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the us army moves against former prisoners of war 189 The US Army Moves against Former Prisoners of War Chapter Eight ★★★ I was very happy as a recruiter in Pasadena and did a real good job. This was later proven by what the investigators asked my supervisors and their answers. As a recruiter, I was a salesman for the army. I talked young men into coming into the service. I worked in a recruiting office on Colorado Boulevard, where the Rose Parade goes through. Our office was on the second floor, right in the front of the building, so we got to see the parades. I liked my job and the people liked me, and everything was going just fine. The army screwed up big-time when they got rid of me. I was an energetic and loyal and efficient soldier, and I was intending to stay in the army for the rest of my life. What happened was, a top national show, the Colgate Comedy Hour, requested a former POW to go on national TV. My commanding officer at the recruiting office asked me, “Would you go do that?” Of course, back in August 1953, right after being released from the POW camp, I had signed a pledge not to ever talk to any civilian or the public about anything that happened over there. But if the army wanted me to talk about it on national TV, I was willing. It had to be cleared through some higher command, and the military said, “Positively not.” Shortly after that, I was pulled from recruiting duty and sent to Fort MacArthur, California, at the southern edge of Los Angeles. All I knew was they denied me permission to go on TV and then almost immediately reassigned me without any explanation. Later, it seemed as though that recommendation by my commanding officer that I go on TV had really brought the army’s attention to the fact that the CID was taking as fact statements other POWs had made about what I had allegedly done during my prisoner-of-war experience. And so, when I was taken out of recruiting and reassigned to Fort MacArthur, I couldn’t do anything about it. My wife wrote a letter to our 190 chapter eight congressman about the transfer, because of the guarantee of two years of recruiting duty. That turned out to not accomplish anything. I knew it was wrong for them to pull me out from that duty. That was probably the beginning of my disappointment and anger at the military. I hated the idea that they transferred me. I had nothing to say about it. “You’re in the army. You got no right to any particular assignment.” I was a corporal at that time, and I was put in charge of billeting. My jobs from the time they transferred me out of recruiting until after I got out of the stockade at Fort Ord, California, were jobs that didn’t mean anything to a soldier. ★★★ Military Justice in Flux Johnny Moore and many other returning POWs were in the early phases of a long introduction to the military justice system. From investigations by the CID and the CIC, their journey took them to court-martial or administrative discharge proceedings. They were unlikely to understand the intricacies of the legal or administrative processes they encountered, but their futures depended largely on the way the military justice system functioned in the mid-1950s. When, during the four years or so after the truce in Korea, the army, air force, and Marine Corps brought charges for court-martial or moved to discharge soldiers believed to be disloyal, they were operating in a military justice system in flux. The laws and regulations governing military justice had changed dramatically since 1949, and the mechanisms and interpretations of the new laws were not completely clear when the 1950s decade ended. The 1949 reform of the Articles of War and the adoption of the 1951 Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) were largely responses to events during World War II, unprecedented public attention to the military in peacetime because of the continued draft, and the increasing influence of a few military lawyers who argued for modernizing a system largely unchanged from the time of the American Revolution.1 In addition, in 1950 President Truman directed the secretary of defense to root out any disloyal military personnel. The directive applied his civilian loyalty program to military personnel, and the...

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