Captain Is Dedicated to Prisoners' Return

    Capt. Eugene R. Guild, U.S. Army (ret.), has a few close friends in his home town of Glenwood Springs, Colo.

    Townfolk shy away from him.  He's a distinguished looking man, clean in habits and speech, but his neighbors would feel a little more at ease if he'd pack up and settle somewhere else.

    The conservative element is afraid that the 82-year-old retired Army combat officer is going to give their town a bad name.  That he enjoys an occasional day running river rapids in a tiny rubber life craft doesn't particularly offend them.  That's a harmless little idiosyncrasy.

    But they are bothered by his "rabble-rousing," his continuing fight with the U.S. government over its unwillingness to admit the possibility that more than 3,000 U.S. servicemen may today be prisoners of the Red Chinese.  And its timid refusal to take positive, strong action.

    Yesterday, I reported how the government recognized, with some reluctance, that Communist China could be holding as many as 450 U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines from since the days of the Korean war.

    Capt. Guild sets the figure at 3,141. This he arrived at by taking the number of servicemen (4,735) still unaccounted for after the war and subtracting the number of remains which the Chinese finally were pressured into returning to U.S. authorities (1,550), plus 44 others who were later established as dead.

    The Chinese claim they have no more bodies.  They refuse to admit knowledge of ever having held any of the missing men in question. 

    "The U.S. government is still asking the Chinese about the fate of the 450 whom they've established were at one time or another in the hands of the Reds," the captain told me yesterday.  "Over the years I've compiled evidence as strong, or stronger, on dozens of the others."

    The captain, in a voice disarmingly soft, continued:

    "But instead of adding to their list as more information comes to light, the government is backing down, soft-pedaling the issue.

    "The Communists have a habit of secretly holding prisoners. A few years ago, after keeping 289 Spaniards for 11 years and denying it all the time, they suddenly released them.  They've done the same with Italian and German prisoners.

    "The Italians claim that the Russians still have 63,000 of their men. The Germans set their figure at 300,000."

    Today, Capt. Guild heads a loose organization known as "Fighting Homefolks of Fighting Men," made up of 1,000 relatives and friends of still missing GIs.  He gets no salary.  In fact, much of his pension check goes into his crusade.

    "We gather information and we try to keep public interest alive on the issue," he told me.  "The government's attitude is (1) they're dead, or (2) there's nothing more we can do about them than what we're doing now, short of war.

    "This, naturally, scares the public because none of us want war.
   
"What the government doesn't point out is that there's a middle ground. 

    "Instead of wasting postage on perfumed diplomatic notes and keeping men in Warsaw and Panmunjom making token protests," Guild continued, "the U.S. could use severe economic and diplomatic pressures.

    "We, as a nation, could generate worldwide opinion and force the Reds into accounting for the missing men."

    Capt. Guild shook his head.  "But we don't.  Instead, our government officials deliberately misinform and mislead the men's kin.  In the case of an Army captain, they actually withheld the information that the Chinese admitted having the soldier as a prisoner.  They withheld the facts from the captain's father.

    "Mothers of some of the missing who have been too persistent in their pleas to Washington have actually been visited by the FBI.  I've had post office inspectors come around to see me.

    "These men," the captain, who, himself, lost a son in Korea, concluded, "proved their loyalty on the battlefield.  Now it's time for the U.S. government to prove its loyalty."

Mother Wants Probe on Case of Missing GI

The U.S. government says that Donald Sybrant is dead.  It lists him as one of the 142,000 casualties of the Korean war.It first reported him missing in action on Nov. 30, 1950, in the battle of Heartbreak Ridge.

Then, three years later, it notified his mother, Mrs. Leota Shadden, of Ainsworth, Neb., that he was presumed dead.  Where there is no conclusive evidence of death, but where a missing serviceman remains unheard of for 366 days or longer, the government may make this presumption.

This it did a few months after the final prisoner-of-war exchange in the fall of 1953.  Sgt. Sybrant was one of the 4,735 missing and captured GIs whom the United States couldn’t account for and declared “presumed dead” at that time.

Mrs. Shadden doesn’t agree with the U.S. government’s conclusions about her son.

Her reasons are not based solely on faith.  There are facts, both personal and general, she has gathered in the ensuing years which lead her to believe that the government her son fought to preserve is accepting her son’s “death” much too casually.

This week, I discussed some of those facts with her.  Her case, briefly, is this:

Through correspondence with men in his outfit, H&S Co., 2nd Div. Engineers, Mrs. Shadden learned that he fought his way out of a Chinese roadblock and swam safely across the Chongchon River.

This was all she knew about her son until Feb. 14, 1951.  Then, in a picture printed in a Tacoma (Wash.) newspaper of a group of prisoners of war, she thought she recognized one of the men as Donald.

She obtained a glossy print of the picture.  The clearer photograph made her almost positive of the identification, although the Communists did not then, nor have they ever, admitted that Donald was a P.O.W.

Next, in October of 1952, she received by mail a Communist magazine, “China Reconstructs.”

It was postmarked Hong Kong.  Letters from the magazine soliciting  her subscription followed in April, 1953, and July, 1955.

The magazine, to her, was the biggest clue to the mystery of whether her son was or possibly still is prisoner of the Communist Chinese.

“It could be,” she told me, “that my son somehow managed to get the magazine sent to me to let me know that he’s alive.”

Investigators, both private and government, have come up with no information that any other relative of a missing or captured GI received the magazine.

How, Mrs. Shadden would like to know, did the Communists get her name and address if her son hadn’t supplied it?

The magazine was addressed to Mrs. LEO Shadden (Leo being her husband’s name).  All her son’s Army records listed her as Mrs. LEOTA Shadden.

Then, there’s the coincidence that the magazine’s subject matter stressed heavy equipment operation — her son’s Army specialty.

Mrs. Shadden’s case that her son is a captive is purely circumstantial.  It’s by no means conclusive.  There are dozens of cases with equally strong or stronger evidence that the Chinese did hold back, or are still holding back American GIs as hidden hostages.

Mrs. Shadden’s complaint is that the U.S. government is passive in its attempts to get an accounting from the Red Chinese  of the hundreds of American servicemen who “vanished” in the Korea fighting.

The Communists — both in Russia and China — have a history of holding back prisoners of war, denying their existence, and then freeing them five, 10 or 20 years later.

Let’s Look Into It

“I feel that my son is alive,” Mrs. Shadden told me.  “I suppose that it’s only natural for a mother to feel that way.  He could be dead.

“But that’s not the point.  The point is, he was willing to give up his life for his country when he went to Korea.

“So as long as there’s a thread of evidence that the Chinese still have him,” she concluded, “the government shouldn’t turn its back on the possibility just because it’s diplomatically less embarrassing that way.”

Tomorrow, I’ll examine some of the cases of the 450 “missing” GIs whom the government says, in one breath, are dead;  in the next, are possibly alive.