File:Ed Flora Vietnam POW from Brunswick.jpg

Summary

Vietnam POW from Brunswick was a hero to his family By Patti S. Borda News-Post Staff, October 7, 2013

During five years in prison camps, Sgt. Ed Flora survived a disabling gunshot wound and kept to himself all the information that North Vietnamese interrogators beat him regularly to get, said his daughter, Teresa Flora LaFratte. After her father's death Sept. 15 in Arizona, LaFratte shared some details of his life and Army service, because she thinks the world needs to know what he and others like him did for their country. “He was very private about what happened to him,” she said. “In Dad's case, it was too painful to even remember.” She urged him to write down his military and personal history so his grandchildren could know more about him. He drafted it for the family, and made her promise not to use what he wrote for a book, she said. What she read as he wrote over the years shocked her, she said, but he would not speak to her about any of it. “Hero doesn't explain him,” she said after reading the account. “I had tears rolling down my cheeks.” Flora produced a detailed narrative of his life, which began in Brunswick in 1941. He gave himself low marks for his personal relationships, but not in his military performance. LaFratte described him as a thrill-seeker. His story is peppered with much “blue” language, she said, and a wry perspective on the choices he and his captors made. In the spring of 1967, Flora completed several dramatic patrols and ambushes in Vietnam that had won his platoon the name Flora's Fighting Fools, and earned him a Bronze Star. For his last mission that year, he received a Silver Star for “gallantry and intrepidity in action as a prisoner of war,” according to the citation. On a mission to rescue a downed pilot in July 1967, Flora was shot in the right arm. An M16 rifle round entered at his wrist, destroyed one bone and exited at his elbow. He was being hoisted into a rescue helicopter when the enemy shot through the line that held the seat, dropping Flora to the ground. His fall was broken some by the dense jungle canopy, LaFratte said. The world stood still “I became a guest of the (North Vietnamese),” Flora wrote. Within hours, he escaped for the first of several times over the years. The longest he was free was two days, he wrote. In his early attempts, when his wound was open and vulnerable, Flora used maggots to prevent infection, LaFratte said. Each time he escaped, he correctly assumed guards would catch up with him and beat him, he wrote. One time, a squad of female warriors found him first, and their brutality was worse, so he was glad when guards he knew took him back. That episode forever affected his trust in women, LaFratte said. When Flora had toilet duty at one camp — emptying chamber pots — he fashioned a message-sharing device from bamboo, so the prisoners could communicate and get orders from the highest ranking officer among them. Guards discovered the communication system, beat Flora, put him in solitary confinement and made him sleep hanging upside down, he wrote. He received that punishment repeatedly. He had a good laugh after a second message system he engineered stumped the prison guards, he wrote. He watched them sort through the chamber pots' contents and find nothing. Flora's matter-of-fact approach to honor, duty and endurance went too long unnoticed and unappreciated by war protesters and history, LaFratte said. “These are the stories that people need to hear.” After his release in January 1973, Flora recuperated for several months and then had assignments in the military police until he retired from the Army in 1977. He attended college and went into banking as a second career. He had a metal rod in his arm and wore a leather brace on it for the rest of his life. World keeps revolving Over the five years Flora was missing, his family in Frederick County had changed completely, though his wife, JoAnn, always believed he would come home, she said. Flora had not seen their son Dwayne since he was 2 months old, and his wife had become an outspoken, world-traveling advocate for prisoners of war. JoAnn was not the 1950s-style wife he expected to find at home, and the two divorced, LaFratte said. LaFratte and her brother had a strained relationship with their father for a time, but they all grew close over the years. Flora regretted not trying harder to keep the marriage together, LaFratte said. He became great friends again with his children's mother, JoAnn Flora May. May always loved and respected her first husband, she said in an interview, although she did not always appreciate his dedication to the Army as she does now. When Flora volunteered to go to Vietnam, JoAnn was pregnant, and he knew she would object. LaFratte said her father summed up that moment in his story: “How do you tell someone it's just something you have to do?” Flora joined the Army in 1959 immediately after graduating from Brunswick High School. He was honorably discharged in 1962 and re-enlisted in 1964 after a series of unsatisfactory civilian jobs, LaFratte said. “I had actually become an arrogant ass,” he wrote. He was assigned to Germany in 1966, where JoAnn and Teresa joined him. “We weren't rich, but we had a lot of fun,” he wrote of the free time they spent traveling around Europe that year. Dwayne moved to Arizona several years ago to be closer to his father, a man he did not know well, but held up as a hero. “I never had the pleasure of knowing him before he shipped out,” Dwayne Flora said. “Beneath the rough exterior he had a heart of gold. ... I am fortunate that I had the last couple years to get close to my father.”