Philip D. Brown

Richmond County Daily Journal

Growing up on a farm in Rockingham helped to prepare William W. Smith for the ordeal he was to face as a prisoner of war in Korea, as much as anyone could possibly be prepared for torture and a sentence of life at hard labor.

“When I meet with history classes or start to tell people my story, I always say, ‘you won’t believe some of the things I’m about to tell you - if you told it to me I wouldn’t believe you,” Smith said.

He is now returning to Rockingham to unveil the book his wife wrote of his experiences as he recounted them. A book signing and address will be held for ‘A Moment in Time’ at the Leath Library in Rockingham Saturday from noon to 4 p.m.

For Smith, his return to Rockingham is the completion of a full circle — an attempt to gain peace and understanding with the hardships he’s endured, and share his experiences and faith with the folk of his hometown.

Part of him still remains in the shanties and huts of his Communist imprisonment, and in a recent interview, he put his head down and took three deep breaths before looking up.

“I don’t know why I’m alive today,” he said. “I cannot tell you why. When we started out on our march to the camp, we had 750 men, 250 made it there.”

His narrative began when he joined the Army in December of 1944 at 15 years old, but was sent back to Rockingham when his true age was discovered, only to return to Fort Bragg in 1947 and ship out first to Fort Jackson then to Korea.

Some time elapsed between then and when fighting broke out, but after two and a half months of combat he fell into enemy hands.

He recounted the fighting and the miraculous circumstance which allowed him to stay alive in his book.

“They came at us so quickly we could not shoot them fast enough,” Smith recalled. “The Browning Automatic Rifle I was holding was so hot that it began to fire automatically, and finally it just quit. When we ran out of ammunition, the hand-to-hand combat began.”

After being knocked to the ground, “A Chinese soldier pointed a Thompson sub machine gun in my face. The barrel looked like the opening of 55-gallon drum.”

Smith recounts putting an arm over his face and calling out to God for mercy. The gun misfired, then the soldier executed the Republic of Korea soldier to his right, and it clicked again when he retrained the gun on Smith.

The process was repeated with the Republic of Korea soldier on his left, and again the gun misfired when it was pointed at Smith.

“I will never know if it was jammed, or if he was out of ammunition, but I believe the Lord was looking after me,” Smith recounted.

After these events, Smith’s ordeal had just begun, and he would spend the next two and a half years in captivity, subject to torture, starvation, brainwashing and the anguish of seeing his fellow soldiers die at the hands of his captors and of malnutrition and preventable diseases.

There are 11 chapters dealing with his ordeal in ‘A Moment in Time,’ and there is more he could not include about that period because of the graphic nature of the content.

A passage quoted on the cover reads, “They chained my hands and my body, but they never reached my mind ...”

And another passage reads, “The physical torture was terrible, but the body can only take so much, and you pass out. I have already said the mental torture was the worst, because you can’t turn that off. Even after 55 years, I still have flashbacks.

“I was labeled a reactionary, basically a troublemaker, because I didn’t embrace the Communist philosophy,” Smith said in an interview. “At my third and final court-martial, I was sentenced to ‘life at hard labor, never to return home.’ That didn’t bother me that much then. By then, we all thought we were dead men, anyway. What was work to us?”

He explained how his upbringing prepared him for the rigors he would face.

“Growing up on the farm in Rockingham, we had two mules, and we’d do what we called surveying, walking them around the fields,” he said. “I was used to walking, and that helped me when we started out on the march. But, really, the country boys tended to survive more than the city boys. We were better prepared for the hard work and harsh conditions we faced in the camps.”

When he was liberated, he’d been reduced from a 190 pound, six-foot tall 18-year-old handsome G.I. to an 82-pound walking skeleton who couldn’t hold down pudding or custard at his meals. The Chinese even threatened to kill him as they were driving him to the trading point because it was apparent to them he would die, but his friends refused to cooperate if they did.

“I told myself that I walked in there, and I would walk out,” he said. “I was 82 pounds, but I was still standing. They never captured my soul.”

He said his Christian faith sustained his life, and recalled one story from the book when he was ordered to pray to a Chinese soldier not to shoot him.

“I pray to no man, shoot me now,” he said.

He was also asked by one of the Chinese guards, “If your God is good, why does he allow you to stay here?”

“God is allowing this so he can watch you,” Smith remembers telling him, which shook the resolve of the torturer.

As he drove into Rockingham this week, he remembered the high school, the Strand Theater, the Bank of Rockingham and the other landmarks that populated his childhood here, and he attempted to sort out what it was he wanted people to know.

“Freedom isn’t free — I paid the price for our freedom. I know,” Smith said. “Now, all I can say is to enjoy every day as much as you can, and enjoy life to its fullest.”

“We live everyday as if it’s our last,” his wife Charlotte, who collected his memories into the book, said. “We never go out of the house without telling the other person ‘I love you.’ We never leave each other without saying those words.”