Word: artillerymen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...south, when the road is not washed out. The French conceived of Dienbienphu as "the cork in the bottle," designed to stop Viet Minh movements into the fertile Red River delta and Laos. But the garrison was ringed by hills that General Vo Nguyen Giap's artillerymen, who outgunned the French 5 to 1, used to murderous advantage...
...actually went on in the POW camps of North Korea, it transpired that extremes of physical violence were the exceptions rather than the rule, occurring, it seems, to something like less than 1% of the prisoners. Mistreatment was far more apt to take psychological rather than physical forms. Our artillerymen are now (presumably) well aware of the extent to which they can be physically maltreated; are they equally aware of the far more common, insidious and infinitely more successful forms of psychological persuasion...
...course begins at dawn. After calisthenics and classroom work, the artillerymen are trucked out to the fort's forested hills, turned loose, and told to evade mock aggressor forces patrolling the 7½-sq,-mi. area. Of 133 artillerymen who took the course one day recently, fewer than 30 got away. The rest were marched, often barefoot, to a simulated P.O.W. compound...
Under constant taunts from their captors, the artillerymen were forced to crawl, wallow in mud, hang by their legs from a horizontal bar, sit for seemingly endless minutes with their legs wrapped painfully around a pole. The guards badgered them for information beyond the maximum-name, rank and serial number-sanctioned by the Geneva Treaty. A sympathetic "Red Cross" representative tried to wheedle additional intelligence out of them, but most immediately spotted him as a phony...
Thrust into a tiny, darkened hut, the captives found that a barrel placed in the middle of the floor had no bottom and led into a black hole. Climbing through, they descended into a sewer pipe barely wide enough for their shoulders. Slowly, the artillerymen clawed their way through the 75-ft. pipe to freedom. But their ordeal was not yet over. Though they had started the day at 5 a.m., they still had to run a mountainous ten-mile course, evading aggressors armed with blank bullets and dummy grenades. Most of them made it back to their mess hall...