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Marty Ellison
I was in Mr Tice’s health class out in one of the portables. He was conducting a segment on mental health, which of course was a kind of jumping off point into what later became his trademark brand.
He introduced us to the mental torture which the North Koreans visited on our captured POWs. Using both physical and mental torture (solitary confinement), large numbers of them died from isolation and depression. Six years later in the Navy, I was training to fly night low level missions over North Vietnam, and part of the training was being thrown into a mock POW camp with lots of very mean instructors who took turns beating up on us. Mr Tice’s lecture floated right to the surface of my memory. The Navy trained us about the Code of Conduct which was instituted following the Korean War, to govern our conduct while evading capture, resisting while captured, and to always find ways to escape. The most helpful part was a seminar we had with repatriated former POWs, one guy was held during Korea. They taught us the tap codes we needed to communicate with other prisoners. While deployed, I kept all this training, including from Mr Tice close to my heart. We lost my roommate on one of these missions, but unfortunately he was never returned.
There was another memory of Mr Tice which was maybe not so flattering. There was a thin shy girl who sat in the back of the room, who seldom uttered a word. I’d known her since grade school. Mr Tice observing her shyness thought he’d try to draw her out, so he walked back to her desk, looked down at her and announced to her and the class that her shyness really was a sign of conceit. I sensed this was traumatic for her, she just looked at the floor and didn’t say a word. I don’t know why that memory has stayed with me all these years, it might be tied in with Mr Tice’s preparing me for possible capture in the future.
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