Trying to Hide input from a Select list

This is my first post to this forum....
I'm stuck trying to do something that I think should be relatively simple...
I have a page with a select box. When you make a selection from this box the data is populated in a search box. So you can type a query and then use the select box to append to the query. What I want to do is let make a selection but the text not show up in the search box but still get appended to the query.
When the onchange is executed I want to make that value append to Querytext and be hidden....

I have tried to pass the select box value to a hidden field and then append that to the query but I can't seem to get the value of the select to pass properly....

Here is the code that I am using:


<div class="border" style="padding: 5px; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 10px;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr>
<td class="label" style="width: 195px; padding-left: 10px;">Enter Query:</td>

<td class="formw">
<textarea class="text" style="width: 280px; height: 20px;" name="QueryText" id="QueryText"><jsp:getProperty name="objAdvancedQuery" property="htmlEscapedQueryText" /></textarea>
</td>



<td class="formw" style="padding-top: 5px;"><input type="image" class="searchImage" src="../../common/img/search.gif" alt="Search" title="Search" /></td>


<%


if (g_strQueryParser.equalsIgnoreCase("Simple")) {
%>
<td class="formw">
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" solid #000;">
<tr>
<td colspan="4" style="padding-left: 2px; font-size: 8pt; font-weight: bold;">Entity Search:</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="4" class="formwVQLHelper">
<select class="select" name="vqlOperator" id="vqlOperator"
onchange="vqlOperatorHelper(this[this.selectedIndex].value);" style="width: 190px;">
<option value="" selected="selected">-- Choose an Entity --</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;CANCER">Cancer</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;COMPANY">Company</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;INTERNET_ADDRESS">Internet Address</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;PERSON">Person</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;PLACE">Place</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;RESEARCH">Research</option>
<option value="&lt;IN&gt;VIRUS">Virus</option>
</select>
</td>
</tr>

</tr>
</table>


</td>
<%
}
%>
</tr>
</table>
</div>