This is a document unlike any other in recent military history, considered so
important that it was announced not by the Services but by the President of the United
States himself, who tried to clear up the misunderstanding that inevitably arose about it
by saying "This is not a formula for being a prisoner of war," because you see, we just
don't think that's part of our mission, to train soldiers to be prisoners of war.
The President said, "This is a statement of first principles which every male and female in our society should know." Principles that are so obvious that maybe we're just
taking them for granted. I think a great many parents and teachers somehow believe
that children get such principles by osmosis or simply by being exposed to them in
some vague way that doesn't require any direct, conscious attention.
NO. 1: RESIST
Look at them; the first principle: If you're ever captured, resist; try to resist, no
matter how minor your resistance; fight your enemy. Don't cooperate with him. Now this
is pretty important militarily. It's important - well, I think if you will recall the trouble we
had on Kojedo (where Communist prisoners revolted and at one time seized a U.S.
General) you can see just what a problem resisting prisoners can be. We used over
15,000 fully armed troops to guard the Chinese we'd already beaten: 15,000 soldiers
who should have been on the front line shooting at Chinese.
In contrast to this the Chinese managed to hold at least one camp that we know
of, holding as many as 600 Americans with as few as six armed guards. Six - no barbed
wire fence, no electric fence, no machine gun towers, no searchlights, no guard dogs;
just six Chinese. And of course the instructors, the disarmed non-military instructors.
Where were the other 594 Chinese who should have been guarding those
Americans? Why, they were down on the 38th Parallel shooting Americans. So militarily
this is important. But it's more important yet in another way, a way we didn't expect; we
didn't prepare people for it, we didn't think perseverance was really a matter of life or
death; we all know it's a great old value. But we saw what happens when men fail to
resist, in Korea, in terms of a new disease that we'd never before seen among young
adults. Oh, we see it among abandoned infants that we find in alleys and ashcans, who
won't respond to medical treatment and yet shouldn't die but do.
We see it sometimes among patients who have a stroke and who can remember
everybody that's died that they know of; died from a stroke and so they think they're
going to die and they literally do. And there's no reason.
"GIVE-UP-IT IS" CATCHING
But we've never seen twenty-year-old white American adults do this. They did in
Korea. There was a disease there called "give-up-itis." It was a disease of what we
psychiatrists make ourselves so unpopular by calling "mother's boys"; the passive, the
dependent, the inadequate; the kid who cried himself to sleep at night; the kid who
would look at the food that looked bad and smelled bad and wouldn't eat it - he'd throw it
on the ground and maybe stomp on it. The kid who would take no initiative, who would
not respond to leadership, who would look around hopelessly, pull his blanket over his
head, tell the rest of the soldiers to leave him alone. And if they did, in 48 hours he was
dead.
This was a significant factor in the death of at least half of the 3000 Americans who died in captivity. RESIST, we tell the soldiers: "Your life depends upon it." But it's an exercise
for more than one man. No individual hero in a movie-type television epic resists by
walking up and clobbering the nearest Chinese guard. We resist in groups. Our strength
is in groups. And it's on the basis of faith between men.
NO. 2: ESCAPE!
So also is the next point which says "try to escape." This country exists because of an
impulse to freedom. And violations of this freedom have always in the past stimulated
the most violent reaction on the part of Americans. And yet out of the 7000 men
captured, the 4000 of those who survived were over three years in captivity, or about
three years in Korea. At no time did a single American ever succeed in an engineered
escape from an established POW camp. Ever!
And why not? Well, it's a hard country to escape in. And the Chinese had a good
system. Well, why didn't they escape before the Chinese system? Because escape too
is not like something Gregory Peck does in an MGM-type epic; it's an exercise of a large
group of human beings. It's a military operation against an enemy. It might take a
hundred men six months to get one person out of a camp. Americans have been
traditionally, fabulously good at escaping, under impossible conditions. They escaped in
Japan sometimes when they were in groups of ten, and the word was out that if one
man got out of that group and the others didn't, the Japs would kill the other nine. Men
still escaped, and they escaped with the help and the support of the other nine.
And yet in Korea we saw a man get up and say "We've got to have an escape
committee." And another man would get up and say, "No; you do something like that,
you're liable to make the Chinese mad - now just wait and see how things go." And it's
true, you are liable to make the Chinese mad. You're liable to make him mad when you
stick your head out of a foxhole and take a shot at him, too.
So try to escape, we say to the soldiers in the new code. And then we get
completely off the military line and we make a moral point, and we insult the churches
and the Sunday Schools and the American families by making this point; we insult you.
Yet I think it's a point that has to be made. It's made in this Code of Conduct, as are
each of these points, because in a significant proportion of the young American
prisoners of war whom we had a chance to study, it was not a meaningful value.
NO. 3: MAKE NO "DEALS"
All we say here is the very obvious thing: "If you're captured by an enemy, don't take
any favors from him; don't make any deals with him." Of course fifty years ago they
would have said "Don't make a deal with the devil" and it would have been perfectly
clear. Or we could refer him to Faust or to many of the other speculations of man about
compromise with his principles. And it seems that in talking about compromise and
getting along with people today and being nonaggressive and everything being quiet and nobody raising his voice if possible, that we've gotten compromise on a minor level
mixed up with compromise on the level of principle.
