German POWs Break Down After Tasting Clean Water for the First Time in Years

The Taste of Water

A World War II story set at Camp Roswell, New Mexico (about 2,000 words), in six short chapters

Chapter 1 — The Train in the Desert Light (August 1943)

The transport train rolled into Roswell Army Airfield as if it had been swallowed by the sky.

New Mexico spread outward in flat distances—scrub brush, twisted mesquite, sand that shimmered under a sun so bright it turned the horizon into liquid. For the three hundred German prisoners packed into the railcars, the view was not just strange. It was insulting in its calm. After years of combat, hunger, and dust, the land looked indifferent to suffering.

The men climbed down in stiff lines. Their uniforms were worn to the dull color of exhaustion. Most had surrendered in Tunisia only weeks earlier—Afrika Korps veterans who had fought across two years of desert war until fuel, ammunition, and hope ran out together. They had expected the treatment the regime’s propaganda promised: humiliation, beatings, revenge disguised as discipline.

Instead, they found American guards who looked at them the way working men look at difficult tasks—alert, controlled, not eager to add cruelty where it wasn’t required. The guards were firm, quick with commands, but not theatrical. Their rifles were held ready, yet their faces carried something almost practical: a determination to get the job done without chaos.

Kurt Richter stepped off the train among the first. He was thirty-one, from Berlin, a metalworker drafted in 1940 and trained as a vehicle mechanic. In North Africa he had learned to rebuild engines with improvised parts, to keep trucks running on fuel that tasted like desperation, to survive on sleep stolen in minutes.

But the hardest lesson had not been shells or bombs.

It had been water.

In Africa, water had rarely been simple. It had been a rumor, a ration, a risk. It tasted of minerals so strong they burned the throat. It carried parasites that turned the body against itself. Sometimes it smelled faintly of fuel. More than once, Kurt had watched men drink because they had to, then spend days sick, losing more water than they gained—caught in the cruel arithmetic where drinking made you weaker, but not drinking meant death.

On ships crossing the Atlantic, the water had been adequate but never good—treated, metallic, tepid. On trains across America, it came from tanks refilled at stations and warmed under the summer heat. Kurt drank it without complaint, because complaining did not produce water.

But the old thirst—deep, lived-in, quietly panicked—never fully left him. The war had taught him to accept that water was another form of suffering.

At Camp Roswell, the guards marched the prisoners through intake: medical screening, showers, uniforms exchanged. The procedures were efficient, almost brisk, as if the camp were a machine built for order. When the processing ended, Sergeant William Drake—forty-two, from Idaho—guided the exhausted men toward the mess hall.

The mess hall smelled of soap, boiled potatoes, and clean wood. Long tables stood in rows. Light fell through high windows. It was not luxurious. It was functional, plain, American.

Then the kitchen staff set glasses at every place—cheap glassware, filled to the rim.

Cold water.

Clear water.

Kurt stared at the glass in front of him as if it were a trap.

Chapter 2 — The First Sip

A young prisoner beside Kurt lifted his glass and held it to the light.

“It’s clear,” the man whispered in German, as if he were speaking about something sacred. “Actually clear.”

Kurt nodded but did not reach for his own glass. Clear water belonged to memory—Berlin before the war, a kitchen faucet, a summer evening, water drawn without fear. In Africa, even the best wells had carried a faint cloudiness, a sediment that reminded you nothing was truly clean.

The young man took a cautious sip. His face changed so fast it startled Kurt—eyes widening, throat moving as he swallowed.

“Kurt,” he breathed. “Kurt, taste it.”

Kurt lifted his glass. Condensation slicked the sides, cold against his palm. The water inside looked like air.

He brought it to his lips slowly. The habit of suspicion had been trained into him. The desert taught you that what looked safe could still kill you.

The water touched his tongue.

Cold—truly cold.

Not “less warm” or “not as bad.” Cold the way water is cold when it comes from deep earth or winter streams. Cold enough to make his teeth ache if he drank too quickly.

And clean. No metallic bite. No chemical burn. No grit. No hint of fuel. No bitterness. It tasted of nothing—and that absence was the miracle.

