A veteran's story: From Korean POW camp home to Hampton

HAMPTON

On a pitch-black night in 1951, on a bleak hill near the 38th parallel dividing North and South Korea, Cpl. Charles Coston lay gravely wounded, hit in the face, stomach and both legs by Chinese shellfire.

Bleeding profusely, Coston looked up and saw a bright light. In the middle of the light, he saw his mother, urging him to get on his feet and give himself up to the approaching Chinese forces.

"She said, 'Repeat the 23rd Psalm and go,' " Coston recalled.

"I said, 'I can't, Mama. I can't walk.' "

She repeated her words. Again, Coston protested.

"Then she said it the third time, very sternly: 'Repeat the 23rd Psalm and go.' Well, when your mama says something three times, you'd better do it."

So Coston got up and walked, despite his shrapnel-shredded flesh - all night long, marched by Chinese troops to the first in a series of camps where he was to spend nearly two years in captivity.

Had he not followed his mother's advice, he is convinced he would have been shot on the spot, cut down on the cusp of adulthood at 22. Instead, he survived to tell the story. It is something he does sparingly.

"I don't do a lot of talking about it," he said, sitting by the fire in his Hampton home last week. It was the second interview he has given about his Korean War captivity since his homecoming 57 years ago.

He was prompted by an account in The Virginian-Pilot in June about the experiences of Thomas Nicholson, another local man captured in Korea. As he read it, Coston, 81, marveled at the parallels.

The two were captured in the same place on the same night and held for most of their captivity in the same prison - Camp 5 on the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. They were released at the same time during a prisoner exchange in August 1953.

Yet neither knew of the other's existence.

"We spent 21 months in the same camp, within walking distance of each other, and never crossed paths," Coston said.

The reason is simple. Nicholson was white, Coston black. They came from a place and a time when Americans of different races were kept strictly segregated, and their Chinese captors did likewise.

"I guess they figured we were used to living that way," Coston said.

Coston was born and raised in Portsmouth, one of 16 children. He was drafted into the Army not long after graduating from I.C. Norcom High School. In less than six months, he was on the front lines in Korea.

It was a time of transition for the military services. President Harry Truman had issued an executive order in 1948 banning racial discrimination in the ranks, but segregated units persisted for another six years.

The 1st Cavalry, to which Coston was assigned, had been nearly decimated by constant combat and was in sore need of replenishment. A fair number of the reinforcements were black, and friction resulted.

Coston was made a squad leader soon after his arrival. Then a group of white National Guardsmen from Alabama were placed in the squad. One of them, who outranked Coston, made it clear that he didn't want to take orders from a black man.

Coston's response was pragmatic. He went to his superior officer and volunteered to relinquish command.

"I said if he wanted to be squad leader, so be it," Coston recalled. "I didn't want to get killed because he didn't want to take orders from me. I gave him the squad and went back to being a gunner."

In the end, rank didn't matter much. For Coston, the war was a daily struggle to retain his sanity as the opposing forces became locked in a grinding stalemate.

He remembers seeing wave after wave of Chinese troops charging toward his squad, clambering over the bodies of their own dead to clear a barbed-wire barrier.

Coston was wounded three times. His last and most serious injuries came on Nov. 5, 1951, after his unit had been given the order "Hold this hill, regardless of the cost."

The GIs fought until they ran out of ammunition. The Chinese shellfire knocked out their radios, so they couldn't call for artillery support.

"We were sacrificial lambs," Coston said.

Coston never got any medical attention for his wounds. His outfit's medic had been killed, and the Chinese had no doctors at the front.

"We had to rely on God, I guess it was, for our healing," he said.

In Camp 5, life was a grim fight for survival. The North Korean winter brought bone-chilling cold. Malnutrition and dysentery were rampant.

"They fed us like hogs," Coston said. "They took away our mess kits and dumped the food into a trough. We had to get down on our knees to eat."

On forays into the nearby village to gather firewood, the hungry GIs stole chickens and sides of meat that had been hung out to dry. They also devised an innovative way to fish the Yalu River.

They scavenged discarded wine bottles from their captors. They put lime in the bottom and stuffed rags in the neck, then threw the bottles into the river. When the water seeped in and reacted with the lime, the bottles exploded, stunning the fish and blowing them to the surface. The fish were then scooped up, wrapped in mud and cooked in hot coals.

Coston was once interrogated for 36 hours straight. When he didn't give up any useful information, his captors put him in a snowbank up to his waist for 10 hours. As the snow melted around his body, they packed more in.

Finally, Coston tore open his coat and said, "Go ahead and kill me." At that point, his captors had his fellow POWs take him back to the barracks.

"They didn't bother me anymore after that," Coston said. "They called me a reactionary" - the label applied to prisoners considered unlikely to be swayed by communist propaganda.

Among his fellow POWs, Coston's nickname was "Mad Sam" - a nod to Samuel, his middle name, and an ironic reference to his improbably sunny disposition in the midst of misery.

"I always had a smile on my face," he said. "They'd say, 'Mad Sam, when we going home?' And I'd say, 'Tomorrow.' "

When tomorrow finally came and the armistice was announced, "the sun got brighter," he said. "It was a joyous day."

The POWs were packed into freight cars and taken to Panmunjom, the border town dubbed "Freedom Village" by the troops, and released.

To the end, the rigid racial segregation of the prisoners was maintained. Any crossing of the color line that occurred was done at night, surreptitiously.

Nicholson, Coston's white counterpart from Norfolk, died last month at 82. The two never met.

Coston came home to Portsmouth to find that however haltingly the military had moved to end discrimination, civilian society was even farther behind.

He remembers being barred from certain restaurants and having to sit in the back of buses.

"Once I tried to get a job at one of the big hotels in Virginia Beach," he said. "They said OK, but I would have to get out of Virginia Beach by sundown."

In 1957, Coston joined the great African American northward migration, settling in New Jersey. "I left to find work," he said. "New Jersey was the land of opportunity."

After working 36 years for the post office, he came home to Virginia in 2004 with his second wife, Brenda. Between them they have four sons and seven grandchildren.

After nearly six decades, he still has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder - flashbacks, night sweats, an aversion to loud noises. Nevertheless, he is able to declare without a trace of bitterness: "Life has been good to me."

He marvels at how far the nation has come in bridging the racial divide.

"A lot of people thought I was crazy, but I used to say one day we would have a black president," he said. "I said I might not be here to see it, but it will happen. I thank God I was here to see it.

"There are still changes to be made, and eventually they will be made. I'm a believer in progress."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com