Lessons from the End of Lonely Street By Wendy Hinman
Carlsbad’s Neil Black looks back on his POW years in Vietnam

Wars sear dates into history. Veteran’s Day was established on the eleventh day of the eleventh month (the end of WWI) to remember the fallen and to honor the sacrifices of those who lived through hell and came home. People who have served our country have the dates they entered hell scorched into their souls’ remembrance. For Carlsbad’s Neil Black, his date with history was September 20, 1965. It was not the day he was removed from the fighting of the Vietnam War; it was the day he began to fight with all his being.

Black enlisted in the Air Force not too long after he graduated high school. After some consideration, he picked the Air Force because “It was the only door I found open at the Post Office. Everyone else was at lunch.” He was off to basic training a week later, where his athleticism caught the attention of a para-rescue recruiter. Black signed on “because it sounded adventurous.”

Next, it was jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia; survival training in the Sierra Nevada; medical training at Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama and Key West for the Navy’s dive school. Once his schooling was done, he was stationed on Guam with the 79th Air Rescue Squadron, where his team’s job was to rescue anyone in trouble in that theatre, on land or sea. After two years, he was assigned to the 41st Rescue Squadron at Hamilton AFB in San Rafael, California.

He was only in the States one week when they needed a volunteer to replace someone in Southeast Asia. What was supposed to be a one-month replacement in Nakon Phenom, Thailand, turned into four or five, with six rescue missions. Five days before he was to return to the States, a call came in that a pilot was down in North Vietnam.

He grabbed his weapons — he was the gunner on the helicopter — and they took off. “As we got to the area, we had radio contact with the downed pilot. He was alive and in good shape. We dropped the hoist and he got the sleeve around his body. Then all hell broke loose. I couldn’t see where it was coming from. I fired back, but shots came zinging into the copter past my head. Suddenly I dropped two or three feet and was in mid-air. The copter was going down.”

Black was grateful for the trees. They stopped the rotors and kept the bird from sliding down the canyon. “The tail boom had broken off, blocking our escape.” The co-pilot got out, and Black remembers him running off into the jungle. The crew would never see him again. Black grabbed his medical kit, some grenades and his M-16. Tom Curtis, the pilot, and Bill Robinson, the crew chief, and Black scrambled down the hill. Within minutes, his M-16 was stuck in mud, so he removed the magazine and threw it into the jungle one direction and the gun the other.

The adrenaline rush in those minutes was all the adventure he’d signed on for. “When you get to that point where you don’t know how long you have to live, you start thinking about family, about friends, and any faith you have rises to the surface. I became very religious-minded. In that moment, I was the most orthodox Jew you ever met.”

In any rescue, Black explained, “There is a high bird and a low bird.” He was in the low bird when the high bird came down. “All we could hear was static and lots of gunfire. His pilot fired a couple of red pin flares which meant go away,” he recalls. And with the high bird went their hopes.

The three of them ran up a creek trying to hide their footprints, and after a while scrambled up a hill and hid in a rotted-out log. Along the creek came a tracker, “and something I have never seen before. The guy scooped up a handful of water and sniffed it, then pointed up the hill right to where we were.” As the villagers came up — “they were sort of like militia” — Black and his crew buried their guns and grenades.

“To be honest, I don’t know who was more frightened, them or us. The pilot we were rescuing was bombing their village. We were the first Caucasians they had ever seen. They hog-tied us and sort of dragged us.” They took them to the top of a mountain and hid until darkness so they could move undetected. As night covered them, William Forby, the downed pilot, was carried in.

His captors kept Black and the other prisoners separated. If they tried to talk, they “got a rifle butt upside the head.” They were blindfolded for a week and led across a valley “like dogs on a leash.” They were led to a place where villagers had made a gauntlet, and they were beaten with sticks all the way into the village. Thrown into small, separate huts Black said, “It was like being in a zoo” with people touching his uniform and his light-colored hair.

When someone could finally speak English, he gave them name, rank, serial number and date of birth. When he was pushed to the ground with a gun to his head, he lied and told them his father — who was an attorney and then started a building supply business — was a butcher. His housewife mother became a maid. He said he had no siblings — probably all the while thinking of his brothers at home — and told them he was a doctor. That lie was to cut his liabilities. Mere enlisted men had little value to the enemy.