Kurt swallowed.

The cold traveled down his throat and into his chest like a shock of memory. For a moment he felt his body recognize something it had forgotten was possible. His eyes stung. He blinked hard, angry at himself, but the tears came anyway—quick, hot, unstoppable.

Beside him, the young man was already crying openly, shoulders shaking. At another table, someone let out a sound that was half laugh, half sob. A minute later, another. Then another.

The crying spread through the mess hall like a wave. Not a riot. Not hysteria. Something more unsettling because it was honest: grown men weeping over water.

Within minutes, twenty prisoners were crying. Then fifty. Some wiped their faces, embarrassed. Some didn’t bother. A few stared down into their glasses with a fixed expression, as if the water contained an answer they had been too tired to ask.

American guards stiffened near the serving line, instinctively scanning for danger. They had been trained for violence, escape attempts, medical emergencies. They were not trained for mass emotion triggered by something as ordinary as a drink.

Sergeant Drake watched the room and felt his own certainty falter. To him, water was water. Idaho had taught him to take it for granted. He had never considered that an enemy soldier could be broken open by a clean glass of it.

“What in God’s name is happening?” Drake muttered to Corporal James Warren, a Texas farm boy assigned to help with intake.

Warren stared at the crying prisoners and shook his head slowly. “They drank,” he said. “And then… they started.”

Drake walked closer to Kurt’s table, careful, as if approaching something delicate. He stopped just short of the benches, eyes moving over wet faces, trembling hands, the way men held their glasses as if afraid the water might vanish.

“What’s wrong?” Drake asked.

Kurt fought to steady his breathing. His training told him to swallow emotion, to show nothing in front of the enemy. But the war had taken too much from him for pride to stand guard anymore.

“The water,” Kurt said in halting English. “The water is… good. Good.”

Drake frowned. “It’s just well water.”

Kurt shook his head, searching for words that could carry two years of thirst. “Not just water. Clean. Cold. Safe.” He swallowed, throat tight. “For two years… no good water. Only bad. Hot. Dirty. Water make sick.”

A prisoner at the table, older, with clearer English, leaned forward. “Sergeant,” he said quietly, “you must understand what you have here. This is luxury we forgot exists.”

Drake stood still, the mess hall suddenly quieter around him, as if everyone sensed the conversation mattered.

“Explain,” Drake said.

The older prisoner’s voice broke. “In Africa, we drank water that tasted of diesel. Water from wells ruined by retreat. Water with parasites. We drank because we must. We forgot what it means to live.”

Kurt nodded, the tears returning in spite of him. “This water,” he added softly, “reminds we were human. Not only survive.”

Drake’s face changed—subtly, like a man realizing the ground under his feet is not what he assumed. He had seen prisoners as responsibility, as paperwork, as bodies to house and count. Now he saw them as men who had been stripped down to survival so thoroughly that a normal glass of water felt like civilization returning.

He cleared his throat and turned toward the kitchen.

“Fill more glasses,” Drake ordered. “These men can have as much water as they want. No limits.”

Chapter 3 — Mercy Without Speeches

For the next hour the kitchen staff refilled glasses again and again. Some prisoners drank slowly, savoring each sip the way a starving man savors bread. Others drank quickly, almost desperately, as if they needed proof the abundance was real.

The guards watched in a kind of stunned quiet. They were not sentimental men. They were soldiers in wartime. Yet even the hardest among them seemed struck by the sight of enemies crying without shame over something Americans rarely noticed.

Corporal Warren, still puzzled, asked the older prisoner, “How bad was it? I mean… water’s water, right?”

The older man looked at him with tired patience.

“Imagine,” he said, “you work all day in heat so strong your thoughts slow down. You sweat until your uniform is salt. You need water to live. But the water you have makes you sick. It burns your stomach. It carries disease. You drink anyway. Then sickness makes you weaker, and you need more water. It is a cycle.”

Warren’s face tightened. He glanced down at his own canteen as if seeing it for the first time.

