NEW COMPASSION FOR THE PRISONER OF WAR

THE choice that faced Commander Lloyd Bucher was between seeing his men shot one by one before his eyes or signing a false confession. He signed--and in that act illuminated the whole agonizing dilemma of weighing military duty against elementary humanity--and often against self-preservation.

The U.S. defense establishment is thoroughly divided on the issue. The Army still insists that P.O.W.s reveal nothing more than name, rank and service number, as prescribed by the Code of Conduct. "It is a simple, single, clear standard to all services," says former Army Chief of Staff General Harold Johnson. "If you have mushy instructions, you have mushy performance." The Air Force, on the other hand, draws an informal distinction between disclosing military intelligence and signing propaganda statements. It values its flyers too much to sacrifice them just to avoid some national embarrassment. Hence, they are tacitly permitted, if shot down, to cooperate with the enemy to preserve their lives and wellbeing.

The U.S. Navy is obviously groping for a standard. The Judge Advocate General ruled that the Pueblo crewmen were not prisoners of war since the U.S. is not at war with North Korea; instead, they are "illegal detainees." Paul Warnke, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, finds it "unthinkable that these men will be court-martialed for signing a false statement. All the confession shows is the bestiality of the treatment they received. The harm done to the national interest is next to nil."

Focus on Confession

Modern times have placed new emphasis on the P.O.W. In wars gone by, a man taken prisoner was considered to be out of the war. Often enough, he was killed on the spot; if he lived, he was often mistreated. As far as his superiors were concerned, he had proved himself on the field; they were happy if he did not defect to the enemy. But in this century of total war, the prison camp has become an extension of the battlefield. Totalitarian nations are not content merely to extract information from a P.O.W. They often hound and harass a man for months and even years in order to win his mind and soul, to reduce him to an instrument of propaganda. It is, of course, a tactic that the Soviet Union devised for use against its own political prisoners, as dramatized with terrifying realism in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and

George Orwell's 1984. In this sense the prisoner of war has become a symbolic stand-in for all men in this century who are subjected to the relentless pressures designed to capture and transform their minds.

That is one reason why brainwashing became a subject of morbid fascination in the 1950s, popularly expressed in the movie The Manchurian Candidate. The Communists seemed to have the capacity to break anyone--Cardinal Mindszenty, for instance, or the U.S. journalist William Oatis, who in 1951 confessed to a charge of espionage in Czechoslovakia and spent more than two years in jail. The Korean War confirmed the worst U.S. expectations. The Chinese not only broke down many P.O.W.s, causing them to collaborate; they also persuaded 21 P.O.W.s to settle in China.

The U.S. public turned fiercely on any manifestation of weakness. P.O.W.s who collaborated were condemned as a disgrace to the U.S. military tradition. Marine Colonel Frank Schwable, who confessed under sustained torture to the U.S. use of germ warfare, was cleared by a court of inquiry, but his career was ruined. The hysteria was climaxed by a rigid superstoical Code of Conduct promulgated by President Eisenhower in 1955. Still in force technically, it requires every P.O.W. to resist his captors, to try to escape and help others escape, to reveal nothing beyond name, rank, number and date of birth--all "to the utmost of my ability."

Wouldn't Everyone Talk?

Defenders of the code insisted it was necessary to discipline P.O.W.s, whose stamina had supposedly declined so sadly since World War II. But as Defense Department researchers continued to look into the matter, the truth turned out to be otherwise. Prisoners in Korea held up no better and no worse than P.O.W.s in other wars. In World War II, so many U.S. prisoners in German and Japanese camps talked so freely that a Defense Department report concluded: "It is virtually impossible for anyone to resist a determined interrogator." In addition to revealing military facts, U.S. prisoners in World War II signed occasional false confessions; yet nothing much was made of it in the U.S. The onus was all on the enemy. Nor did enemy soldiers demonstrate any greater staying power in World War II. From Germans captured at Stalingrad, the Russians learned all of Hitler's plans for their conquest.

The techniques used on prisoners by the Communists today have become painfully familiar, even though the beatings, threats and psychological pressures given Bucher and his crew were so horrifying as to stun the world anew last week. To some extent, the techniques consist of old-fashioned torture protracted and refined, in a mixture of mental and physical ordeals. The P.O.W. may be kept in utter isolation or thrust into a cell group without a shred of privacy. He may be forced to sit or stand in the same position for hours on end until his bodily functions go awry. His interrogators may keep him constantly unnerved, preventing him from sleeping, exploiting his normal feelings of guilt by focusing on painful events in his life. The interrogator may alternate kindness with brutality; a strange bond, which does not exclude a measure of affection, develops between captor and captive. Write Psychiatrists Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold Wolff: "The interrogator is dealing with a man who might be looked upon as an intentionally created patient; the interrogator has all of the advantages and opportunities which accrue to a therapist dealing with a patient in desperate need of help."

Now that they have a broader understanding of the plight of the P.O.W., some factions within the State and Defense departments want to liberalize the Code of Conduct. They include Averell Harriman, who was put in charge of P.O.W. affairs at State almost three years ago. Flyers imprisoned in Viet Nam have signed many confessions--a situation that Harriman's aide, Frank Sieverts, finds predictable enough. "The code says a prisoner can't sign anything, but those who have given it any thought know the only practical answer is 'yes, he can sign,' " says Sieverts. Neither the U.S. military nor the public seems as angered by the confessions as they were in the Korean War --although leniency still does not extend to P.O.W.s who have harmed fellow prisoners by cooperating with the enemy. Says Paul Warnke: "You're allowed to sign a propaganda statement to save your own skin but not to save your skin at the expense of another's."

While the U.S. military has traditionally stressed stoical resistance and ideological conviction as the best defense against Communist brainwashing, others have begun to take a different approach. Social Scientist Albert Biderman, for example, thinks that the typical serviceman's lack of ideology may be his strongest defense. The P.O.W. who "plays it cool," who makes superficial compromises without giving too much away, is sometimes the toughest to crack. Often those who resist most strenuously ultimately break down most completely.

In cases where prisoners finally do break down and sign incriminating confessions, the rest of the military should perhaps follow the lead of the Air Force and discount the propaganda loss. Anyone, friend or enemy, who is persuaded by a forced confession doubtless had his mind already made up. Moreover, propaganda can backfire. The fact that it has been gained through the abuse of prisoners repels people. When the North Vietnamese put captured U.S. flyers on exhibit in Hanoi, foreign reaction was so adverse that the Vietnamese never restaged the spectacle.

Some people in the Defense Department have proposed that the U.S. ignore confessions altogether. They argue that P.O.W.s should sign anything, as long as they do not divulge classified military information or imperil other prisoners. A well-publicized official policy to this effect would drain confessions of any real significance, in the manner of the disclaimer that preceded the Government's own "confession" last month that the Pueblo was inside North Korean waters.

This is not to deny that the men who resist the will of their captors often perform feats of heroism and that some would hold themselves in contempt if they failed to try. The struggle against the captor can become an obsessive way to assert one's defiance of a hostile universe. But the majority of men are not assailed by such temptations of existential heroism. For the most part, the U.S. serviceman fights hard, risks his life and sometimes gives it in the service of his country. It seems unreasonable to ask him to continue risking his life in prison merely to avoid signing a scrap of paper that nobody takes very seriously anyway.

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