Black was taken down a trail at one point, led by armed men and surrounded by chanting and cheering. He was forced to his knees where he said, “My big, Jewish nose enabled me to see just enough under the blindfold.” He saw a man with a machete over his head and thought his beheading was imminent. It was a propaganda stunt and Black’s first lesson in being contrary whenever the cameras were out.

The four prisoners were loaded into a truck and carted off to Hanoi. They arrived at Hoa Lo, which, appropriately, means House of Fire. It was an old French prison. They were immediately separated in what has become known as Heartbreak Hotel, the first induction, indoctrination station of the Hanoi Hilton. All prisoners were fiercely interrogated and tortured for as much information as possible.

He was issued prison pajamas, Ho Chi Minh shoes (sandals), a cotton turtleneck and a thin cotton blanket. The House of Fire was excruciatingly hot in summer and bitterly cold in winter. He was eventually thrown into a solitary concrete cell, six by nine feet, with two cement slabs for beds, and only a small window 14 feet up near the ceiling.

When all went quiet, he heard a knock on the wall. “It was the old ‘Shave and a haircut…’” Black said, “So I tapped back, ‘Two bits.’” Then he heard a voice. It was Robbie Reisner, an F-105 pilot. Lt. Colonel Reisner said, “Be prepared to die for your country.”

Then Reisner taught Black a tap code for communicating. “I wrote it on the floor with a piece of brick.” Once he got the code, Reisner said, “I will not talk to you again.” Any communication brought swift and severe punishment. For a long time, it was the tap code that kept prisoners sane. Even then it was used mostly when the prisoners knew the guards were eating or sleeping. But the code was a unifier, a human connection in isolation. It was an American connection as well. “When you heard a ‘g’ tapped, that’s when you said The Pledge of Allegiance.”

Black was interrogated for five days, two or three times a day by a guy they called Rabbit, whose “English was excellent. Like he was raised in the States.” He was then moved to The Zoo, which was an old French movie studio near the Hanoi Hilton. He was put in a cell next to Ed Alvarez, the first American captured in the Vietnam conflict. Alvarez was an officer and captured in 1964 and released in 1973. (At almost a decade, he is the longest-held officer in United States history. Black, along with his crew chief Bill Robinson, are the longest-held enlisted men in U.S. History at seven and a half years.)

In his cell, Black noticed the bars on the window were wooden. He’d found a nail in the bathing area and stuck it in his shorts. He chipped away at the bars when he could. He was almost through one bar — “I needed two to get out” — when they moved him to another station. He tried seven times to escape, and every time got that much further and learned a little bit more. But, shaking his head, he said, “The longer you were there, the less likely you were to escape.” The longer you were there, the weaker you grew. Black guesses that he got down to 100 pounds at one point.

He was in solitary for eight and a half months. There were sessions of interrogation and indoctrination and torture to get a confession. “They wanted to know why I was there. Who my bosses were. I lied through every bit of it, but they bought it.”

When he was moved back to the Zoo, he noticed more prisoners. “In 1966, they grabbed me and put me in front of an interrogator. I was very quiet; they thought I was listening. I have this way of disconnecting from what’s going on and still looking like I’m listening. My wife says I still do this.”

They brought in high-ranking officers, thinking Black might be a good candidate for a publicity stunt. They would indoctrinate some prisoners, get them to sign confessions and then release them to show how nice the VC communists were. When they asked Black how he felt about them, he answered, “You are the enemy. I don’t like you. God bless America. Hail to the Chief.” That got him “in a world of hurt,” but Black still put a positive spin on it: “It took out of my mind, once for all, that I was going to get out” — at least by way of the Vietnamese.

In April 1966, Black was allowed to write home to his family. Up until that time, they had no idea what had happened. Letting them know he was alive was the most important letter he would write. After that, the few times he was able to write he was just concerned with getting information out, mostly names of other prisoners. “My family would get them first and then they would turn them over to Intelligence.”

The years 1966-1968 were remembered as a series of moves, interrogation and propaganda. Food consisted of “sewer greens,” a piece of fat and a small loaf of hard, mildewed bread or rice with stones in it. “There were a lot of broken teeth from those stones, including mine.” At Christmas time, there was a bigger spread, but it was for the cameras. The prisoners wanted desperately to eat it, and they did, but being careful not to play to the cameras.

