Remembering POWs and those who were MIA

The large room at Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Building belonged on Saturday to two gray-haired men, former prisoners of war, and to those like them.

XII097689: That was Arthur Eck?s POW number.

Dec. 9, 1944: That was the day Eck, of Willits, was captured in France. He wore his POW dogtag on Saturday, hung on his maroon suit, below a maroon cap stitched with the words, American Ex-Prisoners of War.

1887: That was the number Walt Huss?s Japanese captors gave him, engraved on a wooden badge that the Santa Rosa man wore Saturday.

?You dream about it,? Huss said before the ceremony, which marked National POW/MIA Recognition Day, set aside to pay tribute to the trials suffered by POWs and servicemen still missing in action.

?Still dream about it,? he repeated.

Michael McSween of Petaluma, an Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War, wore his 37-year-old military dress uniform. He read the names of 29 local men known to have been POWs.

When their names were read, Eck and Huss, the only men from the list in the room, stood.

?Present.? Eck said,

?Here,? Huss said.

Still unaccounted for, McSween said, are 4,452 U.S. servicemen from World War I, 78,773 from World War II, 8,100 from the Korean War, 1,773 from the Vietnam War, 123 from the Cold War era, one from the Persian Gulf War and 10 from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

About 60 people were in the audience. Judging by how many saluted during the color guard ceremony and when the Marine bugler played Taps, almost all were veterans.

One, Jay Matthews of Santa Rosa, was an Army combat engineer in Vietnam. He wiped away a few tears Saturday.

?It?s an honor to be around a POW ? the MIAs ? it?s just a very sobering experience,? Matthews said. ?These guys are true heroes. I?m not sure I could live up to that.?

Eck, an Army infantryman, told of how he and his fellow POWs were treated: ?Treatment, yeah, we got treatment, we got a lot of treatment.?

Sometimes, the 84-year-old man recalled, camp guards, ?just for fun,? bound POWs at their wrists and hung them from the perimeter fences, ?your back to the barbed wire.?

He almost lost his feet to frostbite, he said. His weight went from 175 pounds to 95 pounds over the five months and 27 days he was a prisoner of the Germans.

Huss lost about the same, 70 pounds, before he was liberated on Sept. 2, 1945 from his prison camp in Mukden, Manchuria (now Shenyang, China).

He was a gunner on a B-29 bomber, shot down over Manchuria Dec. 7, 1944 as it returned from a mission.

?You wonder why two of my crew survived, nine of us perished,? he said.

In the audience his wife, Eleanor Huss, wiped her eyes. Next to her, so did Iris DeBore of Willits, the widow of Arlen DeBore, who died last year, on Memorial Day. He was captured in the Philippines on Corregidor island, held as a POW by the Japanese for three years.

?The worst of the days,? Huss said, were four months in solitary confinement, the sentence he was handed after a two-week interrogation after his capture.

The two gray-haired men told their stories. The POW/MIA flag stood near them, depicting a man?s head and shoulder silhouetted before a watchtower, the words ?You Are Not Forgotten.?