Word: kasler
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...torture continued for days. Fidel would beat Kasler across the buttocks with a large white truck fan belt until "he tore my rear end to shreds." At one point Fidel said, "You are going to see a delegation if we have to carry you on a stretcher." For one three-day period, Kasler was beaten with the fan belt every hour from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., and kept awake at night...
...Kasler was allowed to sleep that night. His mosquito net, which had been taken away, was given back, thus sparing him at least the torment of insect bites. For the next two days the guards kept asking him if he surrendered and each time he said that he did. But on the third day his strength was partly back and he answered...
...week later Fidel asked Kasler if he surrendered. "I decided I'd say yes, and then resist when they asked me to do something." He was put in a room with fresh air, and given cigarettes and chewing gum. Though under threat of death, he communicated once again with his fellow captives. "The guys didn't recognize my old call signal, so I just kept sending my own name. Finally old Norm Wells [Lieut. Colonel Norman Wells had been one of Kasler's wingmen] came up in the next room. Boy, it was good to hear...
...Kasler's leg continued to get worse, and his morale ebbed. "I started to go downhill rapidly. I lay on my bed all day, dreading when the food came around because I had to get up to get it at the door of my cell." Finally, in the winter of 1968, he was taken back to the hospital. X rays showed that an operation was necessary. One of the guards told him that his leg had to be amputated. The wound was cleaned out, however, the iron clamp removed and the leg was finally on its way to healing...
Killed. The torture continued through the spring and summer of 1969. But that July, under threat of more beatings, Kasler wrote one last statement "about the struggle of the great Vietnamese people." He was never tortured again, though others were...