By 1969, Black was back at the Hanoi Hilton and things began to change. Ho Chi Minh died and Nixon came into office. “Ho Chi Minh was a harsh character. He gave out torture orders. Nixon was not LBJ. They were afraid of Nixon. The bombings of Hanoi started again.” Treatment got better.

In 1970, the Americans tried a daring rescue operation on Son Tay Prison Camp near Hanoi. Only a couple months before, the Vietnamese had moved all American POWs out of Son Tay, so no one was there when the Americans arrived. But this caused the Vietnamese to consolidate many prisoners in fewer camps, making solitary cells impossible.
Men were now 20, 50 to a room in the Hanoi Hilton, the courtyard being dubbed Camp Unity. Just to have people to talk to made life more tolerable.

The tap code was replaced by hand signals from cell to cell. Early communication resulted in a beating. After 1970, the punishment was solitary: “I got caught in both phases.” But communication remained vital.

Black remembers one cell with about 50 men in it who started a songfest resistance. “Against the rules, they sang the Navy Hymn (“Eternal Father, Strong to Save”).” The guards ran in and took the SROs (senior ranking officers) off to solitary. Spontaneously, the National Anthem was blurted out (by the rest of the camp) in downtown Hanoi. A few guys even yelled, ‘Play ball!’ at the end. Then we sang ‘God Bless America’.” Guards arrived in riot gear, but could do little. “After five years, it was the first time we sounded off together. We sang more patriotic songs. It was quite a feeling. I will never forget it,” Black stated.

It would be another three years before these POWs would come home, during which they made the most of their time. Black recalls debates held, movie reviews given and math problems worked out. “There were no other distractions,” Black laughed at the memory.

“I was not the best student in high school, but [in prison] you filled your mind with all this information. My thirst for it surprised me. They called me ‘Mr. Curiosity’. I didn’t care what it was…how to prune a tree…I learned to sail on a concrete floor.”

Most prisoners were officers with college degrees, masters, even a few PhDs. Some of the few enlisted prisoners were put through officer training and given battlefield commissions as 2nd Lieutenants. And it was there that Arthur Neil Black became just Neil Black. “I wanted to be a fighter pilot, and Arthur didn’t sound like a fighter pilot. The name was too formal. I became Neil Black, fighter pilot.”

In 1973, there was some scuttlebutt floating around the camp, and the prisoners were called out into a courtyard. The senior officer told the men they were going to march out like an American unit. They marched out and stood at attention silently. Their captors read a document saying they were going to be released. Not a man spoke, showed expression, wavered. They would not give the cameras that gratification. There was a snap about-face and they filed back into their cells.

Once there, “All hell broke loose.” Yet, there was a certain amount of disbelief. The prisoners requested that the sick and wounded go first and then the rest in order of their capture. They were issued civilian clothes and a gym bag. Many of them did not truly believe they were going home “until we saw the American C-141 with the big red cross on it” on the Hanoi tarmac. Black was on the first plane, as were Tom Curtis, Bill Robinson and William Forby. He said there was little show of emotion until the plane was in the air. Then there was a noisy celebration, and yet the joy was unspeakable.

The return to the tumultuous American culture that had become the early ’70s was not easy. He said of his capture, “It’s like a nightmare. Things became surreal and then became real. Then you come back and that is surreal…until it becomes real.” The POWs were some of the few who received a hero’s welcome when they returned from Vietnam, but they had a certain cynicism for how the States had changed.

“My 20s were gone. I had a lot of hell-raising to do — I missed it. Yeah, I was pissed. I’d turned 21 lying on a concrete floor shivering with some sickness.” Black was put in the hospital at Andrews AFB for three months of recoup and debriefings. And disappointment. The Air Force had no precedent for battlefield commissions, so Black’s years of training left him as a masters’ sergeant. But while at Andrews, he was called to the Pentagon. President Richard Nixon gave him a direct commission, and 2nd Lieutenant Neil Black would finally become a pilot.

Black has a philosophic way of looking back. “You didn’t want to know me before. My morals were not exactly high. But when you are alone for 24 hours, introspection happens. The religious aspect is there, too. I prayed very hard, sometimes all day for things to change. The prayers were apparently heard.”

