A Life Taken Prisoner: Black Prisoner of War--A Conscientious Objector's Vietnam Memoir

James A Daly's griping memoir, Black Prisoner of War rests in the unenviable position of  #2,519,472 in the Amazon ranking of books.  Its an unenviable and undeserved position.  What I read struck me as a straightforward, well written account of Daly's experience in the army. What made his experience different from most others, of course, was his being captured and held as a prisoner of war for five years in a series of camps in Vietnam.  Add into the mix his claim to have been a conscientious objector all along, and the fact that, as one of the few blacks held by the Vietnamese, he was the object of continuous and sophisticated indoctrination by his captors, and you have a unique story worth telling.  Originally published in 1975 by a now defunct company, Black Prisoner of War, was republished by the University Press of Kansas after Daly's death in 1998.  It didn't do well either time despite the efforts of co-author Bergman, a publicist.  When the book hit the stores the first time, the war was over, South Vietnam had passed into history, and America was obsessed with other issues.  Even an interview with Walter Cronkite and an appearance on the Today Show didn't get the necessary attention to make the memoir pay out.


What killed the book then, and still haunts it, was hostility against a man who was perceived as a collaborator with the enemy.  A couple of high ranking POW returnees, who strangely enough never met him during their prison camp time, preferred charges against him.  The Army quickly dismissed the charges, but the damage was done.  Certainly, the controversy around him itself justified his putting forward his story.  Daly's memoir is an important contribution to the literature of the Vietnam War. I'm a Vietnam Vet who doesn't believe that my experience was universal, so I won't judge Daly, question his motives, or his honesty. The reader should understand that Daly is giving his very personal experience, and his inner reaction to it, and not trying to write a history.


I was only the fourth reader to review the book on Amazon.  The other three reviewers all made judgments about James Daly's character, honesty, and motives.  They were negative judgments and that was reflected in the low number of stars they gave the story.  It's the nature of history to deal in objective fact, and of memoir to relay subjective and personal truth.  The two rarely coincide.  Both are valid.  I hope my favorable review and ranking do a little to redress the balance between history and memoir in Daly's case.


No review would be complete without mentioning the contribution of co-author Lee Bergman to this volume.  I found that Black Prisoner of War was, despite one reviewers claim, written in a quite readable, simple style. Few people know how difficult it is to produce this type of writing.  It takes a trained writer.  Lee Bergman spent his professional life as a publicist and I have to assume that it was he, rather than Daly, that actually wrote this story.  Jim Daly was an intelligent, but relatively uneducated and unsophisticated man.  His career aspiration after he left the army was to be a professional cook.  Not chef, cook.  He ended up being a mail carrier and a failed laundromat owner.  He may have been a nice enough guy, but he wasn't a writer.  Bergman was. That he is able to present the unusual life this simple man lived in language that reflects the complexity of the issues faced, and the earnestness of Daly's response, is a tribute to his skill as a writer.  I don't know if Bergman is still alive.  I can't find him with a Google search.  If he is out there, I'd welcome his comments on this blog post.

I came across Black Prisoner of War while researching the battle in which Daly was captured for another project.  His account of that battle was helpful to me.  Anyone with more than an idle interest in the Vietnam War will find this book worthwhile and valuable.  It presents the experience of one man in a strikingly different way than most such works.  Daly's saga is one of race, politics, religion, philosophy and individual choice.  Like him or not, agree with his choices or not, his sincerity and essential truthfulness are evident. You get the sense of what it was like to be Jim Daly in those years.  Few memoirs can leave you with the feeling you've glimpsed the core of someone else.  This one does.

Those Veterans who suffer from the effects of Agent Orange will be interested to read Daly's account of being sprayed by US aircraft as they defoliated the rice fields around his POW camp in South Vietnam. He could smell, and actually taste the stuff. It will come as no surprise to them that he died in his 50's from complications of his resultant severe diabetes. Daly, of course, didn't know the toxic effects of Agent Orange when he wrote the book.  Nor did he know he would develop a disease the government now accepts as caused by the defoliant. That we unwittingly kill our own should give us all reason to question the wisdom of war. Any war.

Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death and Astonishing Afterlife

One of the sad truths I learned when writing about Amelia Earhart was that most people are more interested in her disappearance than her life.  The allure of vanishing without a trace attracts folks.  Especially when the disappearee is young, talented, and good looking.



Everett Ruess is one of those pretty, artistically gifted missing whose story pulls us to him.  The twenty year old rode alone into the Utah desert in 1934 accompanied by two donkeys packing his drawing supplies, food, and an ambition to find something in the wilderness that would sustain him throughout a lifetime of creating art.  His donkeys were found a couple months later, as well as various items he was known to be carrying  (though not all).  Also found were a couple of his signatures on desert rocks:  "NEMO 1934".  The allusion to Jules Vern's Captain Nemo captured Ruess's attraction to high culture and craving for isolation from a society that seemed to puzzle him.

