Kansas City Star - MO,USA
Ed Slater: After captivity in Korea, and suffering more after the war, he found peace.
By LISA GUTIERREZ
The Kansas City Star
Ed Slater’s family “did what we did to get what we could get” during the Depression. So for the bad boy from Quincy, Ill., it was reform school or the military
He chose the Army.
So here he was, scared out of his 20-year-old mind, separated from his infantry unit, lost in the Korean countryside.
He wandered two weeks without food before begging for rice from a Korean peasant woman. He ate it up.
He heard the triggers as North Korean soldiers rushed him.
Click-click-click-click-click.
In the summer of 1950 Ed Slater became a victim of what historians call the North Korean atrocity mill.
As a prisoner of war, this son of a plumber learned what flesh sounds like when it’s pounded, what a human head looks like after struck by a bullet, what anguish feels like.
The cries came from his own mouth.
“I thought I was going crazy,” he says. “I was sleeping in bars, sleeping in parks. I knew something was very wrong with me.”
He had post-traumatic stress syndrome, and it took a Veterans Administration psychiatrist and Prozac to treat it.
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