| Summary: | Interviews with American POWs illuminate their captivity in Vietnamese camps and the emotional and physical horrors that they experienced.
In October of 1967, Konnie Trautman was shot down while flying his F-105 over North Viet Nam. During the next six years, he was subjected to some of the most inhuman brutality the Vietnamese were able to muster from their arsenal of torture. On 13 occasions, Konnie went through the rope treatment, a torture so severe that he would have preferred six months in isolation to one 15-minute session in the ropes. He spent 141 continuous days in isolation; interminable months in leg irons; thousands of hours holed up in total darkness ... Yet, somehow, he survived. Konnie was not alone in his experiences. The Communists released 564 American military men and 23 civilians in North Viet Nam, South Viet Nam and Laos. The vast majority of the POW's were Air Force and Navy pilots and air crew members, shot down in North Viet Nam in the years 1965 through 1968 and in 1972. They've become folk heroes of a sort. Their heroism derives from their ability to survive what most of us suspect we could not- years of terror at the hands of an incomprehensible enemy, and years of isolation in a medieval land. As soon as the prisoners were released, the author set out on an assignment, determined to find out how these prisoners of war were able to survive those long, hard years of physical and mental torture and deprivation. He wanted to understand their feelings: how they reacted, psychologically, to being captured; how they handled the persistent interrogators; how they coped with the demands to issue statements that might be used by the Vietnamese for political propaganda; what they thought of their captors, and of the people back home; how they felt about the continuation of the war; how they communicated with one another; what they expected life to be like when they returned to their families. These and hundreds of other probing questions were posed by the author to the ex-prisoners that he met in small groups. This book is their honest and open response.--Publisher description.
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