Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 22, 1993 TAG: 9305220060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CRACKERS NECK LENGTH: Long
Edward Dickenson watched the fuzzy television pictures with anger and disbelief when Navy flier Lt. Jeffrey Zaun, his face battered, told Iraqi captors that America had wrongly attacked the peace-loving people of Iraq.
Like millions of Americans, Dickenson didn't believe a word of it. He didn't blame Zaun and several other captured fliers for making anti-American statements after their capture in Operation Desert Storm two years ago. "I know'd what had happened to them," Dickenson says. "I felt sorry for them."
Even then-President Bush jumped to the fliers' defense. Bush said the statements were made under duress, and he denounced the Iraqis for mistreating prisoners of war.
It's the kind of understanding that Dickenson wishes he had gotten in 1953 when he returned from Korea after three years in a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp.
After an initial hero's welcome, Dickenson, a corporal, was court-martialed on charges of informing on fellow POWs to get favorable treatment. The self-described Southwest Virginia hillbilly was handed a dishonorable discharge and sentenced to 10 years at hard labor.
The Army released him after four years in Leavenworth Prison, and he returned to the Southwest Virginia mountains where he grew up to live in poverty and disgrace. His case went into military legal history: He is one of just a handful of soldiers prosecuted and imprisoned on charges of collaborating with the enemy while a prisoner of war.
For 40 years, Dickenson has struggled to clear his name and overcome the "DD" brand. His appeals have been rejected by military review panels and federal courts. But now, 14 years after his last appeal was rejected, he's suing the Defense Department, contending his dishonorable discharge was arbitrary. He's demanding an honorable discharge.
It may be his last appeal. Dickenson is 63, with a bad heart, two forms of cancer and kidney problems. He's worried about what might happen to Alice, his wife of 35 years, if he gets sick or dies. They live on Social Security and food stamps. If he gets an honorable discharge, he says, maybe they might get some benefits.
But he's not really after benefits, he says. "I'd just like people to see I was done wrong."
Carl McAfee, Dickenson's attorney, says Dickenson's court-martial was "a farce. If this were Vietnam or Desert Storm, nothing would have come of it." He says the evidence against Dickenson was mostly rumor and speculation. "Honest to God, a lawyer could defend him blind today based on what the proof was at the time."
Dickenson believes he was singled out for punishment by a government overwhelmed with fear of Communism, fanned by the hysterical charges of Sen. Joseph McCarthy - who accused the Army of coddling communists.
He accuses the military of showing favoritism to officers who did worse things than he while captured in Korea. They were forgiven for breaking under infamous Chinese brain-washing techniques, and were returned to duty. One got the Congressional Medal of Honor. But Dickenson, a fifth-grade dropout, was branded a traitor.
He doesn't think the officers should have been punished for cracking. He just wants the same understanding they got.
John F. Corcoran, an Assistant U.S. attorney in Roanoke, says it's too late for Dickenson to appeal again. The statute of limitations has passed. Besides, Corcoran says, Dickenson has no new grounds for appeal. "He's had his day in court . . . No one has been convinced he was done wrong."
Glen Williams, the federal judge in Big Stone Gap who will be handling the suit, says it appears Dickenson was judged by the harsher standards of a different era. "Times have changed. This is a case out of history."
Rodney Hord doesn't agree. Hord is a claims agent in Big Stone Gap with the Virginia Department of Veterans Affairs. He encouraged Dickenson to push his case in court.
Hord says he doesn't know all the details of Dickenson's case, but believes "he got a raw deal" by any standard. Hord grew up with Dickenson and was shocked when he read about Dickenson's case in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes while he was in Korea with the 24th Infantry Division.
He says that over the past decade Dickenson has walked into his office every few years and talked about trying to get an honorable discharge. He'd get all fired up and "then it'd fade away."
`I couldn't hold up'
Dickenson was a private with the First Cavalry Division when he was captured by the North Koreans in November 1950. His weight fell from 160 to 95 pounds during a forced death march with other prisoners. Prisoners were beaten for no reason. The only food was a gruel filled with "little white worms." They slept in cramped, tiny huts with "men dying all though the night with their legs on top of you."
He and other prisoners were later turned over to the Chinese and most of the routine beatings stopped. The Chinese preferred psychological methods of control.
Dickenson says the only thing he did wrong was cave in to Chinese interrogators. That came in 1952 after he and three other soldiers failed in an attempt to escape from prisoner-of-war Camp No. 5 in Pyoktong, Korea, near the Yalu river border with China.
He says he was slapped about and forced to stand at attention while wrapped in a rope from his neck to his feet like a spool of thread. Then he was taken out to a valley where no one could see. One of his tormentors put a gun to his head, cocked it and said, "Tell or die."
The Chinese wanted to know where he and the others had dropped equipment they had used in their escape - a mirror, some metal spears and a cloth flag to attract rescuers.
