SPITE HOUSE CL - Hardcover

This is a story that shatters our illusions about how America conducts its wars. You will not want to believe it. Two U.S. Marines, both totally loyal to the same beliefs: one is turned into a hunter, and the other into prey. Such a distortion of patriotism would not be credible unless buttressed by hard facts, and by the testimony of both men. In 1965, Marine private Robert Garwood, ten days short of the end of his tour, was sent on a mission from which he did not return. Ambushed by the Vietcong, he was held prisoner for fourteen years. In 1979 he escaped and returned to the United States, where he was hastily court-martialed and convicted of collaborating with the enemy. Now at last we learn Garwood's true storya harrowing, profoundly moving fourteen-year struggle to survive and prevail, not only over a cruel and manipulative enemy but over his own country's secret efforts to kill him. The secret part of Colonel Tom McKenney's job in Vietnam was organizing killer teams to eliminate such "traitors," and Garwood became an obsession to him. Only twenty-five years later did he come to the conclusion that Garwood was innocent and, more than that, a hero. Thanks to McKenney's courageous testimony, and to the author's fearless pursuit of the facts, an injustice is at last set right, and the workings of a dreadful secret machinery are laid bare. Colonel McKenney had hunted Garwood for years, with intent to kill. But when he met the author at a Vietnam veterans meeting in 1994, his message was "Tell him [Garwood] that I would crawl on my hands and knees to ask his forgiveness."