The Christmas version of “99 Bottles of Beer On the Wall” can only be fulfilled by that annoyingly repetitive, or cumulative as they like to couch it, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” You know how it goes in the classic English Christmas carol: Someone’s over-the-top lover is an extravagant gift-giver, but really, what exactly does one do with ten lords a leaping? I can concoct a few ideas for the eight maids a-milking and the nine ladies dancing—though it shoot me to the top of Santa’s naughty list—but I’m plum-pudding out of even one reason to keep a squad of leaping lords. (Insert Navy joke here.) The 12 days of Christmas begins on Christmas day and culminates 12 days later with 12 drummers drumming. What I could use is in this 5^th Generation War is 12 psychological gifts from the king of resilience, COL James N. “Nick” Rowe, U.S. Army Green Beret and survivor of five years as a Viet Cong prisoner of war in the swampy U Minh Forest of southernmost Vietnam. He endured near-starvation, illness, sores, the comings and goings of his fellow soldiers, isolation, mock executions, the emotional rollercoaster of maybe being released and then having the rug ripped out from under him—over and over—physical torture, psychological torture, indoctrination, the brutalization of his pets, having to kill his pets to spare them from torture, escaping three times and finally getting lucky enough to be picked up by an Air Cavalry command helicopter crew.

 

Day 1: Foundation and Development

Day 2: Skills and Code of Conduct

Day 3: We Are All Scared and That’s OK

Day 4: Rewrite the Rambo Narrative

Day 5: Religion and Faith

Day 6: Personal Coping

Day 7: Dealing with Isolation and Keeping Faith with Others

Day 8: Maintain Identity Throughout Experience

Day 9: Defining What’s Right

Day 10: Dissent vs. Disloyalty

Day 11: Government vs. People In It

Day 12: We Fight for a Cause

First Lieutenant Rowe landed in Ca Mau, walked into a building for his, at times, less-than-welcoming debrief, or rather challenging debrief, and walked out wearing someone’s borrowed Army trench coat as a cape with Major rank affixed. He parted ways with the Army in 1974 after 14 years of service and wrote a book that every man, woman, and child should be required to read: “Five Years To Freedom.” Some days are so bad that all you can muster is doing the laundry and trying to get your head back on straight. Rowe set the example by living through hell with some sort of emotional restraint and grace. Although he was a man of solid faith and this foundation is mentioned throughout his book, he never preaches, never forces, just explains where his mind was at when they were stretching his limbs or clipping the wings of his pet forest eagle, or when a fellow soldier simply could not eat one more bite of rice though it meant certain death if he did not. After this probably much-needed period of civilian life, six years, he went back on active duty in 1981 and essentially established the U.S. Army Special Forces SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) school, for which he gets scant recognition outside the SF community. At some point during his time as a full bird—probably the mid 1980s—he did an interview with the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School staff chaplain at the time, CH (MAJ) Paul E. Barkey. The U.S. Army Special Operations History Office has a YouTube channel and they’ve taken the interview and broken it into 12 topics, 12 gifts for those of us fighting the forever war.

Foundation and Development

Rowe points to family, community, school and church as having the most impact on his development. He brought the foundation that love and education provided with him into the service, and that base proved pivotal to his survival as a POW. At home, he was raised with love and loyalty, plus a touch of stubbornness, which also proved invaluable. The community of McAllen, Texas, extended the lessons of loyalty to a larger group. At school, Rowe learned civics—a subject sorely in need of a resurrection—U.S. and world governments and how they compared and contrasted. At church, he always followed the rules and sung all the hymns, but, as with many of us, he wasn’t enamored with religion with its dogma and ritual until later in life when he understood it as a vehicle to faith, as in true belief. He talks about how chapel was compulsory during his years at West Point, though it no longer is—another situation that needs to be rectified. Parents are too quick to say the child can make a decision about religion for him or herself without recognizing the need to bring the child up within a faith from the start. Children can only make a decision about faith and a church if they’ve known for years what it can—and sometimes cannot—provide and how that base can supported them—or not. (Rowe didn’t say that; I did.) Let’s listen to the man himself.

Rowe also mentions sports, in his case basketball, and participation in his church’s Methodist Youth Fellowship group. Being a team player, interacting with people at possibly their most vulnerable or bonding with others through hardships and fun times, comes with time through sports and church groups, or groups of almost any positive kind. Even if you prefer your own company, the lessons from sports and church participation in your formative years prepares you for those times alone, whether by choice or imposed upon you by others. Rowe’s background was further strengthened and honed during his years at West Point, in Special Forces, through five years of existential horror as a prisoner of a brutal enemy, and throughout his military career. He fully appreciated the love he received in his childhood home, the support of his community, what he learned in school, and the fellowship and budding faith he experienced at church. Those guardrails, that nurturing and appreciation, were what developed his character to the point where he was able to survive five years as a POW with his mind and spirit intact.

On the Second Day of Resilience, Mr. Trouble, as his guards called him, talks about Skills and the Code of Conduct.

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