Veterans From 3 Wars Recall Days as POWs

The observance of POW/MIA Day Friday at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration Medical Center was unrehearsed, uncensored and pretty much unpredictable.

About 50 former prisoners of war, mostly from World War II, attended the San Fernando Valley’s only formal ceremony on the national day of recognition for prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action in America’s wars.

In an hour and a half, they heard ex-POWs from three wars and both sexes spill a lot of emotion and a lot of points of view--not all of them in sync.

There were several common threads, however, such as freedom and hunger and rejection, and the trouble an ex-POW can have coming to grips with it all.

Ex-POW Matthew Buttiglieri, chief psychologist and administrator of the Sepulveda VA’s POW program, began the event by showing a videotape of interviews with Army and Navy nurses who were held captive by the Japanese in camps in the Philippines. With clever editing, their voices at times turned out an almost chanting repetition of the word hunger .

One recalled seeing a chicken outside the barbed-wire fence of her compound.

“The only thing we could think of was getting that chicken so we could make a stew,” the demure-looking woman said.

Another remembered that, on her liberation day, a soldier gave her a candy bar, and she saved half of it.

“We were always saving food,” she said. “We never threw anything away. I still never throw anything away.”

Then Buttiglieri called to the stage one of the women who was in that video, Evelyn Greenfield.

“I love this flag,” Greenfield said, looking at the standard posted beside her.

But Greenfield couldn’t endorse everything done under the guise of patriotism.

She said she was asked to attend the preview of a soon-to-be-released television movie about woman POWs but declined when she heard it portrayed rape and torture of the women.

“It was rough. It was hungry days. But we were not mistreated,” Greenfield said. “We were not raped. We did not have Japanese children.”

Jackson Scott, another prisoner of the Japanese, remembered it differently.

A Different Memory

“Unlike the nurse who so eloquently spoke earlier, I did receive several serious beatings, one for whistling while I worked,” he said.

For Scott, liberation didn’t bring perfect bliss right away.

He said he weighed only 87 pounds when he was released but jumped to 187 pounds by the time he was released from the hospital.

“It was all fat,” he said.

In spite of medical problems resulting from his imprisonment, Scott said he couldn’t get help from the VA.

After being “poked and examined, poked and examined,” he said he was sent away. “The VA couldn’t find anything in my favor.”

But there was a happy ending.

“Eventually, through no fault of my own, Public Law 9737 was passed and things changed,” he said.

Benefits Law

That law, the Prisoner of War Benefits Act of 1981, provides POWs the right to an examination at the VA to identify any long-term psychological or medical problems caused by their internment, Buttiglieri said. The law also provides continuous treatment for those problems, he said.

The next speaker began with a disclaimer.

“If any of you will get squeamish about my talking about God, hang onto your seats, because it is attributable to His grace that I’m here,” the next speaker, Korean War POW William Jones began.

However, Jones went on to talk mostly about communism.

“We’ve got one common enemy out there, and that’s communism,” he said during a rambling talk. Later, as evidence of the softness of character the communists are waiting to prey on, he acknowledged:

“My 20-year-old daughter spends more time with her electric hair curler than she does thinking about voting.”

As this went on, one man in the audience walked out, shouting, “Give it up. Sit down.”

“Go sit down yourself,” somebody else shouted back.

When Jones did sit down, he got an ovation.

Vietnam Songs

Finally, Vietnam Veteran Sam Jacobs brought the program to an end by singing two songs he composed, one about the black granite Vietnam memorial in Washington engraved with the names of the dead.

He said he was tricked by his wife to go see a traveling replica of the memorial that was visiting Santa Barbara. There, Jacobs said, he was standing in tears, staring at a dead buddy’s name when a member of a veterans’ organization put his arm around him and said, “Welcome home.”

For 18 years, Jacobs said, he had dismissed the veterans such as those in the audience as “old warriors trying to remember.”

“Now, come to find out, I’m one of you,” Jacobs said, “an old warrior trying to remember.”