Despite malaria and hunger, Lloyd Ponder survived on faith and determination

Lloyd Ponder fought on Bataan in the Philippines during World War II and made his last stand on the island rock of Corregidor before a surrender order forced him to become a prisoner of Imperial Japan.

At age 101, he is one of the last remaining survivors of the ordeal. He encourages today’s generations to see the silver lining in every hard situation.

"I had a hard education in the prison camps," Ponder said, from his home in Natchitoches, Louisiana. "You can die so easily. Yet where there’s determination, faith, and a will to live, you can overcome impossible odds. I remember looking at the sky at dusk and thinking, ‘That sunset would look so pretty, if only the barbed wire weren’t there.’"

Born October 12, 1921, in Pleasant Hill, Louisiana, Ponder was the first of five brothers. He graduated as high school valedictorian. But with no money for college, Ponder enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the precursor to the Air Force, and trained to become an airplane mechanic.

"I always loved airplanes," he said. "We sure could have used some on Bataan."

His outfit, the 116th Squadron, 27th Bombardment Group, sailed for Manila in fall 1941 and arrived a week before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. When war broke out in the Philippines, most of the airplanes were destroyed, so Ponder fought as an infantryman. But the Allied troops were outnumbered and cut off from resupply.

"We ate our horses," Ponder said. "Small ponies were pretty good, but mules were tough to eat."

Bataan fell on April 9, 1942. American and Filipino troops were rounded up and marched to various POW camps in the infamous Bataan Death March. Separated from his unit and feverish from malaria, Ponder dodged the roundup and escaped by night on a tugboat to Corregidor. He recovered enough to fight with the U.S. Marines until the island fell a month later.

"I was dog tired," Ponder said, "mentally worn out from continuous artillery shelling, probably at the lowest point of my entire life. I remember thinking, ‘No one on this earth can help me now. My life is in God’s hands.’"

For the next three and a half years, Ponder endured a series of POW camps. He witnessed fellow prisoners being beaten and killed. He was hit in the face with the heel of a guard’s shoe. A recurring bout of malaria troubled him intensely.

"Malaria is vicious stuff," Ponder explained. "It kills the appetite for anything. But you got to eat to live. One day, suffering from chills, I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat to eat my ration of rice. A fellow walked by in search of more rice. Victims of malaria were a prime hunting ground. This fellow reminded me of a vulture, and I determined to eat all of my ration. Slowly, one small bite at a time, I ate it all. He got up, disgusted, and walked away."

In July 1944, Ponder was one of 1,600 prisoners transferred to Japan aboard the Nissyo Maru, a rusting unmarked freighter.

"What I saw when I reached the top of the gangplank and looked into the hold made me think I was having a nightmare," Ponder said. "They just kept cramming more men inside. All space was taken. Not a breath of air. No sanitation facilities. Wasn’t even possible for us all to sit. We were a mob—pushing, shoving, yelling."

In Japan, Ponder labored under brutal conditions at a locomotive factory. Five feet ten inches tall, his weight dropped to 90 pounds.

"We talked of nothing but food," Ponder said. "One of our men was caught with some potato peelings he’d snatched from a rubbish heap. He was slugged with a rifle butt, beaten by guards, and kicked in the face after he fell to the ground."

At last, on August 15, 1945, faced with defeat, Japan agreed to an unconditional surrender. The camps were liberated. On the ride home, Ponder added 15 pounds to his frame, sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge a day before his 24th birthday.

"I thought our country never looked so beautiful," Ponder said.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern State College, a master’s from Oklahoma A&M, and married his sweetheart, Joyce. They have two children. Ponder worked in the Louisiana vocational educational system, serving his last 12 years as director of the Natchitoches Trade School before retiring in 1980.

What’s the biggest lesson he learned during the war?

"I made a habit of daily prayer," Ponder said. "When everything appeared hopeless, I’m certain God sustained me."

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Veterans Day is a week away. So, the National Women Veterans United (NWVU) group celebrated contributions and stories of women Veterans. Keynoting their event at the Sgt. Simone A. Robinson Military Women Veteran’s Center was former U.S. Soldier and POW Jessica Lynch.

