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May 17, 2007

POWs' advice to Jimenez: Do 'anything to save your life'

Zach Church

If Joseph Lovoi could speak with Army Spc. Alex Jimenez, he would tell him that "life is worth it." Cooperate with your captors, Lovoi would say.

And pray.

"Anything to save your life," former U.S. Army Air Forces 1st Lt. Lovoi said last night from his Methuen home. "You're just a kid. Your whole life is ahead of you."

And then, with his voice quivering, forcing forward the words: "Goddammit. You shouldn't be there in the first place."

An emotional Lovoi spoke after learning Jimenez was believed captured by al-Qaida during an ambush in Iraq Saturday. His reaction: "Oh my God."

He knows how it feels. After his plane was shot down over Austria in World War II, he was taken prisoner by the Nazis and held in Germany for six months in 1944 and 1945.

At the time, he took it as a reality he had to face. But later, it changed.

"When I retired, my world just caved in on me. All of the sudden, the post-traumatic stress came to life. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep," Lovoi said.

John Katsaros knows it too. Like Lovoi, his plane was shot down in 1944. Katsaros went down over France. Germans captured him for four days, but he escaped with the help of French resistance fighters. Six weeks later, he was captured again and held for two days. Again he escaped.

"The feeling is like being a man without a country and survival is only with the help of other people and yourself," Katsaros, 83, of Haverhill said.

To be captured in Iraq would be "more of a traumatic experience than I've experienced in my life," former U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Katsaros said. "The terrorists out there have no feeling for life, their life included."

Katsaros' family had no idea where he was from March 20 to July 6 of 1944. That feeling, felt now by Jimenez's family, must be horrible, Katsaros said.

"You can imagine what this family is going through, knowing what these terrorists do to people," he said. "We can only pray for them now."

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