The Graybeards – KWVA - Korean War Veterans Association

litter men could not reach him, Father and
another officer went after him and brought
him back, crawling and ducking from rock
to rock through fire so thick his pipe was
shot out of his mouth.
It was his devotion to the wounded
which finally cost him his freedom and his
life. It was at Unsan, on the second of Nov.
1950. For thirty-six hours the 8th Cav. fighting
a perimeter defense, beat off a fanatical
attack. Early in the morning the breakthrough
came, and all day hand-to-hand
fighting swirled around the command post
and the aid station where the wounded lay.
Finally, at dusk, the order came for every
man who could still walk to try a breakout
through the surrounding enemy. Father,
who was unwounded, might have escaped
with them. Her refused to go. Of his own
free will he stayed on, helping Captain
Clarence L Anderson, the regimental surgeon,
take care of the wounded. And there,
just at dark, the Chinese took him as he said
the last prayers over a dying man.
I’ll never forget the night I finally met
him. It was at Pyoktong, on a backwater of
the Yalu, a village where prisoners from
many Americans units were being assembled.
With the survivors of my outfit, C Co.
of the 19th Inf. of the 24th Div. I had been
brought there from near Anju, where we had
been overrun. The men of the 8th Cav. who
had broken out of the perimeter and had
been later captured by twos and threes as
they scattered to the south, were already
there. As we came in, they crowded around
us, asking for word of Father Kapaun. We
had none.
That afternoon Pyoktong was bombed.
A B-26 swept over, dropping fire bombs
and more than half the city went up in
flames. The Chinese panicked. They broke
all the prisoners out and, shooting at the feet
of the walking wounded to hurry them
along, they herded us up onto a hill above
the town. All that afternoon and into the
night we sat there on the icy slope, cold and
miserable, smoking cigarettes made of dried
oak leaves and watching the burning town.
That night they brought us down to where
the wounded from another group lay along
a road on litters made out of straw sacks
stretched on rough pine poles. We shouldered
their stretchers and set off over a
frozen road to the southwest.
I was on the right-hand pole, at the front.
We carried them on our shoulders and as the
shoulder began to ache with the pressure of
the pole against the muscle, we’d stop and
change around. It was during these breaks
that I noticed the man who was carrying
behind me. He was a short man, thickshouldered,
with wide-set gray eyes and a
strong jaw with a deep cleft in it. He wore a
thin, red-brown beard with a little tuft of
goat whiskers at the chin. “I’m Mike
Dowe,” I said. “Kapaun”, he said, and put
out his hand. “Father”! I said, feeling as if
I’d met an old friend. “I’ve heard about
you”. He smiled. “Don’t pass it along”, he
said. “It might get back to the Chief of
Chaplains”. It was a feeble joke but it
cheered us all.
Hour after hour we stumbled on. It was
hard enough to walk by yourself in the dark
on that slippery footing but carrying a litter
was agony. Father never ordered a man to
carry. After a rest he’d just call “Let’s pick-
’em up” and all down the line the guys
would bend and lift and follow him. Far in
the night we came to a village of huts scattered
along a narrow valley. The Chinese
went ahead of us, driving the people out of
the houses. We dropped all the wounded off
at one house and the rest of us were moved
on to other houses farther up the valley.
Father and Doctor Anderson refused to
leave the wounded, but the Chinese threatened
them and made them move on with the
rest of us. The next morning they came
around and pulled all the officers out and
put us together in a compound at the north
end of the valley. Father squawked about
being separated from the enlisted men. But
the Chinese poked him with gun butts and
made him move along. In the first week of
our stay in the valley the Chinese allowed
us a food ration of 500 grams of millet or
cracked corn per man per day. It was a starvation
ration to begin with and then they cut
it down to 450 grams. It was obvious,
Father said, that we must either steal food or
slowly starve. And in that dangerous enterprise
we must have the help of some power
beyond ourselves. So, standing before us
all, he said a prayer to St. Dismas, the Good
Thief who was crucified at the right hand of
Jesus, asking for his aid.
I’ll never doubt the power of prayer
again. Father, it seemed, could not fail. At
the risk of being shot by the guards, he’d
sneak at night into the little fields around the
compound and prowl through the shocked
corn and find where the Koreans had hidden
potatoes and grain beneath the corn shocks.
He moved out of the crowded room where
nineteen of us slept, spoon-fashion on the
dirt floor, to sleep in an open shed in the
compound and found that the shed backed
up to a crib full of Korean corn which he
stole, surreptiously, ear by ear.
His riskiest thefts were carried out by
daylight under the noses of the Chinese.
The POWs cooked their own food, which
was drawn from an open supply shed some
two miles down the valley. When men were
called out to make the ration run, Father
would slip in at the end of the line. Before
the ration detail reached the supply shed,
he’d slide off into the bushes. Creeping and
crawling, he’d come up behind the shed,
and while the rest of us started a row with
the guards and the Chinese doling out the
rations, he’d sneak in, snatch up a sack of
cracked corn and scurry off into the bushes
with it. There were other men stealing too
and some of them squirreled their stolen
food away to eat themselves. Father tossed
his into the common pot. He never said a
word to the men who hid and hoarded food.
But at night after a successful foray, he’d
say a prayer of thanks to God for providing
food “which all can equally share”. That
seemed to shame them and soon the private
hoarding stopped.
His one great failure had overtones of
humor which served to relieve what at the
moment was black tragedy. Once, after
we’d been moved back to Pyoktong, a little
black pig wandered into the compound.
Men who had tasted no meat in months felt
themselves drooling as Father, a big rock in
his hand, cautiously stalked the pig. While a
dozen silent prayers went up, he raised the
stone high and brought it down. It struck the
pig but only a glancing blow. The pig set up
a horrible squealing, the Chinese guard
came running, slamming a cartridge into his
rifle and shouting “Huh”? “Huh”? “Huh”?
Soon after we reached the valley, the
wounded in the sick house - only the
Chinese called it the hospital - began to die
by dozens, poisoned by their untended
wounds. Finally the Chinese allowed
Doctor Anderson to go to their aid though
he had nothing but the skill of his hands to
help them. Encouraged by this concession,
Father asked permission to go with the doctor.
It was refused. “What these men need is
medicine, not prayer,” the Chinese told him.
“Since they aren’t getting any medicine,”
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