To judge by the intensity of feeling that has attached to the fates of the Americans captured as POW's, something more than idle curiosity is at work, something deep in the national subconscious.

A mystique has always surrounded the prisoner of war and the missing in action. On the one hand, their experience embodies the ultimate nightmare: being captured by, and at the mercy of, a demonized enemy, out of reach of America's laws and protection. On the other hand, the POW gains a closer look at the enemy, and perhaps a more satisfying insight, than the citizen or average soldier ever attains. At some level, we wish to know or share the POW's experience, which, even in this most televised of wars, remains unknown, a black hole that imagination rushes to fill.

For most of human history, prisoners of war, including women, children, and elders, were killed, tortured, enslaved, or held for ransom. The prisoners' helplessness allowed the captors to indulge the darkest human fantasies. Cuneiform tablets from ancient times, discovered by archaeologists, bear messages such as:"I have captured many men alive; with some I have had their hands or arms cut off, with others their nose or ears. I have put out the eyes of many—torn out the tongues of others—cut off their lips." During the Punic Wars, the Romans and Carthaginians crucified each other's generals. Only as laws of war evolved in modern times—producing The Hague and Geneva Conventions of the last century—did these practices begin to subside.

 

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This piece first ran in Slate and is reprinted with permission of the author. Click here to see a list of his other History Lesson columns in Slate.