Essay: Field of Lost (MIA/POW/AWOL)

A Story by Abishai100

Nonfiction presentation of the stock-experience of listings of missing soldiers during wartime for an Earthling consciousness of darkness and/or juries.

I'm abandoning my Venger/Lady-Bullseye Chinatown comics-fanfiction (trilogy) altogether, moved by my last MIA-piece set in Europe (Mr. Amlan Satan: MIA) after deciding to work on a quite-valuable war-soldier missing/lost trilogy, inspired by a 1984 (American) film I like and perhaps a '25-year holidays-season of Earth gratefulness reflection/sentiment (too). I've made this special historical/nonfiction presentation of wartime soldier loss/MIA/POWs (etc.) as a prologue to that trilogy I'm working on today, which I hope you read/like. Happy Holidays, all!

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I'm starting this nonfiction history-accounts wartime presentation with my own (Selfie-like) representation of things of modern Earthling social/cultural festivities/rituals like Mardi Gras and Halloween that invoke that special social/socialization 'consciousness' for why/how we humans take-stock of the membership and social participant imagery of things of valued group settings and culture and pedestrian lifestyle. When I think of my own festive/costumed participation in such Earthling activity, I get that educational feel of why we humans like to keep-account for the 'qualia' of things lost in war-fields concerning actual lives/bodies/soldiers/humans for the diorama-build of (American, etc.) social/media experience (Facebook-like!).

There's records/accounts of the taking of POWs (Prisoners-of-War) from even ancient times, and certainly during the Roman Empire's march for power-shape when defeated armies had lifted 'personnel' matched for Gladiator-entertainment. There's a bounty of stories and films accounting for the human stock keeping of these war-fields soldiers lost (and kept) as POWs. Some of these POWs through the ages, through varied wars like those between America-Korea and Vietnam or even WWII or recent ones like the Gulf War, were part of war-violations records of human rights abuses. Certainly, this makes for shadowlands-stories of the experience of was as undeniable Hell (for doubt).

I thought of school-days of making a rich and inspiring American Civil War diorama depicting Union/Confederate soldiers of the Homeland fields embattled as separated/conflicted brothers of the same nation (ok). This made me think of these differing definitions of war-fields soldiers-loss, and why there's category-differentiations between POWs and my next category for review, the MIA (Missing-in-Action) personnel. A soldier who's reported simply 'missing' of vanished may've been unidentified corpse during (actual) fighting, someone who deserted duty in desperation, or someone who's 'blended' into the undiscovered POW (prisoner-of-war) category --- a man/woman taken 'hostage' by enemy forces for prison/camp labor or even torture/execution without disclosure. An MIA is not exactly a POW, but often MIAs are linked to our human war-diorama consciousness of things of the casualties of war as undeniable unavoidable, given's war anarchy (for Heaven/Hell).

Finally, the 3rd category of war-field soldier loss is the AWOL listing, someone who simply is reported as deserting position/duty, maybe by fear or profit-advantage decision, without any hearsay or official license or commander-given leave. While POWs/MIAs have been a war-record filing-keep for historians and statisticians, certainly with great social/literary/council criticism ramifications-value (e.g., Operation Homecoming), and they've offered us numbers of relevance for what made a given-war (e.g. Korean War) particularly bias/perspective based volition for actual soldier-placement frailties/ignorance/doubt/emotionalism, the AWOL soldier (equally 'vanished' or undiscovered or unlisted) is considered a war-casualty of the daily-bread and life-conditions of even fighting-consciousness distancing for what makes war so 'uneasy' for Earthling expression of simple know-of-frailty (ok).

There's actually stock-footage/photos of POW-camps by enemy forces depicting taken-soldiers in positions of helplessness or labors or caging, and there's document-stats of numbers of missing/lost/imprisoned soldiers who can remind us why history-keeping has become an Earthling 'art' for things of doubt/uneasiness/economics. We might note such stat-line value for books (like the 7K-number deaths of American POWs in Japan during WWII out of the claimed 21K American POWs in these Japanese prisons/camps). Of course, reports of POW/MIA/AWOL human soldier stats are ancient, modern, troubling, and may even be 'domestic' in spirit (e.g., American Civil War).

There's an excellent work by Wil S. Hylton (Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II) about WWII American bomber-crew of 11 vanished above the Pacific islands of Palau that prompted serious/weighted inquiry and scuba-gear dive searches, revealing why unanswered questions of war-field soldiers lost/missing illuminate our undeniable human feel of things of economics 'bled' into the mind-of-darkness (for doubt!). Hylton writes, "The human impulse to bury the dead is as old as civilization itself" (pg.-95). He's received some nice review for this engaged/engaging WWII missing-persons work (e.g., "Hylton documents America's noblest policy in riveting narrative detail," comment by Pulitzer-author Stephen Hunter). That's a good library-silo feel for a holidays-season humility, to be sure (for Earth-knucklebones).

That concludes my mystery-work of nonfictional diorama-account of the human curiosity of taking-stock of war-fields loss of actual soldiers and missing-persons of assigned duty/labors/conflicts. I think of the festivity of the holidays-'25 season and why Xmas (etc.) reminds all of the 'creative' value of graphing/charting that empirical account of challenge and/or tribulation and why fear (or darkness) can inspire images (and art!) for things unavoidable (for doubt). The lost-soldier is a diplomat of Earth's candor for resilience/forgiveness, and it can make a holiday-season plum (or avatar!) for just about all of us!