Bouncing Back; How a Heroic Band of POWs Survived Vietnam

[8], 248 pages. DJ is in a clear plastic sleeve. Geoffrey Norman is the author of 12 books of fiction and non-fiction and many articles for periodicals to include the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, Esquire, Men's Journal, the Weekly Standard, and others. His non-fiction books include Bouncing Back, an account of the POW experience in Vietnam; Alabama Showdown, an account of the Alabama/Auburn football rivalry; and Two For the Summit, a memoir of mountain climbing with his daughter. These books all received favorable reviews in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Norman's novels include Inch by Inch, Sweetwater Ranch, Midnight Water & others. Norman wrote the text for a large format book about Virginia Military Institute by noted photographer Anthony Edgeworth. The book is called The Institute. Norman has been a senior editor and contributing editor at Esquire magazine. Editor-at -Large at Forbes. Contributing editor at Field & Stream, among others. He writes for the The American Spectator and Garden and Gun. Later codified by the military, the resources the POWs in North Vietnam evolved became a doctrine of survival known as Bouncing Back. Through intricate and ingenious methods, the prisoners in each camp made contact, and it saved them. They worked out ways to communicate by tapping out a complex code on their cell walls. They established a chain of command and organized their resistance efforts. They nursed each other's shattered bodies and bolstered each other's morale. They even maintained their sense of humor. Derived from a Kirkus review: Shot down in 1967, Lt. Cmdr. Al Stafford was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese until the cease-fire in early 1973. Here, novelist and journalist Norman offers a deliberate, often painful look at the privation and drudgery of life as a POW--but also reveals a surprising richness. After his capture, Stafford, with a broken arm and ribs, was taken to Hoa Lo, to the infamous "Hanoi Hilton." He was interrogated, beaten, and strung up "in the ropes," and later was moved to a prison camp the POWs called "the Plantation." There, the inmates used a highly refined "tap code" to communicate through the walls of their cells. They not only passed essential information and lifesaving encouragement to those in solitary, but tapped out riddles, poetry, played cards and chess, and developed elaborate fantasies involving sailing, playing golf, or building houses. For months before actually meeting, Stafford and another POW exchanged bad puns--"Aesop's feebles"--through a half-inch hole in the wall. In one camp, Norman notes, Stafford and several others set up a "college" and taught classes--entirely from memory--in such subjects an animal husbandry, higher math, auto mechanics, Spanish, and literature; one POW even taught wine appreciation. But, as the author points out, "the constants. . .were uncertainty, monotony, and fear." The POWs lived for years on pumpkin soup and an occasional piece of bread, in extremely unsanitary circumstances, without medical care. Most learned that a key to survival was "bouncing back," a formalized policy that allowed for a man to be "broken" by torture, illness, and deprivation, but "the essential point was not to give up completely. . . but to rally," to take as much as possible, but to forgive yourself your limits. Serious and intelligent; unhindered by bitterness that often accompanies such accounts.…