Eighteen years after she was captured by Iraqi forces on March 23, 2003 — at age 19, becoming the first American prisoner of war and first woman to be rescued since World War II — former U.S. soldier Jessica Lynch still wrestles with post traumatic stress disorder.

Today, the 38-year-old elementary school teacher in West Virginia, who became a household name after the incident four months into the Iraq War, has learned to cope with both the physical and mental scars, just as all Veterans do, she told Veterans here Saturday.

“It’s the courage and the strength we all have inside of us to be able to continue to persevere, to just continue one more day,” said the woman whose April 1, 2003, rescue was filmed and beamed around the world in a keynote before the National Women Veterans United (NWVU) organization, at Sgt. Simone A. Robinson Military Women Veteran’s Center.

“It’s inside of us. But we just have to be able to find and bring it out, because at 19 years old, and just 76 pounds when they rescued me — I didn’t eat, I wasn’t given that — I didn’t think that I was going to make it,” she said. “I really didn’t think that I was going to make it.”

Lynch had been invited to speak at the center in Ashburn, the only Veterans center in Illinois devoted to aiding women in the military — named for a Black soldier who served in the Afghanistan War, killed by an improvised explosive device detonated near her security post.

Many of the women Veterans gathered at the center identified with that post-service trauma as they shared their own stories of service to their country, and resilience in the face of physical injuries or the struggle to break gender and race barriers.

“Just before Jessica came in, we just didn’t have females in those positions. The draft went away in ‘74, and without men to fill those lower ranks, women started coming in. After 9/11 was when they started sending them out into the field, and they were vulnerable,” said Retired Army Col. Constance Edwards, 77, of Frankfort, a Vietnam War Veteran.

Edwards was the third Black woman to reach the rank of Army colonel here in Illinois.

Also attending the event was Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, chair of the Illinois Council on Women and Girls, as well as the Military Economic Development Committee.

“Fourteen years ago, our distinguished guest testified before Congress and exhibited, yet again, her unwavering bravery. Jessica told the nation: ‘I had a story that needed to be told so that people would know the truth,’” said Stratton, referring to Lynch’s historic testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on April 24, 2007.

Lynch unveiled misinformation surrounding her capture and rescue — saying she’d been portrayed as a “little girl Rambo” who fought her captors, when she’d been unconscious.

“Jessica’s commitment to do the right thing every step of the way, to stand for truth and service, is what heroes are made of. Jessica stood up to tell her story, but how many other women Veterans have gone unheard?” said Stratton.

The U.S. Army private with the 507th Maintenance Company had landed on the ground just three days before her convoy was ambushed; 11 members of her unit killed, she and four others taken. Lynch spent nine days in captivity before her rescue by U.S. Special Forces.

“When I came in 1976, the Coast Guard was only accepting five women per month for active duty, and had only started letting them in to the academy in ‘74. A lot of places I served, I was the only woman,” said Brenda Woodfaulk Parker, 65, of Gary, a retired Chief Yeoman for the U.S. Coast Guard.

“I can’t even imagine her waking up and being surrounded by all these men, and the language barrier, being alone. I felt for her, going through that at such a young age.”

Lynch suffered a broken back and legs, enduring numerous surgeries over the years. The recipient of a Bronze Star, Purple Heart and POW medals, she received a medical honorable discharge in August 2003, and authored her biography, “I Am A Soldier, Too,” in late 2003.

“I was fine for the first few years, because I was surrounded by love and support. As time went by, you feel better physically, you feel better mentally. And then it hits you like a ton of bricks: ‘Oh crap, I survived, and my comrades did not,’” Lynch said.

“And it hurts. It physically, mentally hurts. Sometimes it’s not the physical but the inside that hurts the most, and we don’t talk about it. I don’t go public with what I experienced with my PTSD. I never talked about what exactly I felt, what I saw,” she said.

“For instance, every time I was on the interstate, I would almost kind of close my eyes... because whenever someone would pass me, I thought they were going to shoot me.”

