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| MG Ed Mechenbiertalks of his POW days. |
My whole military career was spent in the Military Police Corps, devoted to the operation of Enemy Prisoner of War camps. My fellow MPs and I spent a great deal of time training on this mission, and several years operating these camps for both military operations around the world as well civilian contingencies (Cuban Boat People). We became the Army's "resident experts" in this type of mission.
Having said that, I know what goes on behind the wire when we are running the camps. So I thought it would be good to hear about these camps from someone who spent all those years on the other side of the wire. That is what took us to Troy on that snowy, cold and blowing night. It was not a wasted trip.
MG Mechenbier talked about the things I would have expected him to discuss and pretty much stayed away from the rest -- politics of the war, treatments when he got home, physical and mental abuse. His story was one that just bordered on the edge of "man's inhumanity to man." At any time he could very easily crossed the line he set for himself and taken us into tales of horror. Instead, he talked about his fellow captives, how they communicated with each other, food (and how many individual grains of rice are on each place that was served to them over those 5+ years), living conditions, and relations they had with each other and how they maintained a system of military order and demeanor.
You can click on these pictures to enlarge them and see (left) the hand signals they used to represent the letters of the alphabet, and (right) a drawing of one of the confinement areas.
During his talk, I was thinking of some of the things I saw during our operations and things that were reported to us by our guards, comparing them to what he would say.
The evening was very short, the talk light and not the place where anyone was going to get very deep into the subject. There were a couple of Jane Fonda questions, and he was asked if he ever went back to see that area again or had ever run into any of his captors after the war. But that was as deep as it got. And following the talk, there was such a line to meet him, and the snow was piling up quickly, so any other chance of talking about the view from both sides of the fence was impossible.
It was good anyhow to meet him and hear his story. A pretty fair sprinkling of former military members populated the audience. But one other nice thing was the number of young school people who were there. I assume from the notebooks they had out and the furious writing and note-taking they were doing that this was a class extra-credit project. First of all, kudos to the teacher from Tipp City who gave the students this opportunity to learn something of value about that war and its warriors, an opportunity to learn something that hasn't been changed over the years thru political correctness to reflect some fantasy that wasn't even close to the realty of the moment. And a tip of the hat to those young people. It is good that they hear first-hand stories of this kind so these lessons won't disappear from our country's moral and ethical and historical memory. Glad I went. Glad I got to hear his perspective from his side of the wire.
“In prison, I fell in love with my country. I had loved her before then,
but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple
appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and
took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I
realized how much I loved her. ” (J. McCain)
Hooah
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