Broken Soldiers

This is a great book. It's another one of those "what would I have done if I was there?" Frankly, I don't know. It's easy to ponder what I would have done or what the right thing to do under those circumstances was from a warm office, 52 years after the fact. The author packed in a lot of historical information about the Korean War, the POW experience, and the courts-martial, but also kept the characters alive and the book read like a great but tragic novel. Some of the characters in the book, such as PFC Rothwell Floyd or SGT Gallagher were despicable and richly deserved their convictions and sentences. The rest, like COL Liles, LTC Fleming, and Major Alley seemed to be only doing what they needed to in order to survive and save their men. At some point though, it seems like some of the POWs began crossing the line and doing more than what they needed to survive. This book confirmed the absolute evil of communism and its double-speak with words such as "justice", "peace", etc. that were used to mask its real agenda. It was also ironic how many of the Chinese and North Korean interrogators were highly educated people who had studied English at American universities. This book really shows the depravity that men can sink to under some circumstances.