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HOUSTON -- Pfc. Cecil Easley had been a prisoner of war for so long he didn't recognize the uniform on the American soldier trying to rescue him from a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines.

That rescue, one of the most successful in U.S. military history, is the subject of the movie "The Great Raid," which opened Friday.

Army Rangers freed 512 American POWs from the Cabanatuan prison camp on the Philippine island of Luzon. Only two Rangers and one prisoner died.

Easley and his comrades had surrendered three years earlier and made the Bataan Death March to the POW camp.

Easley had played baseball and football in high school in Houston, so he was in better shape than many of his fellow prisoners. At the time of the rescue, he weighed 94 pounds, still the fittest of his comrades.

Easley saw his friends die of dysentery, malaria, dengue fever and malnutrition.

One day, while Easley was on a work detail outside the camp, a guard accused him of pretending to shoot him with his trigger finger. The guard placed Easley's right index finger on a block, took a short knife that the Americans called a "can opener" off his belt, and chopped off the finger at the knuckle.

By 1944, time was running out for the Cabanatuan POWs. In August the Japanese War Ministry had instructed guards to kill all American prisoners during their retreat.

Two days later, MacArthur's forces landed at Luzon and began advancing toward the capital of Manila. Informed of the Cabanatuan camp by Filipino guerrillas, Lt. Gen. Walter Krueger, the commander of the U.S. Sixth Army, assigned Lt. Col. Henry Mucci's Rangers to stage a daring raid to save the POWs.

Back at the camp, Easley knew the Americans were approaching.

"We'd seen the artillery shells and the airplanes, so we knew the army was getting close, but we weren't expecting the raid," Easley said in Friday's editions of the Houston Chronicle.

On the night of Jan. 30, 1945, Easley was up late, talking with a few friends on the steps of his barracks, when he heard an explosion. He looked at a nearby guard tower, where a Japanese soldier was scrambling to get in position. As soon as the guard stood up he was cut down by a line of bullets.

Easley realized he was being rescued.

The Army Rangers swept through the prison camp, looking for POWs and killing every Japanese guard they found.

The Rangers didn't leave Cabanatuan until every POW was accounted for and every guard was dead or wounded.

The Cabanatuan POWs were welcomed back to San Francisco with a parade. Easley stayed on the HPD detectives' squad until he joined Neiman-Marcus as director of security in 1967. He still lives in the Houston area.

As Easley, 82, spoke this week, a TV could be heard announcing the latest casualties in Iraq. Dry-eyed while recalling atrocities at Cabanatuan, Easley teared up when asked about Iraq. He opposed the war from the beginning.

"It kills me," he said. "I just don't like seeing Americans die."