They never interrogated us much on military matters; what they were more interested in was our family life, our social life. They couldn't believe that a lot of the people captured, me included, owned our own automobiles. I remember one of them saying one morning that in China he would have an egg every morning for breakfast if he wanted. And everybody laughed and said, "God, we could have a dozen if we wanted, every morning." Well, he refused to believe the food was so plentiful.

The Chinese put out a little camp newspaper and encouraged us to write articles for it. You got two cigarettes if you wrote an article, which of course we were thinking all kinds of crazy things to write. Once I wrote, "When I was being interrogated they asked what party I belonged to in the United States and I said I was never in a political party. But I have to confess, I was a registered Republican and I voted for Thomas Dewey." And that was worth two cigarettes.

We were on a diet of soybeans and sorghum seed, the seed that they would thrash off the sorghum cane and boil until it swelled up the size if a grain of rice. Coping with hunger wasn't our primary worry -- we were more concerned with frostbite and the wounds that hadn't healed. There were quite a few guys who died of gangrene. But there was something else in Korea that U.S. troops hadn't been faced with before. It was called "give-up-itis" for the want of a better term. I had a young trooper die in my squad. It seemed there was nothing we could do for him. When he was captured, he had been waiting to hear news about a serious operation his mother had to undergo back home. Now he didn't know if his mother was dead or alive, plus he had seen a lot of his buddies killed in action, so he just went into a state of depression. And unless you had somebody to keep an eye on you, you could just crawl into a corner, throw a blanket over your head, and be dead in a period of twenty-four hours.