"I didn't aim to die over that," Dickenson says. "I just didn't see it. I didn't aim to die over a piece of cloth."
Most of the items were his and had been hidden about two miles from the camp where he and the other prisoners were recaptured. "The Chinese should have known where it was anyway," he says.
From then on, Dickenson says, he was labeled "a rat" by some prisoners, and was called a "progressive" - a term for prisoners who began accepting communist beliefs taught in required camp lectures.
That label isolated him from other prisoners. Some blamed him for things he didn't do, he says. "I guess that's where the collaboration lies began."
The Chinese took advantage in an effort to sow dissension and distrust among prisoners, he says. To make other prisoners think he was an informant, guards would put their hands on his shoulders as if they were friends and talk to him about nothing in particular. "Other prisoners saw that and thought I was collaborating."
At his court-martial, several prisoners testified that Dickenson ran errands for the Chinese and got favorable treatment, including gifts of candy and special cigarettes.
They accused him of telling guards about one prisoner's hidden escape supplies and of revealing other prisoners anti-communist conversations.
Much of the evidence against him was circumstantial. One judge on a military board of review panel agreed. He gave a dissenting opinion on one of the key charges on which Dickenson was convicted, saying, "There is little if any evidence, beyond suspicion and hearsay . . . "
Dickenson denies receiving any favors of candy and special cigarettes. He also denies ratting on fellow prisoners.
"That's a black lie," he says.
"If I collaborated, then everybody else did . . . All I did was do as I was told and try to stay out of trouble. I didn't want to be killed."
He believes he was court-martialed largely because of the way he came back when prisoners were exchanged at the end of the war.
When the exchange - called Operation Big Switch - occurred in 1953 he did not return with most other prisoners. Instead he remained with a group of 22 POWs who, the Chinese said, had accepted communism and wanted to defect. Dickenson says he was forced to stay by the Chinese, who separated him from prisoners wanting to return.
He said the Chinese asked if he wanted to go to China. "I told them `no, I want to go home.' " But, "They told me, `You can't.' " He also says the Chinese told him the U.S. government would kill him if he went home because he was a "progressive."
A short time later he escaped and turned himself over to an Indian Army soldier who was part of the neutral forces called in to monitor the exchange. Dickenson then became a pawn in a propaganda battle between the Chinese and Americans.
The Chinese took pleasure in boasting about the American soldiers who defected. When Dickenson returned, the U.S. Army greated him as a hero, and used him to show that those who had stayed may have been forced to or were victims of brain-washing.
A few weeks later, Dickenson was court-martialed.
Near Ashland, Ky., Fred Obroff has softened his feelings about Dickenson. He was one of the three men who attempted to escape POW Camp No. 5 with Dickenson, and he was one of the key witnesses against Dickenson at the court-martial. "I probably was a little harsh," Obroff says now.
Obroff, 61, now a retired railroad electrician, was an Army private at the time. He says that in the years since Korea he's come to realize that Dickenson "could have got a raw deal."
Dickenson was just an uneducated man who broke under a lot of pain and stress, Obroff says. And he says the accusations that Dickenson informed on fellow prisoners to gain favors may have been a result of camp rumor and efforts by the Chinese to sow mistrust. "They worked every angle . . . I should have taken that into consideration," Obroff says.
"I'd like to see him get an honorable discharge."
Dickenson lives in the same tiny house relatives built 100 years ago out of chestnut and poplar on Powell Mountain above the coalfield town of Big Stone Gap.
He has put siding on the house to make it look more modern, but it's basically a hillbilly shack clinging to a mountainside.
And that's what he is, he says: A hillbilly and proud of it. The biggest room in the house is the kitchen, where his wife Alice keeps coffee brewing and cooks up the beans, corn and vegetables they grow on a steep plot next to the house.
Dickenson says he's fortunate to have the old house and keeps the garden out of necessity.
He was never able to get a job with a high-paying company. "They always ask what kind of a discharge you have and when they hear `DD' that's it."
Alice, who married Dickenson after his release from Army prison, says she didn't hold the conviction against him. She was attracted to him because he was "a good man."
Dickenson points to family photos covering living-room tables. "The Lord blessed us with six children, four boys and two girls. Two boys are ministers. They're all Christians.
"If I was the kind of man people have labeled me, how did we raise these kids? They never had much, but they all have jobs and they all work."
Just a few months ago, with the help of U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, Dickenson finally got the medals he earned while fighting in Korea.
"I fought just as hard as anyone else did. You don't get these medals for running," Dickenson says. He proudly pulls them from their boxes and holds them to his chest - the National Defense Medal, the Korean Service Medal, the Combat Infantry Badge, the United Nations Service Medal, Bronze and Silver Battle Stars, the POW medal.
Dickenson picks up his POW medal and stares at it. "I was a prisoner of war for three years, a prisoner of our government for four years; and one way of looking at it, I'm still a prisoner in my own country."
by CNB