ARMED FORCES: One Changed His Mind

In a three-room cabin clinging to the side of Powell Mountain in Cracker's Neck, Va., Bessie Dickenson sat at her quilting one night last week while her husband, Van Buren ("Dave") Dickenson, gaunt and sick at 72, listened to the radio. Suddenly Dave called out: "Bessie, listen to this. It says one of those boys has changed his mind and is coming home. I just know it's Ed." Said Bessie: "I just know it's Ed too, Dave." Later she mused, "Of course, I'll bet every mother listening thought the same thing. But we went to bed with the feeling. Then later in the night Keith and Thelma Marrs came a-pounding and honking, trying to wake us up ... and they told us they had heard Ed's name on the radio and he was coming back. We was shore happy."

Just a few hours before, their son, Corporal Edward S. Dickenson, 23, with the loose-jointed amble of a mountain man, had passed through a gauntlet of curious eyes at Panmunjom, to be handed over to the U.N. command. Taken prisoner Nov. 5. 1950, he was the first of 23 American P.W.s who, having previously refused repatriation, had changed his mind. Sitting down at a table with India's Lieut. Colonel Ujjal Singh and U.S. Marine Major Edward Mackel, Dickenson ostentatiously drew from his pocket two packs of cigarettes—Lucky Strikes and a Chinese brand. He offered a Lucky to Colonel Singh and, when the Indian declined, with conscious deliberation Dickenson crumpled the Chinese cigarettes into a small wad. He lit a Lucky, inhaled deeply, and said quietly: "It feels great to be in the hands of Americans again."

"That Ain't Ed." The radio bulletins were enough to keep Ed's kin up all night, talking and laughing. Then they got a shock when Ed's half brother, Grover Dickenson, trudged in with a copy of the Roanoke Times. The newspaper carried on its front page a picture of Ed. Bessie took one look at the picture and began to cry. "That ain't my boy," she said. "Eddie was a purty boy, and look at him now. If that's him, he ain't got no teeth. I just know it ain't him." Dave Dickenson came in from the yard and peered over her shoulder. "That ain't Ed," he said sadly. "That ain't my boy."

The picture was blurred, and the boy was older, but the young folks convinced Bessie and Dave that it was Ed, all right. Soon the cabin was filled with kinsmen, neighbors, children and newsmen. Then Jim Dickenson, another son of Dave Dickenson's first marriage, burst upon the scene, glared at reporters and photographers and demanded: "When are you going to Hollywood, Pop? . . . You'll bring Ed nothing but harm by talking to all these folks and having your picture took." Bessie protested: "Don't listen to him, Dave." But Dave Dickenson was old and tired. "Bessie." he said, "the whole thing's got me tore up. I'm easy wrecked, and I can't stand it."