Mary Childress
Daily Mail staff
Wednesday August 01, 2007

When Jack Chapman returned home after spending 2 1/2 years as a North Korean prisoner of war, the first thing he did was meet some friends from school for a drink.

"We went to this bar and the bartender asked where I'd been," Chapman said. "I told him I'd just come back from Korea."

"‘Oh,'" the bartender said, "‘you're one of those cowards.'"

"If I could have come across the bar and beat him, I would have," he recalled. "We were part of the forgotten soldiers -- just like when the Vietnam War soldiers returned home. We were part of that forgotten war."

Chapman, 74, of Mesilla, New Mexico, is in Charleston this week for the Korean War Ex-POW Association's annual reunion at the Charleston Marriot Hotel. About 500 people, including family members, are attending the reunion.

Chapman is the president of the group, which has more than 2,000 members representing veterans from the U.S., Britain, France, Ireland, Australia, Philippines, Korea, Turkey, Mexico, Belgium, Canada and South Africa.

"I enlisted in the Army three days after my 16th birthday," Chapman said. "After serving in Colorado and Alaska, I was sent to Japan in 1950. The Korean War broke out that year and I landed in country.

"I was captured outside the Chosin Reservoir and within three days was wounded seven times," he remembered. "That was Nov. 28, 29 and 30, 1950. During the battle there, we were run over by the Chinese and captured."

Chapman said he was shot in his head, both legs and arms and his rear end.

"I was very fortunate. My fellow soldiers, U.S. Marines and a British Royal Marine in particular, carried and drug me for 19 days until we reached the POW camp," Chapman said.

He found one of the Marines who saved his life at one of the association's reunions in the 1980s. "He didn't believe it was me," Chapman recalled. "He cried when he realized who I was. He thought I had died."

There were 140 men in his unit who were captured and marched through the North Korean countryside. Chapman didn't receive medical treatment from his captors, only from his fellow soldiers. It took more than nine months for the wounds to heal.

"I celebrated my 18, 19 and 20th birthdays as a POW," he said. "The first camp we were in was near the Yalu River and then they marched us north to Pyongyang. In 1951 they separated us again and we marched for almost nine months.

"The North Koreans took us to wherever they wanted us to be," Chapman said. "I think they marched us from village to village just to show the Korean people they were taking prisoners."

Chapman has horrible memories of one POW camp where the GIs were sick, lying around yelling and screaming for help, some dead but not buried and others only partly buried. "Nobody was being cared for," he said.

"Thank goodness we didn't stay there long. They sent us north to camp Changsong where I met Bill Norwood."

Norwood, 77, of Cleveland, Tenn., founded the POW group in 1976. "In the camps you formed unique friendships because our survival depended on the guy next to you," he said. "I started searching for the guys back in the 1970s and located 12 from my camp. We got together and talked and talked and talked. It was something we all needed to do."

He found that the suffering that he and other POWs had gone through had been deeply suppressed after the war. "Just like me, most of the guys couldn't talk about what happened to them with their wives or families," Norwood said. "Once we got together, it was like therapy for all of us."

The annual reunion still serves as a therapy session for many. "We are like a family because we all have so much in common," he said. "What we couldn't tell to our families we can talk to each other about. That's why these reunions are so important. It's a lot better than seeing a psychiatrist and a whole lot cheaper."

The association doesn't charge a registration fee and operates on donations only. "We officially meet every year as an association, but smaller groups meet more often if they happen to live close to one another," Norwood said.

When he was captured, he was taken to Changsong. "If the U.S. forces got too close, our captors would move us to the front of the camp because the North Koreans thought they wouldn't shoot us," he recalled. "They moved us at night from April to August. I've been told that we marched a total of 500 miles to and from various transit camps."

At the last POW camp, Norwood said there wasn't barbed wire around the enclosure but the North Korean soldiers would stand around the perimeter holding hands. He remembered that as being better than barbed wire.

"We had no contact with the outside world," he recalled. "Everything they told us was propaganda. After a while we got letters from the outside world, but they were censored by the U.S. government and the North Koreans so there wasn't much to read."

Norwood is still upset about how his mother was informed about his POW status.

"She didn't hear anything about me for two years," he said, "Then she got a letter from me. That's how she found out I was alive. That's tacky. She could have had a heart attack. The Army should have informed her before she got the letter. The Army had reclassified me from missing in action to POW status but didn't bother to tell my family until after my mother got that letter."

When he was released, he was shipped back to San Francisco. "The Army handed me money and put me on the street," he said. "They didn't give me a bus ticket, a train ticket or anything to help me get home."

"I came from poverty in Tennessee when I went into the Army in 1947," Norwood recalled. "Here I had two pairs of pants, two pairs of boots, a warm coat and more. I thought it was great. Plus I was paid $75 a month - big money to a boy from the south.

"But most importantly, I was given an allotment of $30 that I sent home to my mother every month and the Army matched that amount. Despite everything, I enjoyed the military," Norwood said. "I put on that uniform, and I felt 10 feet tall."

After Chapman was discharged from the Army, he tried to re-enlist but failed the physical because of all the wounds he had received at the hands of the Chinese and North Koreans.

"But I had a cousin who was an Air Force recruiter and he got me in that branch of service," he said. "Even after everything I had gone through, I stayed in the Air Force 16 years. Like Bill, the military was good to me."

Contact writer Mary Childress at maryc@dailymail.com or 348-4886.