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| Home Front: WoT | |
| Hellhole | |
| 2009-03-23 | |
by Atul Gawande
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #1 Importantly, during the Korean War, many US prisoners were put in overcrowded buildings where they had little or no personal space. A phenomenon was observed where some prisoners would cover their head with a cloth, find a corner, curl up and die. Autopsy showed severe internal organ degeneration, attributed to overcrowding stress. So the US Army did extensive research on training soldiers how to be POWs. By the time of the Vietnam War, our prisoners were giving their Vietnamese guards nervous breakdowns. The secret was resistance in any way possible. Even though beaten and horribly tortured, this directive to resist maintained their morale and severely harmed enemy morale. Soldiers forced to build their own prison camps put broken glass on the top of walls in patterns spelling out prisoner names, for US satellites to read. They said that the news of the US Moon landing almost caused some POW camps to collapse, as the Americans would point to the Moon and suggest that weapons would soon be launched from there to destroy Vietnam. Guards were expending all their ammunition shooting at the Moon, in utter panic. In recent years, in the US, one prisoner, a skilled martial artist, was put into solitary confinement, very ill advisedly, as he used his time to teach himself the esoteric "iron hand" techniques of the Wing Chun style. In a few months of practice, he was able to use his fingers and hands as very lethal, short range weapons. For example, within a foot or two of him, with a single finger, he could punch a hole through someone's chest and into their lung, breaking through the ribs. Ironically, he was released soon after that. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-03-23 14:08 |