Mr. Curiosity also got his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. He became fluent in Russian and German, while continuing to serve his country fighting the Cold War in Eastern Europe. Most importantly, Black would marry his wife Vicky of 32 years and be blessed with twins Todd and Tracy, now 31 years old. Since retiring, Black has joined many Veteran’s and service organizations to give back to the country “that got me home.”

“All in all, I’m very proud of what I did. I appreciate freedom and the opportunity we have here. I feel fortunate to have been born here; I understand what it is like to live in a third-world country. I’m not happy about how it (the Vietnam War) turned out. The reason for being there was warranted for the strategy of stopping communism, but tactically it was a mess. A lot of lives were lost — 58,000 — some very good friends of mine.”

So how does Black commemorate the eleventh day of the eleventh month? “I always celebrate it. Sometimes I find myself in a parade, but mostly it is a quiet remembrance, a gratefulness to God. I’m glad to be an American. I was valued by being an American. My thoughts go out to the guys I served with who didn’t make it home.”

First in the Line of History by Wendy Hinman
Carlsbad’s Keith Kennedy takes on some prime beach real estate

At a recent graduation down at MCRD, the main speaker summoned up the ghosts of Marine Corp history by invoking the names Guadalcanal and Chosin. If you are a Marine and you know of no other battles, you know those two. For Carlsbad’s Keith Kennedy, those are personal memories; he was at both on their worst days. And throw in Bougainville, the Pusan perimeter and Inchon. Surprisingly, it is not the worst days that he remembers most. First is the wonder a young man might feel in new, exotic places and the fraternity forged in fighting on the edge of forever.

He remembers his 17th birthday as a good day. He was on Guadalcanal. “I got an extra cup of cocoa. That was a big deal. When we were back off the lines, everyone would bring their chocolate from their K-rations. It was a big night. Sometimes we’d sit in the mud under a poncho and watch a movie. Then it was back to the camps.”

In the initial landing, he was still 16. Was he scared? “I was too young to be afraid.” Ah, the immortal spirit of youth. “It felt like when I played football in high school back in Nebraska (which had been only a few months before). You get all cinched up for the game, your stomach is growling, but once the ball is snapped you do what you’re supposed to do. When you’re coming in (on an amphibious assault) on an LCT or LST — which is short for List, Sink or Tip-over — you’re all cinched up, but once you go” it’s all about your objective.

He and Jimmy, “a buddy from San Antonio,” both turned 17 on Guadalcanal and both got in trouble from their colonel. Kennedy was in the Marine Corp 1st Assault Signal Corp. His job in a landing was to be one of the first in and set up communications so the Navy was not inadvertently using their big guns on the Marines they had just landed. Once the island was somewhat secure, Kennedy and Jimmy got that extra cocoa and called up before their commanding officer. Seems it wasn’t enough that these two young men had survived the worst the Japanese Army could throw at them, now they had homework: they had to write their parents once a week, lest their colonel got into real trouble.

The signal corp. has an interesting history. Now called Joint Assault Signal Company (Jasco), at the time it was 40 Marines — including the Navaho Code Talkers — loosely organized. Its success led to larger and similar units in every branch of the service. Many times, Kennedy’s unit would land on a beach at night.

Guadalcanal had an alley, after it was conquered by Marines, where the radar would not pick up Japanese bombers. So Kennedy and four other guys were put on a submarine and climbed out just off of Woodlark Island. They got into one-man rubber rafts and paddled in using their hands. Their goal was to hike through 30 miles of jungle to the highest point and establish a radio signal site and close that alley. Marine intelligence covered most of the bases. The island was not supposed to have any Japanese troops on it. That was mostly true, but what they missed were the crocodiles. The things you’re glad you don’t know when it’s dark.

“It was a Jap staging area for aircraft into that alley up to Guadalcanal. Occasionally, the Japanese would come into the lagoon and we would hide. The natives were very primitive and they liked us and the way our guns worked,” Kennedy stated.

