DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Three and a half miles south of where you're rolling right now, the land holds a story most folks blow right past. Pull it up in your mind's eye — the High Plains, flat as a ironing board, wind coming in off nowhere — and somewhere out in that wide open, there used to be a place called the Hereford Military Reservation and Reception Center.
This was a prisoner of war camp. World War II. And the story of what happened here is not exactly what you'd expect.
It started in 1943. American and Allied forces had pushed through North Africa, and when an invasion swept across that theater, soldiers were captured — Italian soldiers, thousands of them. About seven thousand, to be closer to the number.
And a good many of those men ended up here, on the Texas Panhandle, in a place about as far from the Mediterranean as you can get without leaving the planet. Now, you might picture barbed wire and hard looks and a cold kind of silence between captors and captives. And sure, there was a war on.
But something else happened here too. Those Italian soldiers and the local residents of the Hereford area — and even the American troops stationed there — they started becoming friends. Real ones.
The kind that last. How do you measure a friendship forged in a prisoner of war camp in the middle of the Texas plains? Well, here's one way.
After the war ended and the men went home, some of them came back. Came back to visit. And some of them didn't just visit — they settled right here in the region.
That's not a small thing. That's a man looking at the world, all the places he could go, and choosing this. The camp itself is gone now.
The reservation, the barracks, the fences, the whole operation — time and the elements took most of it. But not everything. The prisoners built a chapel while they were here, and that chapel is still standing.
The only building left at the site. Still there, three and a half miles south, quiet in that Panhandle quiet. Seven thousand men passed through this ground.
Enemies by the terms of nations, neighbors by the grace of something harder to name. And one small chapel, built by their hands, is what remains to say it happened at all.
What the marker says
(3.5 mi. S) A prisoner of war camp, used primarily for Italian soldiers, was in operation near this site during World War II. Known as the Hereford Military Reservation and Reception Center, it was first used in 1943 for prisoners captured in an invasion of North Africa. Many of the approximately 7000 Italian soldiers imprisoned here became friends with local residents and with American troops. Since the war, some have returned for visits and others have settled in the region. The camp chapel, constructed by the prisoners, is the only building remaining at the site. (1982)