Twenty-Three Americans

Two open, Russian-built trucks rattled south through Korea's demilitarized zone to "Indian Village," collecting point for the Korean war P.W.s who do not want to go home. Twenty-four voices rose in unison from the trucks, and the refrain of the Communist Internationale echoed down the narrow valley: "Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, arise, ye wretched of the earth." Just as the trucks rolled into the barbed-wire compound, they shouted the final line: "The International Soviet will free the human race." Then they raised clenched fists in the Communist salute.

One was a Briton, 23 were Americans who had chosen to renounce their homeland and live on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain. A band of U.S. newsmen silently watched the group dismount, chattering and joking with each other and looking--except for their faded blue P.W. uniforms--like a bunch of crew-cut American college boys returning from vacation. One of them spotted a Chinese newspaperman. "Hey, Comrade Lee," he shouted, "see you in Peking." A Chinese Communist called: "Don't forget us!" "Never!" cried another American.

The "non-repat" P.W.s had nothing to say to the American newsmen, but Communist Correspondent Wilfred Burchett of Paris' L'Humanite busily distributed a statement signed by all of them. "Our staying behind does not change the fact that we are Americans," it read. "We love our country and our people. [But] the murder of the Rosenbergs, the legal lynching ... of dozens of ... Negroes . . . are the best comments we can make to . . . the American tradition of freedom."

Men & Mothers. Sticking to its decision to sit on the names and addresses of the 23 Americans, even though Burchett's list revealed them, the U.N. command nevertheless riffled through its files and pieced together a composite picture: they come, mostly, from middle-income families, nearly all are in their 20s; many have high-school educations, all profess one form of religion or-another. Seven come from cities or large towns, 16 from small towns, villages or backwoods communities; eleven come from Southern states, three of them are Negroes; almost all have names that are American from way back. Most of them were captured in 1950, giving Communist indoctrinators three years to wash their brains.

From Olympia, Wash, to Fort Ann

N.Y., in the places that had once been home to the men on Burchett's list, the reaction was the same wrenching disbelief. "We don't believe it . . ." "It just couldn't be." "They're holding him against his will." In Alden, Minn., the mother of Pfc. Richard Tenneson, 21, told reporters, "If I could talk to him for ten minutes, I could at least make a dent in that kind of thinking." Mr. & Mrs. Van Buren Dickenson, the parents of Corporal Edward Dickenson, 23, sat in stunned sadness in their home in Cracker's Neck, Va. like a study in American gothic. "I won't believe anything except that my boy wants to return home," said Mrs. Dickenson.

"Top Performers." But the Army doubted that the Tennesons and the Hawkinses, the Dickensons and the others would see the 23 Americans soon again. U.N. officers were certain that they had been picked for display because they were "the top performers" among a larger group of Red-held progressives.

One of them shouted across the barbed wire to an American correspondent: "Go home, you imperialist Yankee!" It was so American--for the words came in a rich Southern accent.

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