Author: Stuart I. Rochester Publisher: ISBN: 9781410221155 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 728
Book Description
The story of American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia has never been fully told despite numerous popular accounts, personal memoirs, and official reports that have appeared over the years since the prisoners' release in 1973. Now, twenty-five years after Operation Homecoming, comes the first attempt at a comprehensive, objective, documented history of their experience that seeks to separate fact from fiction and to portray the full scope of the captivity from the perspective of both captive and captor. Honor Bound, a collaborative effort researched and written over the course of more than a decade by historian Stuart Rochester and Air Force Academy professor and POW specialist Frederick Kiley, combines rigorous scholarly analysis with a moving narrative to record in unprecedented detail the triumphs and tragedies of the several hundred servicemen (and civilians) who fought their own special war in North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia between 1961 and 1973. The authors address a gamut of subjects from the physical ordeal of torture and deprivation that required clarification of the Code of Conduct to the sometimes more onerous psychological challenges of indoctrination, adjustments to new routines and relationships, and mere coping and passing time under the most monotonous, inhospitable conditions. The volume weaves a winding trail through scores of prison camps, from large concrete compounds in the North to isolated jungle stockades in the South to mountain caves in Laos, while tracing political developments in Hanoi and Washington and the evolution of the "psywar" that placed the prisoners at the center of the conflict even as they were removed from the battlefield. From courageous resistance and ingenious methods of organization and communication to failed escapes and questionable conduct---"warts and all"---Honor Bound examines in depth the longest and perhaps most remarkable prisoner-of-war captivity in U.S. history. Stuart I. Rochester holds a Ph.D, in history from the University of Virginia and taught at Loyola College in Baltimore before joining the Historical Office of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he is presently Deputy Historian. He is the author of Takeoff at Mid-Century: Federal Civil Aviation Policy in the Eisenhower Years, 1953-1961 and American Liberal Disillusionment in the Wake of World War I. Frederick Kiley earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. A retired Air Force colonel, he was a professor of English at the Air Force Academy prior to serving in Vietnam as an adviser to the Vietnam Air Force. He is a leading authority on prisoners of war and the author of Satire from Aesop to Buchwald and A Catch-22 Casebook. From 1984 to 1997 he was Director of the National Defense University Press and headed the NDU Research Fellows Program.
Author: Bill Hendon Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 1429922907 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 1272
Book Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An Enormous Crime is nothing less than shocking. Based on thousands of pages of public and previously classified documents, it makes an utterly convincing case that when the American government withdrew its forces from Vietnam, it knowingly abandoned hundreds of POWs to their fate. The product of twenty-five years of research by former Congressman Bill Hendon and attorney Elizabeth A. Stewart, this book brilliantly reveals the reasons why these American soldiers and airmen were held back by the North Vietnamese at Operation Homecoming in 1973, what these brave men have endured, and how administration after administration of their own government has turned its back on them. This authoritative exposé is based on open-source documents and reports, and thousands of declassified intelligence reports and satellite imagery, as well as author interviews and personal experience. An Enormous Crime is a singular work, telling a story unlike any other in our history: ugly, harrowing, and true.
Author: Sarah Kovner Publisher: ISBN: 067473761X Category : Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
Many Allied POWs in the Pacific theater of World War II suffered terribly. But abuse wasn't a matter of Japanese policy, as is commonly assumed. Sarah Kovner shows poorly trained guards and rogue commanders inflicted the most horrific damage. Camps close to centers of imperial power tended to be less violent, and many POWs died from friendly fire.
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments Publisher: ISBN: Category : Prisoners of war Languages : en Pages : 978
Author: Michael Joe Allen Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807832618 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 449
Book Description
Reveals how wartime loss in the Vietnam War transformed U.S. politics, arguing that the effort to recover lost warriors was as much a means to establish responsibility for their loss as it was a search for answers about their fate.
