Word: captors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WHILE AT FIRST the man tries to explain to his captor that he is the victim of a fouled-up computer, soon he starts to go along with the routine-only to be told that he is 4-F anyway...
...bodily functions go awry. His interrogators may keep him constantly unnerved, preventing him from sleeping, exploiting his normal feelings of guilt by focusing on painful events in his life. The interrogator may alternate kindness with brutality; a strange bond, which does not exclude a measure of affection, develops between captor and captive. Write Psychiatrists Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold Wolff: "The interrogator is dealing with a man who might be looked upon as an intentionally created patient; the interrogator has all of the advantages and opportunities which accrue to a therapist dealing with a patient in desperate need...
This is not to deny that the men who resist the will of their captors often perform feats of heroism and that some would hold themselves in contempt if they failed to try. The struggle against the captor can become an obsessive way to assert one's defiance of a hostile universe. But the majority of men are not assailed by such temptations of existential heroism. For the most part, the U.S. serviceman fights hard, risks his life and sometimes gives it in the service of his country. It seems unreasonable to ask him to continue risking his life...
...make our code realistic? Proclaim to the world that a captured soldier is regarded as a puppet while in enemy hands. As such, he will mouth words or write documents as his captor dictates. Thus, the propaganda value of a "confession" will become insignificant, and the helpless prisoner will be spared opprobrium for being human...
...second one-acter called Witness finds McNally in fine comic and caustic fettle. Again a gagged victim is trussed up in a chair, this time a man. His captor (Joe Ponazecki) hopes to assassinate the President of the U.S. during a motorcade, and he wants a witness to his own sanity in committing the act. The stuff of madness has been crammed into this young would-be assassin's head, principally by avid newspaper reading and televiewing. He knows all about cabinet crises in Lebanon, but he doesn't know right from wrong. He hopes to resolve...