OUR HEROES
His mother kept faith when faced with bad news.
He was reported as MIA, but his mother always knew he’d come home.
Those were my grandmother’s words after receiving a letter from the U.S. War Department telling her that her son was missing in action and had been officially declared dead.
My uncle Isaac Laughrun was raised on a small farm in Yancey County, North Carolina. He joined the Army Air Corps in 1940 and, in October 1941, was sent to Corregidor in the Philippines, promoted to sergeant, and made a machine gunner.
By 1942, the Japanese had cut off supply lines to the island. Gen. Jonathan M. Wainwright along with a few thousand men occupying the island were forced to surrender.
After a three-week stay in a converted prison in Manila, Isaac was sent to Manchuria. As a POW, he worked seven days a week, sunrise to sunset. The prisoners were paid one yen per day for their labor
(in today’s money, 113 yen equals $1) and often bought food from the peasants to supplement their poor diets.
They walked 8 miles from the camp to a factory and, because the camp was 18 miles from the Siberian border, the temperatures were often 20–25 degrees below zero. Isaac found a GI blanket and, with cords taken from cement bags, he fashioned a coat to wear over his Japanese-issued uniform.
“The camp was far from escape-proof,” he said, “but where would you go?”
Three men escaped but were recaptured and shot as their fellow POWs were forced to watch. “The Japanese possessed a knack for making life unbearable,” Isaac added.
The prisoner’s barracks were made of wood slats with a dirt floor. Heat came from a single potbelly stove and one scuttle of coal rationed every 24 hours. It was not uncommon to be talking to a man before you went to sleep and find him dead when you awoke.
When Isaac had time alone, he wrote in his diary. One entry reads: “I hope God will bless us and deliver us home; I pray every night that this war will be over soon.”
And one day it was. Russians liberated the surviving POWs at Mukden prison camp on Aug. 20, 1945. Isaac arrived home weighing 96 pounds, down from 146. A few months later he married his childhood sweetheart, and they had a daughter, Brenda. After 54 years home, he died in 2000.
Isaac believed the suffering that he and his fellow soldiers endured was worthwhile—the price of freedom.
“No, my Isaac is not dead.
He will come home.”