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A worn piece of metal. The Hanoi Hilton. Agent Orange. A newspaper column. An email from a stranger. They all play a role in the story of a POW bracelet that has come full circle.
But they also tell a larger story of the best of the United States of America, in the face of the worst of mankind. On the bracelet is etched, "Maj. George McKnight 11-6-65." That was the day my former Hilton Head Island neighbor of 22 years was taken as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
He was a U.S. Air Force pilot who was tortured "for seven years, three months, two days, four hours and three minutes," he would say. That was before dementia and PTSD stole those details from his bright mind. McKnight spent years in solitary confinement. For two years, he was a cellmate of John McCain at the prison they called the "Hanoi Hilton." Civilians can't truly comprehend what he gave to our country.
But here's a glimpse from the book, "Defiant: The POWs Who Endured Vietnam's Most Infamous Prison." Author Alvin Townley writes: "For 34 nights, (the prison camp commander) cuffed George's hands behind his back at sundown and shoved him into the 4-foot-deep air raid trench beneath his bed. There he stayed for the next twelve hours. His 6-foot-2 frame barely fit the damp confines of what seemed like a grave. Worms and bugs crawled across his body and mosquitoes feasted upon him. His immobilized hands could do nothing to help. The slightest itch became torture and no amount of screaming or pleading would convince guards to exhume him before his twelve hours had expired. He passed each minute in blackness and near silence. The dirt walls seemed to creep ever closer, and he desperately combated intense claustrophobia. During the day, he lay on his bed listening to the screams of fellow POWs and dreading sunset. When it came, guards forced him back into the trench."
McKnight was in a group they called the Alcatraz 11, the most defiant of the prisoners. One time McKnight and another of the 11 escaped, but were captured within 12 hours. Townley called McKnight "one of the toughest resistors among the American POWs." Maybe that's why a young Army medic also serving in Vietnam would wear a George McKnight POW bracelet. That young man also would suffer greatly for his country. Soon after his retirement as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, which sent him to serve in Desert Shield and Dessert Storm, Joseph Andrew Adamski Sr. developed multiple myeloma. The cancer that claimed his life at 63 in 2008 is linked to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam.
This month, his widow decided she wanted the quiet hero who was my neighbor to have the old bracelet bearing his name. "I would like him to know that my husband wore it and never forgot about him," said Jackie Adamski of Diamondhead, Miss.
