Forgotten Marine’s Tribulations Didn’t End With Captivity : Korean War: Nick Flores’ sacrifices counted for naught when he returned to the States. He was denied an honorable discharge and refused a commendation--until POW-MIA investigators found his records.

Nick A. Flores cheated death during 33 harrowing months as a prisoner of war in Korea.

He survived a winter death march. He spent months in solitary confinement. He attempted to escape three times, each a failure. He was tortured. His was a soldier’s sacrifice, a hell on earth.

Flores endured, and finally came home in 1953.

Back in America, though, the Marine Corps corporal was to suffer again--this time at the hands of the government he had fought to defend.

He was denied an honorable discharge, refused a commendation and left to think, “Of all the things I have done for my country, it seems I didn’t do my share.”

Today, as a result of an extraordinary sequence of events, Flores is a decorated hero. The hard times, if not the painful memories, are gone.

Flores might have lived the rest of his life wondering where he’d gone wrong if not for the dogged research efforts of U.S. officials investigating POW-MIA issues. Knowing nothing of his story, they unexpectedly came upon the Flores file in the National Archives this year and realized he had been cheated.

In a quiet ceremony at Marine Corps headquarters in Washington on Aug. 6, Gen. Walter Boomer, assistant commandant of the Corps, presented Flores with not only his honorable discharge but a Prisoner of War Medal as well.

“I want to make amends,” Boomer told Flores, 62, a slight man with a ready smile.

In Korea, surrounded by disease, despair and death, Flores did more than most people could imagine to defy the enemy, comfort his own and remain true to his country.

“I highly recommend this man for his courage and valor,” Master Sgt. William R. Pettit, the senior officer in the POW camp where Flores was kept, wrote to his superiors on Dec. 10, 1953, four months after he and Flores were repatriated.

“I have known him to give his clothes, food, tobacco ration, and to make moccasins from old boots and gave them to the men that had frozen feet (including myself) to wear,” Pettit wrote of Flores’ “exemplary conduct.”

But when Flores returned home to San Jose, Calif., the Marine Corps denied him an honorable discharge. In some ways, it was a slap that hurt more than the weeks-long death march he endured in the snow-covered mountains of northern Korea or the months of solitary confinement he outlasted in POW camps.

Without an honorable discharge he was unable to get union wages. A carpenter by trade, he was unable to work regularly because of a back injury suffered in Korea. But the Veterans Administration refused to recognize the injury as service related.

“It has been 14 years of hell here in California since I got home,” Flores wrote in a letter to his congressman in December, 1965. “I didn’t reach the breaking point in Korea with all the torture and hell that the Chinese gave me, but I am getting close to it now.”

In Korea he escaped his captors three times, was recaptured after each and survived severe punishments.

“He continually opposed the efforts of his captors to indoctrinate him and undermine his loyalty, and steadfastly maintained his allegiance to his country,” said a citation proposed in 1954 to recognize his “meritorious conduct” as a POW.

But when he got home there was no official commendation. None other than the commandant of the Marine Corps proposed Flores for a Letter of Commendation, but it was turned down by the civilian leadership of the Navy Department.

“Insufficient evidence exists upon which to pass a decision,” Albert Pratt, the assistant Navy secretary, wrote in denying the award on March 18, 1955.

In 1967, after a further appeal by Flores, the commendation was granted but nothing was done about his discharge status.

Records in the Flores file show that when he was discharged in San Francisco on Oct. 5, 1953, he was given no credit for the time he spent in captivity.

The discharge system worked on a point system. Flores fell just short of the minimum for an honorable discharge. Points charged against him prior to Korea for such minor offenses as being 15 minutes late for duty should have been more than offset by points for having spent 33 months as a prisoner of war.

Instead, his discharge score sheet has lines drawn through the box where he should have been awarded points for Korea.

Flores never saw the score sheet.

“When you’ve been a POW you’re happy just to be home and you don’t question it,” he said in a recent interview, with no trace of bitterness or regret.

Flores, who joined the Marines at age 17 and was sent to Korea three years later, piled over the sea wall with the 1st Marine Division in the famous Inchon landing on Sept. 15, 1950. After marching northeast to Hamhung on Korea’s eastern coast, the Marines in late November headed north toward the Changjin Reservoir, where bitter winter winds came howling off the roof of the world.

On the evening of Nov. 29, Flores’ unit was overrun by Chinese a few miles from the village of Koto-ri and forced to surrender the next morning. In early December, Flores says, he slipped away from the column of captured Marines as they marched in darkness through the snow, but he was quickly recaptured.

In June, 1951, he made his second escape. He and his buddy, Army Cpl. Thomas Cabello, of Adrian, Mich., were caught after four or five days and returned to the POW camp, known as Camp One, near the Yalu River, where Flores and others said almost no medical aid was available to the sick and injured.

“Men just died. They got dysentery and died,” Cabello recalled in an interview.

In his fateful third escape, Flores again teamed up with Cabello. Armed with maps, a compass and flashlight that Flores had stolen from Chinese officers, they and several other fellow captives got by their guard and headed for the mountains. After several days all had turned back except Flores and Cabello.

Eventually the two split up, and shortly afterward Flores was captured when he happened onto what he says was a Soviet anti-aircraft artillery emplacement.

Back in the POW camp, Flores was first “hung out to dry” on a wood pole, then convicted of “crimes against the Chinese People’s Army” and sentenced to 12 months’ solitary confinement. Ten months later the war ended and Flores was released.

He weighed 87 pounds.

Maj. Gen. Randolph McCall Pate, the commanding general of the 1st Marine Division, was so impressed by stories that returning POWs told about Flores’ acts of courage and loyalty that he asked to see Flores when he was released on Aug. 20, 1953.

“He said he wanted to congratulate me for what I’d done,” Flores said. “He told me, ‘I’m sure you’ll get one of the highest honors this country has to give.”