Operation Thunderhead Read Free Page A

environment where technical actions have to take place smoothly and effectively, and decisions have to be made with split-second speed.
    One fear that never goes away with training centers on the enemy and their actions. If a soldier is killed, then their concerns are pretty much over. If wounded, there will be a period, possibly a long one, of pain and suffering. There’s the possibility of going home—perhaps not as physically whole as when the individual left for the service—but home is a reward of its own. But one thing will keep a military man from going home, wounded or dead: being taken prisoner, captured by the enemy. As a prisoner of war, a POW, no member of the military knows when he will ever see freedom again, or what treatment he will receive at the hands of an enemy who holds him helpless.
    It is that feeling of utter helplessness, knowing that everything concerning your life, including life itself, is dependent on the whims of your captors, that brings on despair in the minds of men taken prisoner. History has shown that that the fear of being held prisoner can be well founded indeed.
    Conflict, war in a simpler term, has been a part of mankind’s past since before recorded history. For millennia, the idea of a prisoner of war did not exist. When an enemy was defeated, he was killed, wounded or not. Resources were too limited, food too hard to come by, for any of it to be wasted on a vanquished enemy. Usually his home was put to the fire; his village or town was sacked, with anything portable of value being taken; and any family, women, children, or elderly killed—though the women at least stood a chance of being taken as slaves.
    It was into the time of recorded history that the idea of taking prisoners started to become more of a common thing, at least for larger, more organized nations. The defeated survivors surrendering on the battlefield were not simply taken prisoner; they were enslaved by the victor. When the defeated laid down their arms, they became chattel, property of the victors, to be used or disposed of at whim. They were even made the stuff of entertainment in some societies, paraded before a joyous populace celebrating the victory of their military, and the lessening of their chances of becoming slaves. In very limited numbers, some of those slaves could be made to fight for their lives, if not their freedom, in shows for the multitudes. Those captured in war were now property, part of the spoils taken by the victors.
    Captured prisoners, enslaved or otherwise, had to be fed and cared for at least to a minimum extent. Warriors would be lost on both sides of an extended conflict. Valuable skills would be lost to each side as the men were taken and held by the opposition. And their care was a burden. Killing unarmed prisoners out of hand became less popular because the opposite side would consider that a reason to treat the prisoners they held in the same brutal fashion.
    Prisoner exchange and the ransom of high-ranking nobility taken on the battlefield became more common as the millennia progressed, and the victors realized that such actions could work to their benefit if their turn came up in the prison pens. By the Middle Ages, the enslavement of captives happened less often, though the ransoming of ranking officers (knights) as well as nobility was fairly common throughout what was considered the “civilized” world. It was only in the religious wars such as the Crusades where the captured fighters of the opposing faith were still commonly put to death as unbelievers, heretics, or whatever label fit.
    Eventually, the exchange of prisoners captured during war became the normal practice. The release of prisoners after a conflict was over wasn’t officially recognized until the practice was finally put in print in the mid-1600s in the treaty that ended the Thirty Years War.
    For hundreds of years, the threat of retaliation in kind kept most prisoners in some kind