Pow Quotes

“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. ”
― John McCain, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir

“War is not just the shower of bullets and bombs from both sides, it is also the shower of blood and bones on both sides.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“[Someone in the POW camp] said, ‘Look down there at the main gate!’, and the American flag was flying! We went berserk, we just went berserk! We were looking at the goon tower and there’s no goons there, there are Americans up there! And we saw the American flag, I mean—to this day I start to well up when I see the flag." -Sam Lisica, former prisoner of war, WWII ~ The Things Our Fathers Saw, Vol. III”
― Matthew A. Rozell, The Things Our Fathers Saw - Vol. 3, The War In The Air Book Two: The Untold Stories of the World War II Generation from Hometown, USA

“When Green Beret Lieutenant James N. Rowe was captured in 1963 in Vietnam, his life became more than a matter of staying alive. In a Vietcong POW camp, Rowe endured beriberi, dysentery, and tropical fungus diseases. He suffered grueling psychological and physical torment. He experienced the loneliness and frustration of watching his friends die. And he struggled every day to maintain faith in himself as a soldier and in his country as it appeared to be turning against him. His survival is testimony to the disciplined human spirit.

He was gunned down in Manila in 1989”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Salty & Saucy Maine",

“The Germans did not like to use the searchlights, especially on nights when there were British bombing raids on nearby installations. Even the most uneducated German soldier could guess that from the air the sight of probing searchlights would make the camp appear to be an ammunition dump or a manufacturing plant, and some hard-pressed Lancaster pilot, having fought off frightening raids by Luftwaffe night fighters, might make an error and drop his stick of bombs right on top of them.

So the searchlight use was erratic, which only made them more terrifying to anyone who wanted to maneuver from one hut to another at night. It was difficult to time their sweeps because they were so haphazard.”
― John Katzenbach, Hart's War

“He shuddered at the idea of digging beneath the surface. It would be stifling, hot, filthy, and dangerous. The ferrets also occasionally commandeered a heavy truck, loaded it with men and material, and drove it, bouncing along, around the outside perimeter of the camp. They believed the weight would cause any underground tunnel to collapse. Once, more than a year earlier, they'd been right. He remembered the fury on Colonel MacNamara's face when the long days and nights of hard work were so summarily crushed.”
― John Katzenbach, Hart's War