COMMUNICATE OR DIE

Captain Eugene “Red” McDaniel, a navy pilot, was shot down in North Vietnam and held as a prisoner of war for six years. In his book, Scars and Stripes, he described the desperate need for prisoners to communicate with one another to maintain morale. He shared numerous stories of POWs who died, unnecessarily, because they could not find ways to communicate regularly, and effectively with their fellow POWs.

On many occasions Captain McDaniel and his fellow POWs endured torture rather than give up their attempts to stay in touch with fellow prisoners When Captain McDaniel was in solitary confinement, his fellow POWs risked death by working out a complicated communication system that included writing messages under their plates, coughing, slang, taping (by code) on their cell walls, laughing, scratching, even spitting or flapping laundry a certain number of times to transmit letters of the alphabet.

“One thing I knew,” says Captain McDaniel, “was that I had to have communication with my own people. Like me, they wanted to live through their imprisonment.” Communication with each other was what the North Vietnamese captors took the greatest effort to prevent. The North Vietnam guards knew that POWs were sharing similar suffering. Captain MCDaniel knew that any lone, isolated POW became weak and knew he had to make, and keep contact, no matter what the cost, with those isolated POWs.

“For those brave men it was communicate or die. And for personal and corporate relationships it is communicate or watch your career or relationships die a cruel death…the death of disconnectedness, the death of neglect, the death of misunderstanding, or the stone silent death of apathy. Often this is not just your career that dies, sometimes even the corporation dies if communication is not a priority”. --Anna Kendall