POW history bus to stop at Friends U.
BECCY TANNER, The Wichita Eagle
At the beginning of the Korean War, Cpl. Carroll Everist was taken prisoner for three days.
He had been shot in the left knee. His commanding officer offered him an aid patch and carried him.
Chinese captors smashed the heads of Everist's commanding officer and the other men who had been taken prisoner, he said. He pretended to be insane. He had heard that the Chinese considered being crazy worse than being dead.
He survived, and U.S. soldiers were able to rescue him.
Everist, 76, of Mulvane, is expected to join a panel discussion of the POW experience at 7 p.m. tonight in Room 100 of the William Penn Science Building at Friends University.
He says his biggest concern is that many bodies of POWs remain buried in Korean camps.
"Of the eight of us, I was the only one who came out alive," he said. "We can't bring them home. We can't because we don't have a peace treaty with North Korea."
The panel discussion coincides with a traveling exhibit at Friends University from 3 to 7 p.m. today. The exhibit, which is presented on a bus, is called "Behind Barbed Wire: Midwest POWs in Germany." It comes to Friends courtesy of the TRACES museum in St. Paul, Minn.
Both the exhibit and panel are sponsored by the VFW and AMVETS.
Friends University professor Gretchen Eick, who helped coordinate the panel, said it will explore such questions as:
** Why did some POWs survive certain conditions or experiences while others didn't?
** How did liberated POWs come to terms with their experiences?
** How do countries once in armed conflict reconcile and move beyond war?
"We will end with current discussions on how the U.S. treats POWs," Eick said.
Eddie Graham, 90, of Wichita, was among those who survived the Bataan Death March in World War II. He plans to attend the discussion tonight.
He was part of a starving and exhausted U.S. force at Bataan in the Philippines who surrendered to the Japanese. Thousands of these soldiers were marched on a 90-mile trail that included deprivation, brutality and torture.
Those who survived faced years of brutal captivity; one-third died before the war's end.
"As long as I kept walking and didn't get out of line, I was all right," he said. "I had malaria at the time. Of the 2,700 men in my unit, about half came back alive. They died of mistreatment, malnutrition and sickness."
He was beaten when he took a drink of cold water. He has no memory of it.
"I survived by faith," Graham said. "I made up my mind I was going to come back."
Wichita Eagle (KS)