ARMED FORCES: One Changed His Mind

In a three-room cabin clinging to the side of Powell Mountain in Cracker’s Neck, Va., Bessie Dickenson sat at her quilting one night last week while her husband, Van Buren (“Dave”) Dickenson, gaunt and sick at 72, listened to the radio. Suddenly Dave called out: “Bessie, listen to this. It says one of those boys has changed his mind and is coming home. I just know it’s Ed.” Said Bessie: “I just know it’s Ed too, Dave.” Later she mused, “Of course, I’ll bet every mother listening thought the same thing. But we went to bed with the feeling. Then later in the night Keith and Thelma Marrs came a-pounding and honking, trying to wake us up … and they told us they had heard Ed’s name on the radio and he was coming back. We was shore happy.”

Just a few hours before, their son, Corporal Edward S. Dickenson, 23, with the loose-jointed amble of a mountain man, had passed through a gauntlet of curious eyes at Panmunjom, to be handed over to the U.N. command. Taken prisoner Nov. 5. 1950, he was the first of 23 American P.W.s who, having previously refused repatriation, had changed his mind. Sitting down at a table with India’s Lieut. Colonel Ujjal Singh and U.S. Marine Major Edward Mackel, Dickenson ostentatiously drew from his pocket two packs of cigarettes—Lucky Strikes and a Chinese brand. He offered a Lucky to Colonel Singh and, when the Indian declined, with conscious deliberation Dickenson crumpled the Chinese cigarettes into a small wad. He lit a Lucky, inhaled deeply, and said quietly: “It feels great to be in the hands of Americans again.”

“That Ain’t Ed.” The radio bulletins were enough to keep Ed’s kin up all night, talking and laughing. Then they got a shock when Ed’s half brother, Grover Dickenson, trudged in with a copy of the Roanoke Times. The newspaper carried on its front page a picture of Ed. Bessie took one look at the picture and began to cry. “That ain’t my boy,” she said. “Eddie was a purty boy, and look at him now. If that’s him, he ain’t got no teeth. I just know it ain’t him.” Dave Dickenson came in from the yard and peered over her shoulder. “That ain’t Ed,” he said sadly. “That ain’t my boy.”

The picture was blurred, and the boy was older, but the young folks convinced Bessie and Dave that it was Ed, all right. Soon the cabin was filled with kinsmen, neighbors, children and newsmen. Then Jim Dickenson, another son of Dave Dickenson’s first marriage, burst upon the scene, glared at reporters and photographers and demanded: “When are you going to Hollywood, Pop? . . . You’ll bring Ed nothing but harm by talking to all these folks and having your picture took.” Bessie protested: “Don’t listen to him, Dave.” But Dave Dickenson was old and tired. “Bessie.” he said, “the whole thing’s got me tore up. I’m easy wrecked, and I can’t stand it.”

“He Ain’t No Communist.” He was afraid that Ed would face Army punishment or social contempt in Cracker’s Neck. Neither fear seemed justified. Pentagon policy will be to treat Dickenson just as any other repatriated P.W., and Cracker’s Neck (three stores, a church and a few houses) was resolved to welcome Ed as a hero. Learning of this, Jim Dickenson calmed down and Dave Dickenson began to talk. As Dave roamed around the kitchen, swatting flies, he said: “This is about all I ever do now. Bessie does everything else. She does all the talking for us, but I’ve got this to say. I never heard the Communist name until this war started. Us mountain folks don’t understand things and don’t pay much attention to the papers and things. They say my boy is a Communist, but he ain’t . . .Why, i’ll bet if they had the President over there, they’d make himdo anything they wanted. My boy ain’t no Communist.”

Only Ed Dickenson, 7,000 miles away in Korea, knew why he had wanted to try Communism—and he wasn’t giving the real reasons. When he crossed the line at Panmunjom, he was smiling sheepishly and seemed eager to talk, but he was whisked away by helicopter to the 121st Evacuation Hospital at Seoul and later by plane to the Tokyo Army hospital. At press conferences, he was sullen and evasive, and told a story that was skeptically received. Why had he originally refused repatriation? “I wanted revenge against the Communists for what they did to my buddies and me,” he said, his eyes darting nervously around the room. “I never intended to go to China, but I figured if I played along with them, I could get information against them and then expose them to the U.S. Government and the world.” Having unburdened himself of this tale, he added: “I believed Americans would be intelligent enough to understand and believe me.” He was more relaxed when he shifted the subject to home. “I’ll be more than happy when I get back home with my mother and father and the rest of my family,” said he. “I had a girl, but she sent me a Dear John letter,* if you know what that is.”

“She Ain’t Gonna Marry.” One of Ed’s girls had got married since he went into the Army. Another was blonde Kate Laney, 20, who lives in a cleared bottom section in Cracker’s Neck. Last December Ed Dickenson wrote her a letter. It said: “Kate, I don’t know how to say this, maybe you will call me crazy but I don’t care. I would like very much to have you for my wife. I know that I never tried to go with you before, but I’m sure that we could be happy together.” Kate wrote back to the boy she had never dated, reasonably suggesting that they wait until he returned home before making any such decision. But last week, when asked if she would marry Ed Dickenson, she had barely opened her mouth to answer when her mother, with an angry spit of snuff juice, snapped: “No, she ain’t gonna marry him.”

Dickenson’s parents hope to make up for his romantic difficulties. Out on her back porch, Bessie noted that water is now piped to the house from a mountain spring. “If Ed could only see how close the water is to the house,” she said. “When Ed was home, the water was up on the hill and we had to carry it down.” She moved back into the kitchen and tossed a fat slab of sausage into the frying pan. “We’re gonna put on the big pot and the little one too. Keith Marrs is gonna bake a fruit cake—Ed loves fruit cake. We’ll have fried chicken with lots of gravy. Ed likes soup beans, too; we’ll have some of those.”

* G.I. slang for a jilting letter from the girl back home.