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Six years ago, on Memorial Day, I helped my dad assemble the many pieces of his service dress white uniform. As retired military, the local organizer had asked us both to ride on a float in our hometown parade. Why us? We represented two successive generations of naval careers.

Before leaving for the parade, Dad and I stood side by side for photos with the things that we carried. I held the remaining piece of his F-4J aircraft that I had collected two weeks earlier, in a village in Nghe An Province in north central Vietnam, where Dad’s burning fighter plane had crashed in 1968. The engine piece had spent decades re-purposed as a pot to hold flowers for Tet, the lunar new year family holiday in Vietnam.

My dad, Gene Wilber, ejected from his plane two seconds before it plowed into an open field. Sadly, his back seater – a 24-year-old husband and father – was unable to escape the crash on that Father’s Day in 1968. Forty-seven years later, Gene held in his hand a small bottle of earth that I had collected from the crash site – the final resting place for his friend, Bernie. We carried these remembrances in the parade that day in 2015.

That was Dad’s final Memorial Day. Three weeks later, Gene was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer. Two weeks later, he died. The jet engine piece was again transformed into a flowerpot, this time displayed at his funeral.

Standing upright during his final days was difficult for Gene, but he had always stood out, even as a prisoner of war. An experienced career aviator and fighter squadron commanding officer, he had thought he would be fighting for peace in Vietnam. But he felt the doubts looming even before he was shot down. In Hoa Lo Prison in Hanoi, the first 20 months of solitude afforded him the time to think deeply. Gene concluded that the war was illegal and misguided, and he believed that wholeheartedly for the rest of his life.

Most of the other POWs who turned against the war felt they had to suppress their beliefs, worried that if they said anything they would harm their careers, or, worse, be jailed on their return. But my dad spoke against the war, during and after captivity. For him, conscience was paramount. The war was wrong. If he did not speak out, his silence would be a self-betrayal.

Dad paid dearly for his dissent. Nearly five years a prisoner, he returned home to be cast as a villain among the many others who were scapegoated for the embarrassment of America’s Vietnam incursion. In 1973, the Nixon administration deftly orchestrated Operation Homecoming, welcoming returned POWs as the embodiment of “peace with honor” and creating an open season on dissenters.

Defend the Constitution, not your boss

To answer the war’s critics, the new narrative has made it easier throughout the decades since the war to blame America’s defeat by a lesser power on dissenting POWs and the broader antiwar movement. By the time Operation Homecoming rolled out, hundreds of thousands of Americans had marched in the streets, including tens of thousands of active-duty GIs and Veterans.

Avoiding the questions that Gene Wilber and other dissenting POWs asked, or completely unaware of their voices of dissent, our culture remains bound to an errant past, left only with a hero-myth. This dooms us to forever repeat Rambo’s cry, “Nothing is over!”

Mend it or end it: Men-only military draft is a vestige of anti-women bias. Supreme Court should strike it down.

If Gene Wilber were to convey a message to military members and their families on this Memorial Day, what would it be? He was not anti-military. He saw a need for defense. He volunteered for the Navy and flew over 200 combat missions in Korea and Vietnam. If he were here today, he would likely say this: Support and defend the Constitution, as that is your job. Remember that your truest loyalty has to reach beyond immediate boss, beyond chain of command, even beyond institution, to the principles that our country was founded on. Keep conscience clear.

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Former Texas Rep. Sam Johnson, a military pilot who spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam before serving more than two decades in Congress, died Wednesday at age 89.

The conservative Republican, who lived in the northern Dallas suburb of Plano, died at a Plano hospital of natural causes unrelated to the coronavirus outbreak, said his former spokesman, Ray Sullivan.

Johnson flew nearly 100 combat missions in Korea and Vietnam. He was flying a bombing mission in 1966 when he was shot down and wounded. He was imprisoned in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" for nearly seven years, mostly in solitary confinement. He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1979, after a 29-year career.

The ardent conservative and anti-communist was elected to Congress in 1991 after six years in the Texas House of Representatives. He vowed to stay a maximum of 12 years, though he served more than double that.