The locals were using dart guns and spears to hunt wild boar and “the equivalent of a large opossum.” They liked to hunt with the Americans. But they would often talk about these things in the lagoon; Kennedy thought maybe it was some mythical creature. He came to realize they were referring to salt-water crocodiles. “I never saw one until I went to that reptile farm they used to have near Knott’s Berry Farm,” he states. Those crocs can reach 20 feet in length and Kennedy shudders a bit when remembering that dark night in a small, rubber raft.

Everything else Kennedy remembers about Woodlark Island sounds like something out of a travel brochure. “It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been,” he recalls. Conjuring up images of South Pacific or the opening scenes from The Thin Red Line, the months Kennedy spent on Woodlark was a moment in paradise before purgatory called again. Rain forest, crashing rivers, cerulean coves and “lots of critters.” For a teenager, it was an adventure, “Unbelievable fun.” He and a buddy saw their first iguana while climbing coconut trees.

There were harrowing days to be sure. Respect grows for men when their mettle is tested in combat. But in the idyll days of the Pacific theatre, that respect turned into lifelong friendships. Even with the inhabitants. Kennedy has many stories of his captain’s cussing parrot, and he adopted two mutts, Mistake and Mishap. When one of the dogs died, the other was renamed Radar for his ability to distinguish friendly aircraft from the enemy’s. In a time of war, you develop a bond with anyone who has your back.

The only problem with Uncle Sam’s all-expense-paid trips to tropical islands in the ’40s was there were a lot of literal blackout dates. And in hopping from one island to the next, grit, duty, luck and valor was about all you could take in your carry-on. It wasn’t hard to take pictures — just hard keeping them. “I took a lot of pictures at the beginning, but I had to abandon ship twice (in the Coral Sea) and lost everything I owned when those ships went down.”

Though Kennedy has a way of putting an extra emphasis on his WWII tour of duty — he sailed to Noumea from San Diego on the Lurline, a Matson Line cruise ship commandeered by the U.S. government for use as a troop ship — the duty is the foundation. Like many of Tom Brokaw’s dubbed “Greatest Generation,” Kennedy’s more difficult moments are assumed, understated; it is as if for them, war is not polite conversation.

Almost as an afterthought, he said, “I lost my eyesight in ’43.” He was at an ordnance depot and they were off-loading fuel and ammo, a volatile combination. Before one was separated from the other, there as an accident and Kennedy was blinded by the flash burn. Like all good fighting men he said, “It got me a little R&R in Australia.” And besides, he said in understatement, “A guy led me into a DC-3. I could tell by the sound that we were flying really low. The plane was filled with wounded men.” He was the lucky one; he was only blind. The doctors thought it might be permanent, but after a few months he could see again.

In the military, everyone gets a nickname. Kennedy had to wear Marine-issue wire-rim glasses. In his typical accentuate-the-positive way he adds, “They were so thick they must’ve been bulletproof. And they were green, like Coke bottles.” So sometimes he was called Goodeye, sometimes Badeye, but mostly Hollywood, since few people back then wore dark glasses.

Also, like most military men in that war, he feels whether or not it was right to drop the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it saved a lot of lives. “The Japanese were really entrenched on Truk Island and another one. It would have been a bloody landing there. That is where we were headed next when we got the news we were going home instead,” he states.

For most it was home to stay, but for Kennedy it was just a longer R&R stint. In a few short years he would be off to Korea. In those years, Kennedy had switched from the signal corp. to the 1st Marine Tank Division, but that did not end his beach landings. His unit was pulled out from the Pusan perimeter to join in MacArthur’s daring surprise landing on Inchon. Seeming to brush aside the almost impossible obstacles of the landing, Kennedy describes it as if he were answering a question about his day at the office.

But Kennedy can, like most men who have been to war, get that far-away look in his eyes when remembering those days. The Chosin Reservoir produces this look. He hesitates; he is reticent, not out of politeness, but perhaps out of the futility of communicating what those bone-chilling days were like. It has been said of the The Frozen Chosen that “Those who were there will never forget; those who were not there will never know.” The casualty rate was high enough that those who came out are called “The Chosin Few.”

Kennedy would marry and have children. He settled in Carlsbad and into serving this community. Kennedy is a tireless Rotarian and one of the main organizers of the Carlsbad Street Faire. For most of Kennedy’s 40 years in the Marines he would say, “They were fantastic experiences with great, great people.” Some of those people are lifelong friends; the fallen are lifelong memories. Perhaps for a Marine the highest honor they can pay their friends on Veteran’s Day is a clenched jaw, that far-off look and a tear in the eye of memory.

