By Terri Moon Cronk
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, June 28, 2013 – An Army chaplain who posthumously
received the nation’s highest military honor earlier this year was
inspirational, courageous in battle, and someone who talked the talk and
walked the walk, a group of former Korean War prisoners of war said in a
recent interview with Army Television.
Army Chaplain (Capt.) Emil Kapaun, a Roman Catholic priest and a
Korean War POW, was awarded the Medal of Honor in an April 12 White
House ceremony and was inducted into the Hall of Heroes at the Pentagon
the next day, 62 years after his death.
Several of the chaplain’s fellow POWs attended the Medal of Honor events.
“In prison camp, he was an inspiration to everyone,” recalled Robert
Wood, a former Army infantry first lieutenant. “He never failed to
inspire me with his courage and his own devotion -- bathing the sick and
wounded and scavenging for us. He was a good thief. He would steal
rations for us from the Chinese.”
It was the winter of 1950-51
when Kapaun, Wood and hundreds of other U.S. troops were captured by the
North Koreans and handed over to Chinese camps as POWs. Wood vividly
remembers his first meeting with battalion chaplain Kapaun.
“When
got to Korea the first time, we came in contact with the enemy [when]
we were on one hill and another battalion was on another hill, running
out of ammunition,” Wood said. “I volunteered to carry some ammo over to
them. I headed out and all of a sudden, there’s Father Kapaun standing
next to me, carrying ammo with a pipe clenched in his teeth. I said,
‘Where are you going, Father?’ and he said, ‘I’m going with you, son.’
We took off up the side of a hill with no cover -- just a ditch
alongside the trail. We came under machine gun fire, and we both [dived]
into the ditch.
“I looked over my shoulder at Father Kapaun, and
all he had was the stem of the pipe still in his mouth. They’d shot the
pipe right out of his mouth,” he continued. “I said ‘Father, do you
really want to go?’ and he said, ‘Go on son, just go on.” He only
increased my admiration, because in combat he was extremely courageous.”
Joe Ramirez, then an Army corporal, experienced a different introduction to Kapaun.
“We landed in South Korea July 18, 1950,” he said. “There were
skirmishes. Father Kapaun came around to ask if anyone wanted to be
baptized. I was the only one to raise my hand. We went to the river and
he baptized me there.”
Ramirez said he has “everything ever
written” about Kapaun in an album, which he refers to every week and
shares with his children and grandchildren.
“[Father Kapaun] had a
lot of influence, especially on the younger guys, of which I was one,”
he noted. “He would say, ‘Don’t believe what [the Chinese] tell you.
You’re all Christians,’ because they were trying to convert us to
communism. He was against it, and that’s why the Chinese hated him.”
Ramirez credits Kapaun with giving the prisoners a reason to live amid
the harsh conditions of the prison camp. “He gave us a lot of
encouragement, talked to us and said prayers. In the winter it was 50
below zero,” he said. “A lot of us didn’t have winter clothing; we had
summer clothing. He said, ‘Keep the faith -- we’re going to get out of
here one of these days.’”
“He was more than a religious leader,”
said Ray “Mike” Dowe Jr., an Army first lieutenant and platoon
commander. “He taught people to have faith in their own beliefs, to
maintain their integrity, to maintain faith in their country and their
god, and by so doing, it gave people a will to live.”
After
nightly “ration runs,” as he called them, Kapaun taught the other
prisoners not to hoard food, but to share it, Dowe recalled.
“He
would volunteer to carry the dead on stretchers every time,” he said.
“He’d take the clothes off the dead, wash them and distribute them to
the wounded, and take care of the sick. He’d have to escape from the
officers’ compound to do it.”
Kapaun had the gift of emboldening
the prisoners. “He was an inspiration to hundreds and hundreds of people
who survived, and wouldn’t have survived that ordeal without him …
[Survival] only comes from instilling the will to live, which comes from
your beliefs, your country and resisting the enemy,” Dowe said.
Despite the conditions that go with captivity during a war, the chaplain
tried to keep the prisoners’ spirits up and help them think positively,
Wood recalled.
“The first months were horrible. During the first
winter there was bitter cold, starvation, and we were all sick, but he
would go around and lead us in prayer. Jews, Protestants and Catholics
were saying the rosary,” he said.
Kapaun became stricken with a
blood clot in spring 1951, but POW doctors were able to treat it. The
chaplain then developed pneumonia, Dowe said. As he began to recover,
the Chinese became restless over his survival.
“When he started
to get well, they couldn’t tolerate it,” Dowe said. “They came down with
bayonets and troops, and we tried to resist them. The doctors told [the
Chinese] not to take [Kapaun], but they took him to what they called a
hospital. We were in tears. He turned to me and said, ‘Mike, don’t cry.
I’m going to where I always wanted to go and when I get there, I’ll say a
prayer for all of you.’”
Rather than putting him in the
hospital, Dowe said, the Chinese put Kapaun in a building with other
prisoners who were beyond medical help. “It was just filled with every
kind of bug, and feces,” he said. “[The Chinese] didn’t feed them. They
[placed him] in a 7-by-7-foot [room] after his death, they threw his
remains into a pile.”
Dowe said he later spoke with people on
teams that were on a recovery mission in North Korea. They told Dowe
they found that area and recovered some of Kapaun’s remains.
“We
lost something when we lost him -- [he was] a constant reminder, a ray
of hope that we were going to get out of this thing eventually, and he
was someone who retained his civility and devotion,” Wood said.
Wood was one of the prisoners who had to carry the chaplain to “the death house,” he said.
“We all knew taking him up there was a death sentence, yet he was
calming everyone around him, saying he was going to a better place and
that he’d pray for us, and not to be upset. What really stunned me was
he was blessing the Chinese who were killing him,” Wood said, becoming
emotional. “I had tears in my eyes when he was doing it. I could never
do that.”
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