I much prefer this approach to the holidays, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany. Use your creche as an action set; it sounds crass, but it’s not. It’s a learning visual. Baby Jesus is added to Mary and Joseph on Christmas Day, surrounded by barnyard animals and an angel for sure. Each day add another figure, a shepherd, a townsperson, until the wisemen show up on January 6. I say let them visit for a few days and then dismantle Christmas. This packing up of Christmas on Boxing Day leaves me cold. Leave the lights up at least. In fact, leave the lights up all year. The wreath can stay up until it discolors. Of course, this might be a Northern thang. Anything for some cheer in land of the ice and snow. Besides, I need to rehome my eight maids a-milking. My better half isn’t taking it well. Fortunately, I can kick this Christmas carol right out of my head and concentrate on input that will actually do me some good. We need guidance through this information war in which we find ourselves. Nobody understood propaganda and how the mind is softened up for infiltration better than U.S. Army COL James N. “Nick” Rowe.
For the uninitiated, COL Rowe grew up in a loving family with strong community ties at school and church. He graduated from West Point and served in Special Forces. He’d only been in Vietnam three months when he was captured by the Viet Cong, along with two other military advisors. In a bamboo cage, shuttled within the U Minh Forest from swampy camp to swampy camp, he suffered dysentery, starvation-level rations, isolation, sleep deprivation, physical and emotional torture, and mind-numbing indoctrination sessions. He saw fellow Americans die from the combination of stressors, their minds giving up long before their bodies. His name was listed on two execution lists. He escaped three times before, finally, making trying one more time and making aboard the helicopter that extracted him from the terror. He experienced the mock execution of a fellow POW. His immune system was so weakened that he was almost constantly fighting some kind of fungal infection or other rash or sores. But he had everything he needed to survive: namely, his identity.
COL Rowe had a loving start in life with a loving family and a community that supported its members through school and church. This by itself could have been enough of an identity to survive the onslaught of identity-blurring tactics used by the Viet Cong, but he was also a West Pointer and a Special Forces officer. If, as he explains, we’re all playing various rolls in our lives with different audiences, it was the military audience he wanted to reach, which also included his family. He would think about how these peers, superiors, and subordinates would judge him if he did anything to collude with the enemy. He also accepted that being an officer and a Special Forces officer meant that more was required of him. “What would they think of me,” was the refrain playing in his head.
The communist prisoner management system works to blur your understanding of your own identity. You lose time because of the effects of isolation. The enemy constantly attacks your values, beliefs, faiths and loyalties, as COL Rowe lists them, to the point where you question who you are and where you came from. They try to turn you from images of home and family, saying you can’t see them anymore. We are your audience, we are the ones judging you, we are the only audience that matters. Fortunately, for our country, they brought into the equation peace protestors like Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, saying that these people would support you at home. It was a strategic error. COL Rowe, like the majority of the military community, didn’t like Hayden, Fonda, and their ilk. It was easy for him to resist aligning with the Hayden-Fonda team. He’d already chosen his audience, comprised of his fellow officers and fellow Green Berets. “What would they think of him?” was the only question he needed to ask himself to resist caving to the enemy’s incessant quest to get American servicemen to betray their country. It was the people he would live with when he returned that he wanted to make proud.
Tomorrow is Day 9 of “The Twelve Days of Resilience.” Join us as COL Rowe talks about how to define what is right.
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