And once a Marine, always a Marine. In the first Gulf War Kennedy wrote to the Corp and offered to re-up. He said, “I couldn’t go over there, but I could do some of the work here so the boys could go.” He got a letter back, which said in essence, ‘Thanks, but no thanks. Sergeant Major Kennedy, you have already answered your call to duty; you have held your spot on the line; you have served your country well.’

A Hitch in Hell By Wendy Hinman
A POW’s story of the Bataan Death March

La Costa Glen resident Lester Tenney’s life should be a movie. It has everything. Boy meets girls. Boy marries girl. Boy goes off to war. Boy survives the Bataan death march. Boy is in POW camp and used as a slave in a coal mine. Boy realizes war ends when he sees atom bomb obliterate Nagasaki. Boy comes home. Girl thought boy was dead, has remarried. Boy lets girl go. Boy is a man in the truest sense of the word and an incredible human being. Laughter, romance, suspense, agony, hope, tears and it ends with the lesson that living for yourself doesn’t make a life; this movie would have everything.

Tenney is the first to remind us that, “Freedom is not free. I refuse to let a holiday go by (Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day) without something. We need to remember the price that was paid.” He means that in the collective sense. Tenney helps put on a Veteran’s Day Program at La Costa Glen where he said, “La Costa Glen is a community of Carlsbad veterans.”

Past programs have highlighted Medal of Honor winners, the four chaplains of the Dorchester and individuals with distinguished service records. But Tenney has one of the most incredible stories of all, and yet he is the first to remind us that all veterans are owed our appreciation. Honor, bravery and heroism come in different measures, but gratitude goes all around. Sacrifice and suffering comes in different measures as well, but how can that be reimbursed? Our thanks seem meager compared to the price some paid for the freedom we often thoughtlessly enjoy.

Tenney was born on the Southside of Chicago and grew up on the north side in a large and loving family. By the time he was 20 he had met the love of his life, married and had a business that was becoming rather successful. But the U.S. was drafting young men. Sensing his duty to serve, Tenney joined instead. He chose an outfit he felt was serious and patriotic. He joined the 192nd Tank Battalion, Company B of the Illinois National Guard. Tenney’s tenacity to make his own choices when options were few would stand him in good stead further down the road.

While on maneuvers at Camp Polk, Louisiana, the 192nd was the only National Guard attached to the Army’s 1st Armored Division. “Under the watchful eyes of the army’s special investigative unit, which included Gen. George S. Patton…our battalion was declared the finest tank unit of all those on maneuvers,” Tenney writes in his book. And since no good turn goes unpunished, they were called into federal service and arrived in the Philippines on November 20, 1941.

The 192nd had a little more than two weeks to settle into their tents near Clark Field when the Japanese surprised Pearl Harbor on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Five hours later, Clark airfield would come under attack. Though the U.S. Air Force and Navy on the sea and the Army on land would valiantly hold off the Japanese invasion, by December 21 they had landed, leaving the Army to fight on without proper supply lines or escape routes. By December 26, Gen. Douglas MacArthur had called for a plan to retreat and defend only the Bataan Peninsula and the island of Corregidor. Soon, the U.S. Army was down to meager rations and no hope of reinforcements. They courageously fought on with the objective of holding off the Japanese advance long enough for others to establish strategic strongholds elsewhere in the South Pacific.

MacArthur said, “No army has ever done so much with so little (most of their equipment was WWI issue or so new they had not yet trained with it). Nothing became it more than in its last hour of trial and agony.” Thus said in a radio address announcing on April 9, 1943 the largest surrender in U.S. history. The “Battling Bastards of Bataan” had no doubt saved Australia a similar fate by holding out so long. But little did MacArthur know that his men, already half starved and most suffering from one, if not a combination of tropical diseases, had just begun their most severe “trial and agony.”

Rounded up by a vengeful and disorganized Japanese army, “We were pushed into a line that became the Bataan Death March.” This also began Tenney’s decision to determine his own fate within his very limited options. The first thing he decided on was to keep a positive attitude. He did not allow himself to think he was about to die — though circumstances suggested it many times over. Instead, he thought about how he could survive in each instance. He made long-range goals (return home to his wife in Chicago) and short-range goals (make it to the next bend in the road).