Johnson had been a POW with U.S. Sen. John McCain, and although they clashed in Congress, Johnson defended McCain in 2015, when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested he wasn't a hero because he'd been captured. Johnson announced in January 2017 that he would retire at the end of his term. When Johnson stepped down in 2019, at age 88, he was the oldest member of the U.S. House.

"Scripture tells us `There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven,"' Johnson wrote in a January 2017 letter to constituents, telling them he would retire at the end of his term. "For me, the Lord has made clear that the season of my life in Congress is coming to an end."

Another former Texas congressman, Ralph Hall, was the oldest-ever member of the U.S. House when he left office at age 91 in 2014. Hall, a Republican and World War II pilot, was 95 when he died in March 2019.

Samuel Robert Johnson was born on Oct. 11, 1930, in San Antonio. He grew up in Dallas, married Shirley Lee Melton in 1950 and graduated the following year from his hometown's Southern Methodist University with a degree in business administration.

Johnson enlisted in the military at age 20 and served during the Korean and Vietnam wars. He was 35 on April 16,1966, and flying a night mission carrying loads of napalm, when his aircraft came under heavy enemy fire over Vietnam.

The gun of Johnson's F-4 Phantom II jammed and the plane was hit. Its right engine caught fire, forcing Johnson and co-pilot Larry Chesley to eject, and the future congressman broke his arm and back and dislocated his shoulder.

Johnson recalled trudging through the jungle before being surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers who took him to the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, better known as the "Hanoi Hilton." He endured what he would later describe as 3-foot by 8-foot, rat-infested "dark and filthy cell."

"Forty-two of those months were spent in solitary confinement with 10 other fine American patriots because the Vietcong labeled us `die hard' resistors," Johnson wrote in 2015.

He recalled tapping code on the wall to communicate with other Americans being held, and that "our captors would blare nasty recordings over the loud speaker of Americans protesting back home."

While speaking on the House floor in 2003, Johnson said his faith only got stronger through captivity. He recalled how one day his captors put him against a wall and promised to execute him with machine guns.

"I started praying harder than I have ever prayed in my life. In a few seconds, the guns went click, click, click, click, click," Johnson told the chamber. "It is only because of the grace of God I survived."

He was released and flew out of Hanoi on Feb. 12, 1973. He earned a master's degree at George Washington University in Washington in 1976. He retired from the Air Force three years later and began a home-building business. He was elected to the Texas Legislature in 1984 and went to Congress following a special election in 1991, after Rep. Steve Bartlett resigned to become Dallas mayor.

Representing Plano and other conservative northern suburbs of Dallas, Johnson was known for his work on Veterans' affairs and for his efforts to bolster the financial standing of the Social Security program. He took office backing term limits, yet he stayed in Congress more than double his promised maximum of 12 years.

When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, Johnson and other Republican military Veterans in Congress alleged that Russian intelligence lured Clinton to Moscow during the Vietnam war when "I was sitting in a POW camp in Vietnam eating fish eyes and pig fat." Questions about Clinton's patriotism dogged him during his first campaign, but the allegations made by Johnson and the others were largely soon forgotten.

As a prisoner of war, Johnson shared a cell with McCain, who would later become a U.S. senator from Arizona. But the pair later clashed on political issues -- including McCain's efforts to eventually help normalize U.S. relations with Vietnam. Still, Johnson criticized Trump for suggesting McCain was no hero.

"Comments like those of Donald Trump, or any other American, suggesting that Veterans like Senator John McCain or any other of America's honorable POWs are less brave for having been captured are not only misguided, they are ungrateful and naive," Johnson wrote in 2015.

In February 2018 -- marking the 45th anniversary of the operation that led to his release -- Johnson donated a chipped green tin cup issued by his captors and tube of toothpaste he smuggled out of North Vietnam to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Johnson recalled then how he and other prisoners would communicate by tapping on the walls and how he'd hold his cup against them to amplify sounds and better hear their messages.

In his autobiography, "Captive Warriors: A Vietnam POW's Story," Johnson wrote of the cup: "For me, it symbolized our war of resistance for seven long years. It had been a means of communication and, as such, a means of survival."

