They all jumped on me and started beating me. They had me on the floor — eventually my arms and legs were chained. They dragged me by the chains to PSA and stopped only when a nurse asked them to please stop. So they put me on a mattress and dragged the mattress. They took me to the observation room and left me, hands and feet cuffed. I had no sanitary napkins, no means to wash myself. The cuffs cut into my skin (the scars are still visible), and my wrists were bleeding. Later i found out that i had received an infraction for slapping an officer in the face while they were beating me.

She says, "Other people suffered so much.... But no one beat or tortured me.... I never saw a German.... But still it's as if they killed me. Because I'm not the same person. My name, my date of birth-they're not mine. The doctor said it's shock. I don't know what happened before then, or what I was like. So it's as if I didn't exist."

My heart was broken and my head was just barely inhabitable

I very nearly died. Of course, everyone thought I was acting, even the person doing the strangling. But actually I was dying. Luckily someone noticed the froth coming out of my mouth and knew something was wrong. I wasn't that spooked by the incident. But when they told me I had been out for a while, I wanted to make sure I wouldn't have any long term damage because I didn't know how long the oxygen had been cut off to my brain. But I was fine apart from a couple of rope burns. That's what happens when you take art to extremes.

My next words are, "Get me the hell out of here, I can't take much more of this." The corpsmen and the gunnery sergeat drag me to a bunker full of wounded men. As I'm given a shot of morphine, I think, "Okay, this is it. We're going to bleed to death, or the Chinese troops are going to come in here and finish us off. I'm looking Old Man Death right in the face."
I don't pray for myself. I spend the rest of the night praying for my wife, Bertha, and my infant daughter, Arline. She was born right after I left for Korea. I pray that Bertha will find a good father for our daughter and a good husband for herself.
Near daybreak, someone pokes their head inside and tells us the Chinese have pulled out. I'm sent to a field hospital, where I'm told I've also taken a bullet to the stomach. The blast put a good-size hole in my hip, but it missed my spine. I know how lucky I am to be alive.

The 81 days of detention were a nightmare. I am not unique; it happened to many people in China. Conditions were extreme, created by a system that thinks it is above the law and has become a kind of monstrous machine. There were so many moments when I felt desperate and hopeless. But still, the next morning, I heard the birds singing.

I pointed to the side of the road and then I pulled over and parked. When the guy got out of the car he was stripped to the waist. A typical young macho stud. He put his face within two inches of mine, and he was telling me what I was and what he was going to do to me. So I did the natural thing. I reached in and got a headlock on him, and I had him very firmly while he thrashed around. I felt I was doing just fine because I had stopped what was going on, but his girlfriend decided that he wasn't doing very well. So she ran and jumped on us. They both fell on top of me and my head crashed into the pavement. I landed on my left ear, got a hairline fracture and concussion. [...]
It was like some kind of nether world. Most of the time I didn't know where I was. Like I'd wake up and find I.V. units in my arm, and I'd rip 'em out and say, "What kind of a hotel is this? You tell them I'm never coming here again." [...]
When I came home from the hospital I was having terrible nightmares every night, sometimes to the point where I started not wanting to go to sleep. And I still have occasional migraines, dry eyes and short-term memory loss. [...] If I discovered anything in that strange, 10-month period of recovery, it's that music is the one thing that makes me sane.

He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

I jump down from my box. I am afraid he will be trampled. He is unconscious and not in view of the panicked crowd. I go to his side and find someone already there, pushing the box off him. I bend down and say his name softly. Mike, I say. His eyes open, and he is already crying. This is his first police riot, mine too. The blood is always heavy on any head wound, I say, remembering something random as I try to calm him. And I tear off a piece of my T-shirt to press against his head.

He never even once took me to a hospital, I would receive a heavy-duty beating. I was once beaten till I fainted

The guy was dead as hell. He lay on the floor in his pajamas with his brains scattered all over the rug and my gun was in his hand. I kept rubbing my face to wipe out the fuzz that clouded my mind but the cops wouldn't let me. One would pull my hand away and shout a question at me that made my head ache even worse and another would slap me with a wet rag until I felt like I had been split wide open.

During all these days Lao Chiu was lying on the bed suffering continual pain. The doctors and nurses did their utmost to reduce his suffering to the minimum, but they could not completely relieve it. Even the chief surgeon said once, "When we were healing him I often thought that if another person was in his place he certainly would not have stood it so long, but Lao DChiu endured everything. When I saw him grinding his teeth to suppress his groans, I felt so touched that the tears feel from my eyes." Indeed he suffered great pain for a long period. While changing the dressings even laughing gas anaesthesia could not keep him quiet. Sometimes these pains were so intense that his whole body trembled uncontrollably.

It was like a concentration camp and I have bad memories because it was the first time I saw human beings lose everything, even dignity [...]. Thank God no one tried to hit me or put me down, there was no sexual violence towards me because our group stayed together, we made business with nobody and just tried to survive. I knew I never wanted to go back.

When I regained consciousness, I was transferred to a psychiatric clinic. I stayed there for twenty-two days. Against previous diagnoses, which identified a bipolar disorder, I was diagnosed with a personality disorder. Again, I was medicated enough to practically not be able to speak. I remember walking through those halls more dead than alive.