there but not enough to call a crowd," the Mesa resident said of the commemoration at Mountain View Memorial Gardens. "To me, it's all about honoring these brave men and women who fought for this country and unfortunately got killed. A lot of people don't seem to realize that many of these veterans fought to preserve our freedom. And the trigger word is freedom. You can't realize what freedom is until you lose it."
The 79-year-old Bomar can. All six years and one month of it. A seeming lifetime in a barbaric, North Vietnam prisoner of war camp where torture was dished out more regularly than meals of "seaweed soup."
So can Dale Shebilsky, who will stand with Bomar at the flag-draped cemetery. And Rudy Vidmar, 82, who walked 800 miles as a prisoner of war on a forced march that killed American and allied troops during World War II.
Shebilsky, 81, of Mesa, will lead the East Valley Chapter of American Ex-Prisoners of War in the annual ceremony.
"People lose sight of some of the things that Memorial Day stands for," said the group's commander who was imprisoned and brutalized by Russian soldiers who mistook him for a German near the end of World War II.
Vidmar, who lives in Apache Junction, says the spirit of Memorial Day is eluding many Americans who have grown weary of war.
"I think people are so accustomed to all these wars we've been having, and Memorial Day doesn't mean anything to them," said the former Army Air Forces tech sergeant who was shot down over Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 24, 1944.
Bomar said he encourages people to visit cemeteries of the war dead during the Memorial Day weekend.
"Being there makes you remember," he said.
Jet shot down Feb. 4, 1967
Like his ex-POW colleagues, Bomar has much to remember. The atrocities for him began Feb. 4, 1967, after a Douglas EB66C Destroyer carrying Bomar and five other crew members was shot down more than 80 miles north of Hanoi by surface-to-air missiles.
Maj. Jack Williamson Bomar, the mission's navigator, was thrust to the front end of the cockpit as the two-engine jet, its tail assembly destroyed, plummeted end-over-end.
"I'm jammed sideways against the radar," Bomar recalled. "I managed to push the seat back with my legs to get it on the rails to eject."
As another missile found its target, ripping through the plane and erupting its fuel tank behind Bomar, he ejected into the frigid air. "When you hit the wind at 458 mph it's like hitting a brick wall," he said.
Spinning toward the ground with shrapnel in his left leg and the knuckles of his left hand left in the plane's cockpit, he opened the chute manually, only to find that some of its cords were between his legs.
"I was caught upside down," he said.
Bomar grabbed the parachute knife and cut four shroud lines. Then, in an upright position, he released his inflatable dingy over a rice paddy.
The harrowing experience would be the least of his problems for the next 73 months.
Eight villagers carrying spears converged on the navigator as he lay on his back, stripped him to his shorts and wired his thumbs behind his back.
Covered with mud and bleeding, he was beaten. "They just hammered me," he said.
His captors turned him over to North Vietnamese troops for more pummeling.
The jeep carrying him to Hanoi, he said, stopped at every village on the way, where he was thrown to the ground and beaten in a demonstration of revenge for bombings.
But the worst was yet to come in his eight months of solitary confinement in one of several camps and a complex derisively nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton where he held a water cup to the wall to listen to the Navy pilot communicating with him from the cell next door - now U.S. Sen. John McCain.
Over the years since his release on March, 4, 1973, Bomar, like many ex-POWs, has recounted his confinement in therapeutic sessions with his peers, in interviews and for investigators.
Their systematic torture, he knows, was also inflicted on his peers engaged in combat from World War II through the current conflict in Iraq.
"Our chapter offers prayers for our men and women in Iraq," Shebilsky said.
What's Memorial Day?
Memorial Day is a federal holiday observed the last Monday of May that commemorates men and women who died in military service for their country.
It first honored Union soldiers who died during the Civil War and was expanded after World War I to include those who died in any war or military action.
On June 28, 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Holidays Bill, which moved Memorial Day to Monday. The law took effect in 1971 at the federal level.