The ingenuity of American prisoners of war in communicating with each other during the Korean War was amazing. One way was to tap a code - known as the "F L Q V" code - on pipes or walls. Every POW was taught this five letters wide, five rows deep (25-letter square) code that looked like this:
A B C D E
F G H I J
L M N O P
Q R S T U
V W X Y Z Wherever necessary the letter C was substituted for the letter K, which was
dropped.
To start, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 taps indicated the row the first letter of the message would be in. The next series of taps would mark the letter in the row indicated. Thus a five-tap followed by a two-tap would mean the letter W.
Eventually sophisticated offshoots were developed, like a visual code encompassing touching various parts of the body to indicate letters. For instance, a prisoner under heavy pressure to make an anti-war statement for publication could let other POWs watching him being led across a courtyard know he was c-o-p-i-n-g by scratching his head - for Row 1, then his shoulder - for Column 3, indicating the letter C, then scratching elbow, wrist, hip, knee, ankle, toe, etc, to form the following letters.
In the vermin-infested prisons, the guards saw nothing unusual in all this scratching, because they had the same scratching problem.
The guards also coughed, cleared their throats and spat a great deal, and had no idea that, when the prisoners did the same things, they were talking to each other. Sometimes - especially when a prisoner was being taken to or from an interrogation and the others wanted to buck him up - the amount of coughing and spitting that went on was even too much for the rheumiest guards. They couldn't get out of the cellblock fast enough.
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