Abstract
More individuals have experienced a prisoner of war or hostage situation than most people realize. There were over 130,000 American service personnel captured during World War II alone; over 7,000 were taken POW during the Korean War; and nearly 600 returned from Vietnam to U.S. control during Operation Homecoming in the spring of 1973. The men held in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam conflict were held longer (almost 9 years for some) than the POWs of World War II (4 years), Korea (3 years), those held during the Pueblo incident (11 months), or more recently by Iran (approximately 1 year).
My room was almost totally black. The window was covered by a sheet of steel with small holes drilled in it, just enough to let light in. That sheet of steel got awfully damned hot, ... it just about killed me. ... I started thinking ... we are going to have a tough time if we are here for any length of time, because the problem is going to be a psychological problem.
—Returned POW, 1974
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Hunter, E.J. (1988). The Psychological Effects of Being a Prisoner of War. In: Wilson, J.P., Harel, Z., Kahana, B. (eds) Human Adaptation to Extreme Stress. The Springer Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0786-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0786-8_7
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