College Student Documents The Memories—

Remembering Prisoners And Soldiers Missing In Action

By Kendra Bobowick

Games played by war prisoners were both real and imaginary, from the stories resident Ashley LaRocque has heard.

“I remember what they would do, they would play cards, but they didn’t have cards,” said Ms LaRocque, a 2005 Newtown High School graduate currently enrolled at University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Explaining one story’s long-lasting impressions, she remembers the turmoil of two American soldiers imprisoned by the Vietnamese.

She said, “There were two [prisoners of war] POWs and one was African American and the Vietnamese thought it would be worse torture for the white soldier if they were together. They thought it would be racial torture.”

Tossing those two prisoners into the same cell did provoke racial differences between the men, but a friendship eventually formed, Ms LaRocque explained. Still recounting the stories she discovered in books in high school, Ms LaRocque said the men eventually got out of prison and had passed much of their incarceration trying to keep their minds sharp.

“They would play cards and memorize who had which cards,” she said. “They would get into arguments but they could do this for hours and hours.”

Fascinated with accounts about prisoners of war, Ms LaRocque is now compelled to retell their stories on film through first hand accounts, interviews with servicemen’s family members and friends, and through former veterans who still have fellow soldiers among the missing.

She said, “I think this is important, and not enough people remember it and it’s not spoken about enough.” When her studies introduced her to the Prisoners of War and soldiers Missing in Action — POW/MIA topic in high school, she said, “I felt strongly about it.” She is currently organizing her interviews and preparing what she envisions as “a collage of interviews.”

Stories of POWs and those MIA may seem like history to some, she said, but are still told in the present tense by those with links to a prisoner or friend who never returned from Vietnam, Korea, World War II, or other conflicts overseas, she said.

“If you talk to people, it’s like this happened yesterday,” Ms LaRocque said. “It’s an open wound; it’s a father or a brother and they went to war and haven’t been heard from again.”

Noting that wars such as Vietnam or Korea “are long over” for much of the public, she said, “for a lot of people, they’re not [over].”

She hopes to gain awareness, she said, she also hopes to capture on her camcorder “the emotions of the people tied to this.”

Her documentary is not about statistics, she said, but the people.

“These are real people involved,” she said.

As a college student in North Carolina with a brother attending school in Washington D.C., the Newtown native is on summer break until August 17. She plans to visit her brother in Washington, and to use the rest of her vacation and time at school on her project.

Trips to Washington D.C., are scheduled in October and November to hopefully capture soldiers’ and families’ stories on film nearer to Veteran’s Day.

Ms LaRocque, a business management and film studies major, seeks personal accounts from veterans and their families both locally and elsewhere.

Her own family has some military history. Ms LaRocque mentioned that her grandfather was a Marine.

She can be reached at 203-470-9648. Information about prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action can be found at www.dtic.mil/dpmo/ or www.veteransearch.com/powpage.htm. She will be in Newtown until August 17.