The Eye Test

The people who were in charge of us during our sojourn with the People had a passion for secrecy that was difficult for us to comprehend. This desire to keep us in the dark pervaded all aspects of our daily life. As a result, any thing we were involved with was always shrouded in secrecy. At first this was viewed as means to keep us off balance, but we came to see it as more than that. It was a reflection of how they lived and how sick their society actually was. An example of how this effected us is well illustrated by my eye test.

My glasses were lost the night we were captured. I was without them for about eight months before someone in the Korean hierarchy decided that this problem should be corrected. This was not done for humanitarian reasons, but since the world was watching they had to play their part as benevolent custodians of our crew. I attribute the loss of my glasses to bad luck and not to some program on the part of the Koreans to make life more difficult. Others had either lost their glasses or had them shattered during beatings. In fact, it got to a point that they would allow you to take your glasses off when you were going to be beaten. A sufficient number had been broken or lost for someone to realize one day that the families at home were going to notice and criticize the DPRK. This was an unacceptable thought, so the decision was made to get those boys some specs.

I was one of the first to participate in this program, so when it was my turn for the exam I had no idea what was happening. And because of their attitude, no one would tell me. One afternoon a guard came to the room, called my name, and asked me to come out. This was never a pleasant experience under the best conditions. I was taken to the second floor and told to enter one of the lecture rooms, which contained a desk, a chair, a doctor, and one of the officers who specialized in interrogation. I was ordered to sit in the chair next to the desk and face the wall. The doctor opened a small suitcase which rested on the desk and took out an appliance that was placed on my head. It was a device used to hold the lens to test vision, thus ascertaining what strength lens was needed for a prescription. The doctor put two lens in the holder, pointed my head at the wall, and turned the exam process over to the officer.

I knew I was in trouble because I can't see a thing without my glasses, and the two lens were far too weak. The chart didn't even have the big E on it, so I had no idea what the hell I was looking at. The officer asked me to read the chart. When I said I couldn't, the doctor made some noise, but put in two different lens. I still couldn't see the chart, let alone read the damn thing. The doctor was getting upset and so was the officer. I thought that the Korean's standard for acceptable vision was just a tad higher than the US Navy's. Again, two different lens were plopped in. No dice.

The officer took this opportunity to tell me that I was not being sincere and that I was defying him and then went into high gear about American imperialists being pigs and so on. God, I never wanted to read an eye chart so bad in my life. Plop, plop, two more lens, no help. The officer was now yelling and the doctor was joining in. Stereo harangue, Korean in the left ear and English in the right. Now I was in a unique position -- I could possibly become the first person ever tortured as a cure for myopia. Two more were exchanged and I was now able to make out the chart well enough to see that it wasn't an alphabet I was current on, but not well enough to make out what it was. The tenor of the discussion was escalating and two guards had entered the room, which made me to fully expect the beating to commence at any minute.

In desperation, the doctor dropped in two lens made from a '38 Chevy headlight and I could see the chart, which consisted of four vertical rows. The first three rows contained Chinese, Korean, and Russian letters, but the fourth row contained broken circles, which was perfect for functionally illiterate people, as I now found myself to be. It dawned on me that I was supposed to point in the direction of the break in the circle, so I started pointing and at last the room became quiet. I had been sincere. The doctor took the lens from the holder and handed it to the officer. Boy, did he love that, he started laughing his ass off and showed it to the guards who also got one hell of a charge over my inability to see. The officer took off down the hall with the lens sharing his discovery with whomever he met. From the sounds in the hallway, he was having a good time and so were his friends. The doctor wrote down my prescription and sent me back to my room.