A ‘Fairly well’ experience

WEST ODESSA Describing how he was treated as a World War II prisoner of war, Odessa’s Wayne Howard, almost defensively, leaves it at two hollow words that give no indication of the lonely disconnect he felt for two years.

“Fairly well,” he said, almost instantly reverting back to his laconic existence that protected him for 62 years and revealed barely anything inside Stalag III-B prison camp near Furstenberg, Germany.

Afflicted with cancer today and nearing death at 89, Wayne Howard wanted to speak though, so he slowly pieced together his story that defies the initial two-word reply.

Drafted April 6, 1942, Howard was in northern Africa by February 1943 and a German prisoner of war after a Feb. 14, 1943, confrontation at Faid Pass in Tunisia.

He spent about two years and four months inside the prison fences. It amounted to labor-filled days, he said, nightmares about how thirsty he was, and potato soup, potato bread and maybe a little horsemeat in the soup.

“Our bodies were so low,” he said. “No thoughts. No nothing. You just existed.”

Family and friends rarely questioned him on his two-year German confinement once he left, Howard ex-plained.

“As a kid, I didn’t really have an appreciation for what he went through,” son Rodney Howard said.

And Wayne Howard didn’t babble incessantly to any-one interested or not. The way he saw it, he wasn’t a spokesman, selling his war experience.

“I just didn’t care for it,” he said.

Like so many of what Tom Brokaw dubbed the “Greatest Generation,” he was a regular man with crafts-man hands who was thrust into a dramatic war.

And when he came back from his war camp, he became a regular guy again, using his craftsman hands for wages and to build furniture in his spare time.

If he went to bed thirsty, he’d wake up with the recurring nightmare that started inside the prison camp.

But he kept it to himself, a silent history held inside.

“Just wanted to forget it,” he said.

Born in Knox City, he’s the son of a Depression-era wage-hunter who moved across the Texas Plains looking for work at cotton gins or as a blacksmith in the economi-cally meek Dust Bowl.

Wayne Howard didn’t attend high school.

“Well, we had to go to work,” he explained.

As a young adult, he found construction jobs building military bases in Roswell, N.M., and Lubbock. Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was sent from Lubbock to Fort Sill, Okla., to Fort Knox, Ky., to Ireland to England to Tunisia in North Africa.

Then with one turn in a Jeep around a steep hill in Faid Pass, the 22-year-old private first class found himself surrounded by the Axis armies.

“The guns were as thick as can be down there,” he said.

He hid in a ditch, starving and dehydrated for nearly a week. Once discovered, he became a prisoner of war.

Howard was processed through Stalag III-B prison camp near Furstenberg, Germany.

There, he disengaged.

“I just wondered if my mind would ever come back,” he said.

Correspondence home was censored, and the one letter that he saved revealed nothing about his depressed living conditions.

When Wayne Howard’s camp was liberated, he weighed 98 pounds, about 50 pounds lighter than his normal weight, Rodney Howard said.

“As a kid, we’d eat promptly at a certain time,” Rod-ney Howard said. “Now, I know it’s probably because eating was important to him.”

Rodney said his father has talked more about the expe-rience in the last three years — something he can only attribute to time.