Time and time again parents say to me, "Well, what you say is right, you know,
and it's just exactly what ought to be said in our PTA meeting. I've been thinking so for
six months."
And I say, "Why don't you get up and say so?"
"Oh," they say, "I'm not the kind that ever gets up in a group and talks."
Or it's like the parents, one of whom is a Baptist and one of whom is a
Presbyterian, and they decide not to make their kid go to either one but let him pick for
himself. They don't want to commit themselves to him because it's not democratic. Well,
maybe it's not, but in effect all you have communicated in this kind of system is that
neither one of you cared enough that you would try to convince him that this is what you
thought was right.
We make deals all over the place. In a St. Louis paper the other day I saw an ad
just like this. "Why deny yourself; would you change jobs for nine cents an hour? Would
you move out of the city for nine cents an hour? Then why not buy our Pontiac, because
for only nine cents an hour you can. We've got a wonderful deal for you." And it is only
nine cents an hour - sixty bucks a month!
NO. 4: LOVE THY BROTHER
And then in the Code of Conduct we say to the soldier: "If you're ever captured,
don't do anything to hurt your fellow-American soldier." Don't do anything to hurt your
fellow-Americans. Don't say anything, don't do anything. Love your neighbor.
To a great many people this just isn't meaningful. Because love is not a passive
thing and that isn't what's meant in the commandment "Love Thy Neighbor . . ." Love is
an act. And the reason this is in the Code of Conduct is because of a most remarkable
phenomenon that showed up again and again. One example will demonstrate it, I think.
There was a man named Gallagher. He was tried and convicted in New York in a
military court about a year and a half ago, on two charges of first degree murder in a
POW camp. Gallagher was a monster. He was in a hut in North Korea and there were
some men in the hut whom he considered socially unacceptable: they had very bad
dysentery, they were smelling up the place, and so forth - and so he threw them out. It
was thirty degrees below zero outside that hut. And they died. Right away.
So we tried him and convicted him of murder. Now we know that nothing like
saying "Don't hurt your fellow-Americans" is going to reach Gallagher at all, or the few
people who are like Gallagher. But they're really not our problem at all; I don't think they
ever will be. They couldn't possibly be.
We've got a worse problem than that. The Gallagher-type problem you can see
and you can deal with; you can fight it. The worst problem is the one that this point was
designed for. It was the other forty men in the hut. It was the witnesses we collected for
that trial, who on their interrogations would go through something like this:
"NONE OF MY BUSINESS"
We'd say: "Soldier, did you see Gallagher throw these men out of the hut?" The
soldier would say, "Yes, sir, I did."
"And what were you doing at the time he threw them out of the hut, soldier?"
"Well, I was huddling together with everybody else to try to keep warm; it was
very cold up there and you had to just get heat from other peoples' bodies."
"Well, what were you doing to try to keep Gallagher from throwing these men out
in the freezing cold?"
"Well, nothing, sir."
"And why not, soldier?" we'd ask.
And invariably or almost invariably the answer would come back: "Well, sir, I just
didn't feel it was any of my business to interfere." And so men died.
When we get to the point where loving your neighbor is a totally inactive thing,
where love is no longer taking the responsibility for other peoples' welfare, where we
can become passive witnesses - and granted in daily life, not in a POW camp, what we
witness is often not quite as dramatic as that- but no less real - and when we become
passive witnesses to those who destroy us, then we're in very serious trouble.
So don't do anything to hurt your fellowsoldier, we say.
NO. 5: ESTABLISH LEADERSHIP
Well, the final point I want to mention in this Code and almost the final in this
speech, is really a one-sentence indictment on leadership. I'm not talking about two-star
general leadership, I'm talking about shop foreman leadership and leadership in
peoples' families and in Boy Scout troops and in school classrooms, and among kids
who come up to the Principal and want their names taken off the honor roll because the
other kids make fun of them if they're on the honor roll.
I'm talking about being different and being aggressive, not in a destructive way,
but in the way that is healthy American competition. And this sentence merely says:
"Soldiers, if you're ever captured by an enemy and you're the senior man, take
command. And if you're not the senior man, support and back up those who are."
We thought, you know, if a man ever worked in an A&P store he'd know this,
because they have an assistant manager and a manager. We thought if he'd ever been
on a football team he'd know this. But fewer young Americans are playing on football
teams. More and more are watching them.
OMISSION IN TEACHING
So we have to put this terribly obvious statement in the Code because it
becomes clear that somehow we are not teaching about the attitude of leadership, the
willingness to take this responsibility, the willingness to be other than merely popular. personal popularity; which is only asubjected to. Sort of "I'll be good to you andand they wouldn't follow him up the hill. .
And contrary to what I hear from some educators in the country today, I think
also this is the responsibility to communicate on the part of the public educational
system. I'm horrified by what Dr. Benson called the objectivity which leads to the point
where the teacher also doesn't commit himself to his students; where no principle is
taught. Just technique or methods.
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