Word: cowart
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First out was Otho G. Bell, 24, of Hillsboro, Miss., a round-faced little man in a poorly cut fawn-grey cotton suit; next came William A. Cowart, 22, of Dalton, Ga., a hulking figure with dirty white pants shoved into high Korean cavalry boots; last was Lewis W. Griggs, 22, of Neches, Texas, a tall, thin, preoccupied youth, carrying the only luggage of the three: a bundled-up raincoat and a pair of brown shoes dangling by their laces...
...Their families were poor, their lives unhappy, their world warped. Bell's father bragged that "I could always scare him into anything"; Griggs ran away, eventually joined the Army because of a school-bus teasing about a girl friend. Bell spent three years in the eighth grade; when Cowart wrote a Communist-line letter from the Communist prison camp about McCarthyism and McCarranism. one of his teachers said: "How much it would have gratified us when he was in school to have known that he could even identify national figures." Cowart was in the Army at 15, Griggs...
...three were captured in Korea and easily gave in to the Communists. While many other prisoners as young and as poorly equipped for an ideological war resisted or died, the three turned on their country, volunteered to make propaganda broadcasts. Cowart and Griggs turned on their buddies, became informers...
When they chose Communism, Cowart danced a jig of joy, but after seven months of stern indoctrination his joy turned to disillusion. Instead of getting the university courses the Communists promised, the three were sent to labor on collective farms in drought-scarred Honan Province. As Cowart tells it, they rebelled, refused to work, made trouble and thus earned their freedom...
...Even if I were going to be hung, I would come anyway," Bell recently wrote to his wife. The third American, William Cowart of Dalton, Ga., wanted to go to Japan. A couple of Belgian army deserters also wanted to get out of Red China, respectively in favor of the U.S. and Laos...