Drake listened and felt something settle in him—not guilt exactly, but perspective. He had believed he understood deprivation. He had served through the Depression years as a boy. He had known hard work. But he had never known thirst paired with fear of the very thing meant to save you.

He watched Kurt drink another glass, slower now, breathing more evenly. The tears did not stop entirely, but they softened into something like relief.

No one in the room talked about politics. No one said “democracy” or “ideology.” But something more powerful than argument was happening anyway: reality was contradicting propaganda in the simplest, most undeniable way.

The prisoners had been told Americans were weak, soft, cruel. Yet the Americans stood guard while their enemies drank freely, and when the enemies cried, no one struck them for it. No one mocked them. The guards held the line with discipline, but there was no extra cruelty in their discipline.

It was a kind of strength Kurt recognized the way a mechanic recognizes good steel. Not loud. Not dramatic. Reliable.

When the first meal was served—standard army food, plain and filling—the prisoners ate with an urgency born of long hunger. But it was the water that stayed in Kurt’s mind, the cold clarity of it.

It should have been nothing.

Instead, it felt like a turning point.

Chapter 4 — Letters That Could Not Say Everything

Three weeks after arriving at Camp Roswell, Kurt sat on his bunk with a pencil and a sheet of camp paper. Outside, the desert wind moved across the fence line with a dry hiss. In the barracks, men talked softly in German, played cards, argued about soccer matches in the yard as if ordinary opinions could rebuild an ordinary world.

Kurt wrote to his wife Helga in Berlin.

He knew the letter would be censored. American authorities would remove anything that hinted at military intelligence. German censors, wherever they still had power, might cut anything that sounded like defeatism. Still, he wrote, because some truths were too important to keep trapped inside the wire.

He told her he was alive. He told her he was healthy. He told her the Americans followed the rules of international law.

Then he wrote about the water.

Clean water. Cold from underground. Safe to drink without fear. I tasted it and broke down crying. Many men cried. We had forgotten what good water was.

He tried to explain North Africa in a few sentences—diesel in wells, parasites, the misery of thirst. He tried to explain what it meant to realize the enemy had so much infrastructure intact that they could give good water freely to prisoners.

He also wrote what he believed, though he suspected it would be removed:

America is strong because it has abundance. Their supply chains function. Their systems work. We were told their comfort made them weak. But comfort built on working infrastructure makes a nation hard to exhaust.

When the letter left camp, Kurt felt a strange calm. He could not change the war from a bunk in New Mexico. But he could at least plant a seed of truth, even if only part of it survived the scissors.

Helga’s reply, when it finally arrived months later, came with the smell of Berlin—paper that had traveled through damaged systems. Her words were spare. She wrote about water pumps because pipes had been bombed. About ration cards and winter fear. About children growing quiet.

Kurt read her letter twice, then sat for a long time staring at the barracks wall.

He understood, with a clarity that made his chest ache, that captivity in America was safer than freedom in a collapsing Germany.

The thought brought shame and gratitude in equal measure.

And every time he drank from the camp’s cold tap, he remembered Helga filling buckets from hand pumps in a ruined city.

Chapter 5 — A Sergeant’s Lesson, A Prisoner’s Change

Sergeant Drake continued his work as he always had: intake routines, head counts, paperwork, order. But something about that first day stayed lodged in him.

He began noticing details he had once ignored: how prisoners flinched at sudden movements, how some hoarded bread, how certain men stared at faucets as if expecting them to fail. He began understanding that the Germans carried not only defeat, but a history of deprivation that had reshaped their instincts.

Drake was not a man who gave speeches. He did not call himself a humanitarian. Yet in small ways, he adjusted.

When summer heat climbed, he made sure water breaks happened on time. When new prisoner transports arrived, he insisted again on the mess hall stop and the glasses of water before anything else, not as a reward, but as a reset—an announcement of what this camp would be: controlled, yes, but not needlessly cruel.

One afternoon, months into Kurt’s captivity, Drake walked past the recreation yard and saw Kurt repairing a camp cart wheel under supervision, hands moving confidently. The work reminded Drake of men back home fixing farm machinery—focused, competent, steady.

“You were a mechanic?” Drake asked.