Johnson's wife died on Dec. 3, 2015 at their home in Plano at age 85. He is survived by his adult daughters, Gini Johnson Mulligan and Beverly Johnson Briney, and 10 grandchildren. His son, James Robert "Bob" Johnson, died in 2013 at age 61.

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Reba Whittle was ready to join the Army Nurse Corps long before the United States entered World War II. She had no idea that before the war was over, she would earn a place in World War II history but never be recognized for it in her lifetime.

After graduating from college and studying at a specialty nursing school in San Antonio, she received her commission in the U.S. Army in June 1941. Now 2nd Lt. Whittle, she performed her duties stateside as the U.S. entered the war. She signed on to train as a flight nurse in 1943.

Flight nurses are the champions of medical care in the skies, especially for wounded troops returning from the front. Any soldier too wounded to stay in the theater will be loaded onto departing aircraft, prepped and cared for by flight nurses. During World War II, flight nursing was still a young concept, but by the end of the war, it was recognized as a must-have.

There were no doctors aboard the flights, and the nurses took on duties usually reserved for doctors. Add on the idea that the plane might be attacked on the way to pick up patients, and it became a dangerous, high-pressure job.

By January 1944, Whittle was based in England, flying troops from the front lines of Europe back to the safety of the English countryside. She flew more than 40 missions aboard Douglas C-47 Skytrains between January and September 1944.

By the end of September of that year, Allied forces had liberated Belgium, and its government had returned to Antwerp from London. American troops already had reached the Siegfried Line, Germany’s outer defense system, and casualties from Operation Market Garden were pouring in from the Netherlands.

On Sept. 27, Lt. Whittle’s C-47 was headed for a collection point near St. Trond, Belgium. Somehow it had flown some 40 miles off course and entered the outskirts of Aachen, Germany. Her aircraft, not having landed and taken on its precious cargo of wounded soldiers, still was carrying supplies into the theater, so it wasn’t marked as a medical flight. It was basically a lone target, flying into enemy territory.

As it approached Aachen, the skies opened up with German flak fire, riddling the aircraft with shrapnel, killing one pilot and wounding the other. Whittle also was wounded in the attack, and the plane went down. As the wounded crew escaped the burning wreck, they were captured by German soldiers.

After being treated for their wounds, they were driven to a nearby hospital where Whittle, the lone woman on the flight and the only American woman ever captured by the enemy in the European Theater of World War II, was informed that no one really knew what to do with a female prisoner.

She was transferred to a British-run hospital at the Nazi prisoner of war camp Stalag IX-C, where her nursing skills were put to work. The International Red Cross informed the U.S. State Department about her status as a prisoner, and she eventually was released to the Allies in January 1945.

Once back with the U.S. Army, she received the Purple Heart for her wounds and an Air Medal for her service in treating wounded soldiers. She was put on convalescent leave, taken off flying status and then transferred to California, where she continued her service as an Army nurse -- and that was all. After getting married, she applied for a discharge.

The Army determined that the reason for her discharge had nothing to do with physical disabilities related to the crash, even though Whittle suffered from recurring headaches for the rest of her life. As time went on, she began to suffer the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, arthritis in her spine and the side effects of what we know today as traumatic brain injury. Whittle applied for VA benefits but was turned down.

In 1950, Whittle began the appeals process to get a military retirement. It took four years before the Veterans Administration recognized her disabilities. The sticking point was the reason she left active duty. After years of waiting, an Army Physical Disability Appeal Board finally determined her discharge was related to her injuries.

Even then, they determined her injuries, which included taking flak above a German city and surviving a plane crash before being held in a POW camp, were not combat related, so she only received back pay to the date she filed her appeal. The difference between the dates was worth roughly $140,000 (adjusted for inflation).

Though she made no more attempts to collect her due retirement pay and died of cancer in 1981, her husband, retired Col. Stanley Tobiason, continued to fight for her recognition as a prisoner of war.

After the Army recognized the nurses captured by the Japanese in 1983, Tobiason took up the cause once more. That same year, Whittle was given prisoner of war status and was awarded the Prisoner of War medal in 1997.

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