Author: Heath Hardage Lee Publisher: Hachette UK ISBN: 1472131770 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
Featured in Stylist's guide to 2019's best non-fiction books The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington - and Hanoi - to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam. On 12 February, 1973, one hundred and sixteen men who, just six years earlier, had been high flying Navy and Air Force pilots, shuffled, limped, or were carried off a huge military transport plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. These American servicemen had endured years of brutal torture, kept shackled and starving in solitary confinement, in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons, the worst of which was The Hanoi Hilton. Months later, the first Vietnam POWs to return home would learn that their rescuers were their wives, a group of women that included Jane Denton, Sybil Stockdale, Louise Mulligan, Andrea Rander, Phyllis Galanti, and Helene Knapp. These women, who formed The National League of Families, would never have called themselves 'feminists', but they had become the POW and MIAs most fervent advocates, going to extraordinary lengths to facilitate their husbands' freedom - and to account for missing military men - by relentlessly lobbying government leaders, conducting a savvy media campaign, conducting covert meetings with antiwar activists, and most astonishingly, helping to code secret letters to their imprisoned husbands. In a page-turning work of narrative non-fiction, Heath Hardage Lee tells the story of these remarkable women for the first time. The League of Wives is certain to be on everyone's must-read list.
Author: Glenn Robins Publisher: University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 081314325X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
While serving as a crew chief aboard a U.S. Air Force Rescue helicopter, Airman First Class William A. Robinson was shot down and captured in Ha Tinh Province, North Vietnam, on September 20, 1965. After a brief stint at the "Hanoi Hilton," Robinson endured 2,703 days in multiple North Vietnamese prison camps, including the notorious Briarpatch and various compounds at Cu Loc, known by the inmates as the Zoo. No enlisted man in American military history has been held as a prisoner of war longer than Robinson. For seven and a half years, he faced daily privations and endured the full range of North Vietnam's torture program. In The Longest Rescue: The Life and Legacy of Vietnam POW William A. Robinson, Glenn Robins tells Robinson's story using an array of sources, including declassified U.S. military documents, translated Vietnamese documents, and interviews from the National Prisoner of War Museum. Unlike many other POW accounts, this comprehensive biography explores Robinson's life before and after his capture, particularly his estranged relationship with his father, enabling a better understanding of the difficult transition POWs face upon returning home and the toll exacted on their families. Robins's powerful narrative not only demonstrates how Robinson and his fellow prisoners embodied the dedication and sacrifice of America's enlisted men but also explores their place in history and memory.
Author: Tom Wilber Publisher: NYU Press ISBN: 1583679103 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
A fresh look at the how US troops played a part in the resistance of US troops to the American war in Vietnam Even if you don't know much about the war in Vietnam, you've probably heard of "The Hanoi Hilton," or Hoa Lo Prison, where captured U.S. soldiers were held. What they did there and whether they were treated well or badly by the Vietnamese became lasting controversies. As military personnel returned from captivity in 1973, Americans became riveted by POW coming-home stories. What had gone on behind these prison walls? Along with legends of lionized heroes who endured torture rather than reveal sensitive military information, there were news leaks suggesting that others had denounced the war in return for favorable treatment. What wasn't acknowledged, however, is that U.S. troop opposition to the war was vast and reached well into Hoa Loa Prison. Half a century after the fact, Dissenting POWs emerges to recover this history, and to discover what drove the factionalism in Hoa Lo. Looking into the underlying factional divide between pro-war “hardliners” and anti-war “dissidents” among the POWs, authors Wilber and Lembcke delve into the postwar American culture that created the myths of the Hero-POW and the dissidents blamed for the loss of the war. What they found was surprising: It wasn’t simply that some POWs were for the war and others against it, nor was it an officers-versus-enlisted-men standoff. Rather, it was the class backgrounds of the captives and their pre-captive experience that drew the lines. After the war, the hardcore hero-holdouts—like John McCain—moved on to careers in politics and business, while the dissidents faded from view as the antiwar movement, that might otherwise have championed them, disbanded. Today, Dissenting POWs is a necessary myth-buster, disabusing us of the revisionism that has replaced actual GI resistance with images of suffering POWs—ennobled victims that serve to suppress the fundamental questions of America’s drift to endless war.
Author: Stuart I. Rochester
Author: Bill Hendon
Author: Vernon E. Davis
Author: Sarah Kovner
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Foreign Affairs. Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments
Author: Michael Joe Allen
Author: Heath Hardage Lee
Author: Glenn Robins
Author: Larry Guarino
Author: Tom Wilber