As we wend our way through the 12 days of Christmas, which started on Christmas and ends January 5, the day before the Feast of the Epiphany, we don’t really need three French hens. What we could use is some understanding of how to navigate this endless battle to control what and how we think. Nobody understood this better than COL James N. “Nick” Rowe who spent five years as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. Rowe graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1960 and went on to become a Special Forces executive officer serving as a military advisor to South Vietnamese ethnic irregulars. In the course of assaulting the village of Le Coeur in the Mekong Delta, Viet Cong elements capture Rowe and two other advisors.
The communist system of managing prisoners consisted of keeping them near starvation, ailing, and without companionship or hope. They applied physical torture sparingly because the anticipation of its next session was torture enough. Probably most cruel was the emotional abuse caused by the promise of release that kept getting taken away. Lack of sound sleep also softened up the prisoners for interrogation. Solitary confinement, alternated with brief periods of being reunited with fellow prisoners, made the isolation, once reimposed, all the harder to bear. Rowe discusses all the things he learned as a POW in an interview he sat for during the mid-1980s with John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School staff chaplain, CH (MAJ) Paul E. Barkey. The interview is broken down into 12 segments. I’ve dubbed them “The Twelve Days of Resiliency.” (Because that’s what man does; he gets to name things.) On Day 3 of these “Twelve Days of Resiliency,” COL Rowe talks about being afraid and how to manage that fear.
COL Rowe discusses how in a prison camp, unless you possess a singular identity with all people you interact with—which is rare—it’ll be stripped away, and who among us isn’t playing a role in some capacity with some audience or other. You’re naked in the world and scared. As he put it, he thought he was ready to face interrogation, torture, and death, but when he was face to face with them, he found he lacked preparation. In his book, “Five Years to Freedom,” he admitted how scared he was. But when his name was released to the public as a POW by anti-war protestors, his cover story of being an engineer draftee was blown and he revealed that he was really scared. His captors were furious that he’d been able to deceive them for so long and started first with resumed interrogations. When COL Rowe learned that his guards knew his true identity, his fear only increased. In this segment of the video, he talks about how fear is not a weakness, but a primal emotion that, if corralled, can be used to help save your life. If it spirals into panic, however, it can devolve into a whirling thoughts and no direction, or as COL Rowe puts it, “a wild mass of flying horse manure.”
COL Rowe returned to the Army after a six-year hiatus to write his book and developed the Special Forces Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) school. He built the course to teach soldiers how to resist the enemy while still surviving a real-world scenario populated by people who can hurt you. He emphasized that being able to accurately and honestly assess yourself is critical so that you can deny the enemy access to your weaknesses. For him, this happened in the dark, swampy U Minh Forest in the Mekong Delta at the hands of brutal communists, but his course made it possible for later soldiers to find out who they really are first under training conditions rather than in the potentially deadly real-world situation. Fear can be converted into a strength to get out alive.
In tomorrow’s segment, Day 4 of “The Twelve Days of Resiliency,” Mr. Trouble, as his guards referred to him, talks about rewriting the Rambo narrative.
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