POW Survivor, Convert: I'd Endure It All Again Just to Have the Book of Mormon
Al R. Young - Warning: This article contains some war content that might be disturbing for some readers. When my father, Alfred R. Young, was liberated from a Japanese POW camp at the end of World War II, he weighed 90 pounds—scrawny for any man, but skeletal for someone 6-feet 3-inches tall. His weight, however, was only a shadow of concern compared to his mental and emotional condition after 39 months of wartime captivity. He endured two hellship voyages; physical, mental, and emotional starvation; innumerable beatings; forced labor; disease, psychological abuse; isolation; and six months of Allied bombing raids that eventually obliterated his prison camp, devastated Tokyo and Yokohama, and...