And the Wind Blew Cold: The Story of an American POW in North Korea (review)

As an unadorned military captivity narrative, with the simplicity and elegance of a soldier's debrief, Richard M. Bassett, with the aid of Lewis H. Carlson, offers an enlisted man's descriptive reflection on life from captivity to repatriation during the Korean War (1950-53). As a memoir, it neither probes nor reflects on the larger issues of Korean captivity and to a degree resembles the many self-published works from World War II. The Richard M. Bassett story begins with his training and deployment to Korea. The author's claims to naïveté notwithstanding, he prepared for combat the way most infantrymen did in 1950: physical conditioning, weapons training, waiting for everything, and lots of hiking. Bassett became a prisoner of war on 6 October 1951, only six weeks after arriving in Korea from his training area in Japan. Taken by the Chinese after a vicious fight, he began his long march, noting the extreme hostility of the North Korean civilians he encountered, and ended it finally at Camp Five along the Yalu River near the Manchurian border. Bassett points out that in Camp Five, most of whose inmates were American but included other UN POWs as well, he and his friends had been completely segregated from their officers and NCOs, and the captors had begun the reeducation policy so infamous in Korea. In that vein, we learn about the Progressives who collaborated with the captors and the Reactionaries who opposed them. Midstream in the book, we learn about the camp's minutiae, including the guards, the horrid food, clothing, prisoner illnesses, interrogations from time to time, lice, and the POWs' consumption of the abundant amount of marijuana that grew wild in Camp Five. Escape was impossible, especially in winter; the dead were stacked in an area close to the camp to wait for burial in the spring. Conditions improved from 1952 to repatriation, and on 12 August 1953, Bassett was released to U.S. Army custody during Big Switch. More important, the author tells us about his religious faith and makes certain that his readership understands clearly that faith more than patriotism sustained him behind the wire and helped him to resist his captors to the end. He laments the fate of the twenty-one American defectors who remained behind, some of whom were held with him in Camp Five. Thinking at first that the incident was an aberration and concluded after repatriation, Bassett discovered his error when the U.S. Army and later the FBI showed a considerable interest in whatever relationships he may have had with them in camp. Bassett learned to his dismay that he and his friends were not returning heroes of the Korean War; rather they had evolved into security risks. Debriefing sessions during the long shipboard journey home from Korea were really interrogations which attempted to discover who did what; who wrote what; who knew whom; and who associated with whom in the prison camp. Later, years after separation from active duty, FBI agents arrived to interview him at home and finally cleared him of any misconduct as a POW. In the short epilogue followed by a series of validating personal documents, Bassett reminds his readers that he suffered from various ailments induced by captivity, including a heavy dose of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; yet his religious faith coupled with forty-five years of marriage sustained his will to live and his ability to triumph over the humiliation of suspicion.