cover image To Be Free!:

To Be Free!:

Ron Martin. Vanguard Press, $0 (250pp) ISBN 978-0-8149-0925-6

Having narrowly survived the carnage of the Vietnam War, Marine Sgt. Jack Ramsey fashions a desperate purpose: to escape from a North Vietnamese POW camp where he is tortured, worked to the edge of maddening fatigue and constantly brainwashed. Evading his merciless, sadistic guards, he digs out of a bamboo punishment cage and makes his way through the jungle to the sea where he steals a fishing boat from which a U.S. cutter rescues him. Throughout, flashbacks alternate with chilling details of incarceration. While hardly justifying the war, this lucidly written book provides the reader with a convincing account of a fighting man's decision to prove himself adequate to his brutal and hopeless circumstances. In an ironic epilogue, Ramsey, who does not consider himself heroic, whose sweetheart has abandoned him, whose psychic wounds are deep, finds grief for his fallen comrades the first step in his attempts to cleanse his soul. (August 11)