They were forced to march in hot and humid sun, many soldiers already compromised physically. Any solider who stopped was killed without question. The march started at sun-up and went until a few hours after the sun went down. Days went by without food or water. Many men had dysentery and were not allowed to pause to relieve themselves. Orders were shouted in Japanese and the misunderstanding disobedient were cut down without mercy. Tenney noted, “These were not the brightest men” in the army of the Rising Sun.

Tenney said, “The worst part was watching your friends die and knowing you could do nothing about it. They would just choose a way to kill you, decapitate, bayonet, shoot or bury alive. I witnessed all of those.” Besides the empathy for the fallen, each solider had to deal with painful hunger, dehydration and the effects of indiscriminate beatings. Though the march only lasted about a week, it seemed endless.

The death march ended at a death camp. Camp O’Donnell crowded too many men into poor excuses for buildings. If men did not succumb to disease, they were lost to beatings and tortures. Tenney again reviewed his options. As one of the healthy ones — which merely meant he could walk on his own — he volunteered for work details in order to at least get fresh air. These details either brought water into the camp or were in charge of burying the dead (50 to 150 a day). Tenney learned as much Japanese as he could as another way of controlling his future.

He escaped off of one work detail and fought with American guerrillas before being recaptured. Eventually, they were relocated to Cabanatuan, another death camp, and then he was put on a “hell ship” for Japan. Once in Japan, the POWs were taken to Camp 17 in Omuta. These prisoners were put into slave labor mining coal for the Mitsui Company. Slightly better sanitary conditions, but still daily beatings and sometimes torture for the most innocuous reasons.

“Every time the Americans bombed a Japanese city, we got a beating,” he states. Or, for Tenney, it might be because he was Jewish. He said in his book, “On more than one occasion while working in the coal mine, a Japanese civilian worker would ask, ‘Is 264 Jewish?’ A positive answer always resulted in a beat for the Jewish prisoner.” Three and a half years of exhausting work, beatings and monotony. Tenney joined up at 185 pounds and upon his release, a mere 101.

How did he know the war was over? “We told ourselves, four things would tell us the war was over: One, we wouldn’t have to work anymore. Two, we would get all the rice we wanted. Three, we would receive Red Cross packages and four, we wouldn’t have to bow to the guards,” he states.

One day, they saw a big mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, which Tenney describes seeing with awe. “I thought it was a floating airport that the Japs were going to float over to the west coast and then bomb the U.S.” Shortly after that, they no longer had to work. They got all the rice they wanted. When Red Cross packages arrived, Tenney said they all looked at each other, “Three out of four!” Tenney ran outside the mess hall and addressed a guard: “The guard bowed to me and we knew we’d won.”

Coming home was mostly a dream. In a stopover in Okinawa, he and seven other prisoners where given whatever they wanted. “Clean, white sheets and a pillow” were the most desired items. Tenney’s brother Bill was there. A Navy Seabee, he could have been discharged, but he hung on knowing the POWs would come through Okinawa. Tenney said, “To come off that plane and hear my name called ‘Lester’ — I hadn’t been called by my name in a long time.”

Home still meant the agony of realizing his wife — who thought he had died in the march — had remarried and was expecting her first child. “Back then, we did the right thing for the right reasons.” Tenney said he, “Acted like it was no big deal for her sake. But it tore me up.”

Tenney summed up his experience, saying, “Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible and achieves the impossible.” Making the choice to hope carried him through. Disciplining his mind on the next thing got him through each day.

On a work detail in the Philippines, a friend handed Tenney a book, Prayer Book for Jews in the Armed Forces of the United States. He didn’t realize such a book existed, but he owns it to this day. In one particularly agonizing moment he said, “I found just enough strength to hold open the little book. I read, ‘So teach us to number our days, that we may get us a heart of wisdom. Mark the man of integrity, and behold the upright; for there is a future for the man of peace…’”

For the whole story and a fantastic read get Lester Tenney’s book, My Hitch in Hell (Brassey’s Inc.). Available for order at any bookstore.