Chinese felon or class enemy. No great pressures would be put on him, other than those of starvation, lack of medical care, and a certain amount of indoctrination.
This was the Lenient Policy. All American POW's, however, were not subject to it. Airmen, in particular, who were bombing North Korea to rubble, rousing the hatred of both Chinese and Koreans, were criminals from the start. Later, when the typhus carried across the Yalu by the CCF hordes spread to the civil population, airmen would be accused of germ warfare, giving the CCF both an out and a chance at a propaganda coup.
Airmen, and some others, would be put under acute stress to confess alleged war crimes. Some were put in solitary. Some were physically tortured. All were starved and interrogated until their nerves shrieked. They were treated in almost the identical way that political prisoners had been treated by Communists for a generation.
Even under the Lenient Policy, no relief parcels were allowed to be delivered to Communist POW's, nor were any neutral observers, at any time, allowed to inspect the prison camps.
Communists saw no reason why Americans should have special privileges not given to their own people.
When he had told them of the Lenient Policy, the officer told the shivering, tired, fearful POW's one thing more:
'Everybody here is the same. No officers, no N.C.O.'s here. Everybody is equal!'
It has always been customary to separate officers from sergeants, and sergeants from other ranks, in POW camps. It is the most effective way of breaking down possible resistance and cohesion in any group of prisoners, American or Hungarian. But the Chinese tried a new twist.
'No one here has any rank—you are all the same,' the Chinese said. To Sergeant Schlichter's horror, this had an immediate appeal for many men.
One soldier went up to an officer and slapped him on the back. 'Hey, Jack, how the hell are you?' He thought it was very funny.
The Chinese smiled, too.
In this way, and in others, such as putting ranking POW's on the most degrading jobs, the Chinese broke what little discipline remained in the POW ranks. The officers themselves did not quite know what to do. To many of them, it seemed self-aggrandizing, almost totalitarian, to insist upon their right to command, since they were only captives, too. Most of them did nothing.
The officers and sergeants, as well as the young men, faced a new situation, for which they were wholly unprepared.
Morale, among the captives, was already gone. Now the last shred of discipline went, and with it went many Americans' hope of surviving.
There was no one to give the POW's direction, except the Chinese. Among the Americans, it could not be anything but dog eat dog, hooray for me, and to hell with you.
The disciplines that hold men together in the face of fear, hunger, and danger are not natural. Stresses equal to, and beyond, the stress of fear and panic must be overlaid on men. Some of these stresses are called civilization. And even the highest of civilizations demands leadership. There has to be a Chief Executive of the United States, with the power to bully and chivvy both the Congress and the people, sometimes into doing what is necessary for their own good.
In Death Valley, there was no one to bully and chivvy the wretched prisoners but the Chinese, who had no American's welfare at heart. Men did not hold together, but came apart, dissolved into individuals, governed only by their individual consciences. And as fear, cold, sickness, and starvation deepened, conscience shallowed.
The controls of civilization make men, often against their will, become their brother's keepers. When the controls are taken away, it is but a step to becoming their brother's killers. The veneer of civilized decency is much thinner than most Americans, even after seeing Auschwitz and Belsen, think.
Civilization is a fragile discipline, at best. In Death Valley it disappeared.
The prisoners, in subzero weather, were huddled into filthy huts where there was not room enough even to sleep comfortably. Men lay on the odorous ground, pressed tight against each other at night, week after week.
The food they received daily, in a bucket, was not enough to keep the aver-age American in decent health. Rapidly, they began to starve.
A number had combat wounds that had received only cursory treatment. Infection and dysentery seared them, making the huts even more horrible.
What medical care they received was pitiful by any standard.
Sergeant Schlichter, rather than an Army doctor, was placed in charge of the camp hospital, in accordance with the CCF policy of humiliating officers. The hospital was an old North Korean school building, high-roofed, heated by two pot-bellied stoves, without pipes.
The stoves had only green wood to burn, and the smoke lay across the room like a blanket of death. Sergeant Schlichter and his surgeon, Captain Shadish, had to crawl about on their hands and knees to keep from choking.
The crude 'hospital' had pallets for only sixty men, among the hundreds who had untreated combat wounds, dysentery, pneumonia, jaundice, and psychic disorders. The Chinese allowed Shadish exactly enough medicines to give four men one sulfa tablet four times a day.
Each day, Shadish and Schlichter, crawling from man to man, had to play God. To the four men who had the best chance to live, they administered the sulfa. The worse off, Schlichter said later, 'We committed to God's care.'
Men died.
Each morning Charles Schlichter came into the hospital and said, 'Sit up.' Then he said, 'If the man next to you can't sit up, shake him. If he doesn't move, call me—'
Then, after those who could sat up to be counted, Schlichter and Shadish carried out the dead. The ground was frozen, and they had no tools, but at first, while they still had strength, the bodies were buried in shallow graves. Later, when their strength began to fail, they turned the bodies over to a detail of South Korean prisoners. The ROK's threw the emaciated bodies on the ground outside the camp.
The prisoners remained in Death Valley from the day after Christmas until 12 March 1951, and each day men died. They died of war wounds, of infection, pneumonia, dysentery. In most cases malnutrition was a contributing factor.
The prisoners continued to receive only a diet of millet and maize, boiled in a pot, delivered in a bucket, supplemented by dog. But the dogs grew more wary, and the prisoners weaker. Without salt, greens, or essential minerals, they sickened.
The sick and those with war wounds died first. Then the men without faith began to die, often, seemingly, of nothing at all.
The youngest men, oddly, died first.
Schlichter, who never lost his determination to live to return, or his faith in God, believed that most who died didn't have to die. For the first time in his life, he wondered if the will to die, when men's worlds have been turned upside down, was not stronger than the urge to live.
There were men who had grown up with no strong belief in anything; they had received no faith from parents, school, or church. They had no spiritual home or haven. Exposed to horror and misery, when the man with the gun cut the line to home, destroyed every material reason for living, they could not adjust. They no longer wanted to live.
Schlichter saw men who refused to eat the meager slop he was eating, in his own effort to stay alive. He heard men mumble fantasies, living in a dream world of their own warm, protected past. One boy angrily told him, as he urged the youth to eat, 'My parents never made me do things like this!'
Another told him one night, sobbing, 'I know my mother is bringing me a pie tonight—a pie, Sergeant.'
In Charles Schlichter grew a feeling, which he never lost, that some American mothers had given their sons everything in the world, except a belief in themselves, their culture, and their manhood. They had, some of them, sent their sons out into a world with tigers without telling them that there were tigers, and with no moral armament.
Most of those who could adjust, who wanted to live on, lived. It helped if a man could hold to something. Some lived simply because they came to hate the Chinese so much.
And there were some, determined to live, who took food from the sick and dying, and there was no one to say them nay.
