A War Of Memories
50 years later, a former marine grapples with questions of murder--and an elusive search for the truth
The investigators also wrote that Lamb's mental health was in question following the battle for Seoul. During that time, they said, a military physician diagnosed him as paranoid after he threatened to tell the secret of the POW killings. But the investigators, their files show, failed to note that when he was evaluated at Bethesda Naval Hospital a short time later in 1951, a doctor called the diagnosis an error, saying, "No paranoid ideation was evidenced at any time."
Their findings leave no doubt that events were difficult to reconstruct--"a toilsome chore" is the way the investigators described it. "Potential witnesses proved difficult to locate," they wrote. "Those who were located demonstrated that the passage of time takes a costly toll on one's faculties and memory." The report described how one witness "fell ill prior to interview" and how another "suffered seizures during interview."
Asked by U.S. News to grant an interview and explain the inquiry more fully, the inspector general's office declined but answered many specific questions through a Marine Corps spokesman, Maj. Douglas Powell. Noting that the after-action report covered several battles in a four-month period, Powell says that the "unspecific comments" about Easy Company marines' killing prisoners "were not determined to be within the scope of the investigation and not pursued." He adds, "The investigation speaks for itself."
Lamb is disappointed with the findings but makes no apologies for his own fight. Why, he is asked, has he persisted so long, when others would have buried the past? Sounding much like the drill instructor he once was, Lamb puts it this way: "Right is right, and wrong is wrong. The Marine Corps hymn says first to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean."
"How are you going to keep your honor clean," he asks, "if you bury such a horrible thing?"
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