Norman Bussel, Yorktown ex-POW describes struggles

Yorktown ex-POW describes strugglesLower Hudson Journal news - West Harrison,NY,USA
By Brian J. Howard
The Journal News • November 9, 2008

YORKTOWN

A few months after he was liberated from a German prisoner-of-war camp, Norman Bussel was invited to a wedding he just couldn't bring himself to attend.


Bussel wasn't doing well, the trauma of the past year still painfully fresh for him. Still, the pilot from his bomber crew was getting married in Atlanta and Bussel thought he could make it.

But five days before the wedding, he received a letter from the sister of his navigator, one of four fellow crew members killed when their B-17 was shot down over Berlin. She didn't understand how six men could make it off the plane while four others could not.

"To me, the implication was that I'd stepped over his dead body and just left him," Bussel, now 85, said in the living room of his Mohegan Lake home.

From the time he'd boarded in Rattlesden, England, on April 29, 1944, until the time he bailed out, the 19-year-old technical sergeant saw only one other crew member, and then only briefly while they were over the English Channel. He never heard a bail-out order, never even left his radio room until he leapt from the plane.

It exploded seven seconds later, as he was counting to 10 before pulling his parachute cord.

After reading that letter, Bussel skipped the wedding and went on a two-week drinking binge.

He recounts that day, including his subsequent capture by angry villagers, in moving detail in his book, "My Private War: Liberated Body, Captive Mind - A World War II POW's Journey," published yesterday by Pegasus Books.

A journey is what he shares, from his enlistment at 18 over his mother's objection to his grueling detainment in Stalag Luft IV in eastern Germany.

The story doesn't end with the camp's liberation by Gen. George S. Patton's tank corps, though. That comes a little more than halfway through the book. What follows is the story of his long struggle with survivor guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder.

"My medication of choice was alcohol," the Memphis, Tenn., native said. "I expect if drugs had been around then I'd have done them as well."
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