“Yes,” Kurt replied, in clearer English now. “Before war. Metal work.”

Drake nodded. “You do good work here.”

Kurt hesitated, then said something he had been turning over in his mind since that first glass of water.

“In Africa,” Kurt said, “we were told America is weak. Soft. Too comfortable. But you have… systems. Water. Food. Supply. It makes you strong.”

Drake did not argue. He had seen the convoys. He had seen warehouses full of equipment. He had seen how a nation that could provide for its own soldiers could afford to provide for prisoners too.

“That’s America,” Drake said simply. “We build things. We keep them running.”

It was not bragging. It was a statement of identity, the same way a farmer says he farms.

Kurt nodded slowly. The bitterness he had carried about defeat did not vanish, but it changed shape. He began to see that the war was not only decided by courage or ideology, but by infrastructure—by water and fuel and factories, by the quiet strength of systems that kept people fed and supplied.

And he began to see American soldiers not as monsters or saints, but as men who had enough discipline to hold power without turning it into cruelty.

That, Kurt realized, was its own kind of victory.

Chapter 6 — Returning Home With a New Obsession (1946 and after)

Kurt remained at Camp Roswell until spring 1946. The days settled into a routine that was dull but safe: work details, meals, evenings in the barracks, soccer games in the yard. He learned English slowly. He earned small wages he could not spend, money meant for a future that still felt like a rumor.

He drank clean water every day. Many glasses. Always with quiet respect.

When repatriation finally came, he crossed the Atlantic again and returned to Berlin, where the city looked like a body after a beating. Buildings stood half-open to the sky. Streets were patched with rubble. Pipes were broken. Water came from temporary systems, hand pumps, improvised repairs.

Helga was alive. The children were alive. Their reunion was not a scene from a film. It was exhausted relief, tears that came late, the touch of familiar hands proving survival.

Kurt found work in reconstruction, repairing vehicles at first—anything that moved was valuable. But soon he pushed toward a different kind of work. He sought training and assignments connected to water systems: purification, pipes, pumps, plants.

When Helga asked why, he struggled to explain.

Because water had become more than water.

It had become a measure of civilization.

He had learned in captivity what he had not fully understood in war: that a society that can provide clean water reliably—water that does not make children sick, water that does not carry fear—gives its people a foundation strong enough to endure almost anything.

Years later, when Berlin’s systems began to function again, when faucets finally delivered safe water reliably, Kurt would stand at the sink and let the cold run over his hands for a moment longer than necessary.

His children, born after the worst years, did not understand why their father treated water with such seriousness. To them, water was ordinary again. That was the point. Kurt wanted it to remain ordinary.

Once, when his son complained that the water was too cold, Kurt smiled—not in amusement, but in gratitude.

“Cold is good,” he said softly. “Cold means it came from deep places, protected places. Cold means someone kept the system working.”

He rarely spoke about North Africa. He spoke even less about captivity. But sometimes, on quiet evenings, he told them the story of the first glass at Camp Roswell.

How three hundred men sat down expecting punishment.

How clear water appeared in cheap glasses.

How the first man to drink began to cry.

How the crying spread—not because the men were weak, but because they had been too strong for too long, and for one moment they were allowed to be human again.

And he told them something else, carefully, the way a man handles a fragile tool:

“War teaches you to believe your enemy is less than human. But I learned, in an American mess hall, that a man who has power can still choose decency. That choice matters. It stays with you.”

Kurt died many years later, after Germany had rebuilt itself into something stronger and more careful than the nation that had marched into catastrophe. His obituary mentioned his service, his trade, his family.

It did not mention water.

But his children remembered. And in their homes, when they filled a glass from the tap, they did it without fear—an ordinary act made possible by systems rebuilt, and by lessons learned in places no one expected.

In the end, it had been “just water.”

Cold, clean, safe water drawn from deep New Mexico rock.

But for three hundred men who had forgotten what safety tasted like, it was proof that civilization still existed—and that even in war, some soldiers had the steady courage to honor it.

Note: Some content was generated using AI tools (ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity and suitability for historical illustration purposes.