Throughout our nation’s history American servicemen and civilians have resisted captivity in every form, drawing on special powers of ingenuity, determination, and patriotism to escape– sometimes repeatedly. Robert Doyle’s penetrating look at some extraordinary escapes by Americans breaks new ground in escape psychology, shedding light on the types of people
“When the Library of Congress compiled oral histories for its Veterans History Project, 24 of the 49 individuals who identified themselves as Medal of Honor recipients had not actually received that award.” (Justice Samuel Alito, United States v. Alvarez.) If Fake Warriors will lie to the Library of Congress, who
In When Hell Was in Session, Jeremiah Denton, the senior American officer to serve as a Vietnam POW, tells the amazing story of the almost eight years he survived as a POW in North Vietnam. In 1966, he appeared on a television interview from prison and blinked the word torture
On April 6, 1967, twenty-year-old U.S. Navy Seaman Apprentice Doug Hegdahl fell off his ship, a guided-missile cruiser, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Close to exhaustion after nearly four hours in the water, he was picked up by a small fishing boat and soon found himself in Hỏa Lò Prison,
At the age of eighteen, armed with a dream of flying and the desire to serve his country, Norman Gaddis enlists in the Army Air Corps in the months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. After twenty-four years of service and seventy-two combat missions, he is shot down while in