Phillip Fradkin's Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife documents Ruess's "short life" and "mysterious death" well and in an engrossing manner, often through Everett Ruess's own words.  However, Fradkin's account of Ruess's "astonishing Afterlife" leaves me unsatisfied.  Something about this boy still draws us to him, but it's hard to put a finger on just what.



A University of Utah art curator has classified him as a "gifted amateur." A little Googling led me to the conclusion that prints by this "gifted amateur" go for about a thousand, when they can be found. I have some work by other similarly gifted artists that might bring five bucks on a good day.  For some reason, Ruess is different.  The Ruess family were prolific writers.  Everertt produced a high volume of writing while sitting around the campfire, and his mother and father kept the letters, later publishing some of them.  Everett was sometimes a powerful writer, and was clearly working to develop his writing further.  He was, in my opinion, more talented as a writer than painter.  His writing is, however, limited to describing a desert he preferred to paint.  No one argues his writing stands alone.  Studio photos by the then well known photographer Dorothea Lange were widely published during the searches for Ruess, and they show what most would call a very good looking young man, even if one suspects his beauty is primarily his youth.  All things being equal though, do we care more about the fate of the beautiful than the ugly?  Maybe.  But, for eighty years?


Twenty year olds-pretty and plain-drop out of sight everyday.  They run away, get killed, change their names, get lost in the desert, are swallowed by bodies of water, and sometimes just vanish.  What is it about Everett Ruess that makes anyone pay any more attention to him then anybody else?  And, they do pay attention.  In 2009 a journalist and two university scientists published what turned out to be an erroneous DNA identification of bones found in the dessert as those of Ruess.  When the ID proved wrong they ran into a blizzard of criticism.  A project that one of the experts thought would be "interesting and fun," but not of much consequence, came close to ending careers. 

Perhaps it is Ruess's fascination with the beauty he discovered in the desert that keeps us interested in him.  In fact beauty was something of an obsession for him.  An obsession taught him by a mother who seemed more interested in art than family.  Stella Ruess seems to have been a very attentive mother, but she was attentive in the manner of a sculptor molding bronze.  Art was all in the Ruess household.  Since father Christopher was absent for many of the formative years of his children's lives, Stella's view was not to be tempered by his more practical bent. 


Most of what we know about Ruess comes from the promotion and publishing efforts of his mother after his disappearance.  She kept his name and work alive for decades after she must have known he was dead.  At some point Everett became an art project, not a missing boy.  The same held true for Amelia Earhart.  Her husband George had no problem with publishing her unfinished book and his own biography after her death.  I've no problem with that.  She left a stack of unpaid bills.  But, he then backed a movie that suggested her last flight was connected to a US intelligence mission against the Japanese, a scenario many today believe true simply because of that movie.  I'm sure had she popped up again after the movie release she would have been furious at the lie. 


Unfortunately, this is the way we make money in the age of celebrity.        

The Round House

Louise Erdrich has been an important American writer for twenty-five years, yet it took most people by surprise when her latest novel, The Round House, won the National Book Award for fiction.  Perhaps it's because, while no one doubts her tremendous talent, she has insisted on writing in a distinctly Native American way rather than conforming to the smart, edgy style of her nonindian contemporaries.  By Native American way I mean an elliptical nonchronological style based on family, clan, and tribe, instead of the urban/rural setting with linear time flow construct used by most of us. However, in The Round House, (Harper, 2012) Erdrich earns her place in the mainstream by meeting three difficult challenges that defeat most writers .

The narrator of this novel is Joe, a thirteen year old boy who is growing up on a reservation in the Dakotas.  How many novels have you read whose children think, act, and speak like adults, at least part of the time?  Joe's thoughts, emotions, and behavior are perfectly believable, all the time.  I haven't encountered a more real child voice since To Kill A Mockingbird.  Both books explore a child's response to injustice, In Mockingbird it's racism, while Round House deals with rape.  Both books deal with crimes that society has made complex, but a child sees as the simple atrocity that it is.  The choice of a child to tell the story, and the skill Erdrich uses to make that child's voice real accomplish her first task.

The second is to artfully present a political argument without scaring away the reader with her passion.  Her focus is the injustice of the American legal system. US law prevents Native American tribes from using their own system of law and courts to prosecute crimes against their people by nonindians off the reservation.  Writers who make political points with their work frequently produce heavy handed polemic that drives readers who just want a good story away.  Erdrich handles this problem skillfully by making Joe's father a tribal court judge.  Antone Coutts, the husband, is ready to kill to avenge the rape of his wife.  Antone Coutts, the Indian judge, is perfectly powerless to do much except appeal to white friends in seeking justice.  Erdrich simply lays out the jurisdiction problems and leaves Antone standing helpless as his wife's rapist strolls about the reservation, safe behind a wall of white privilege.  The character and the story make the political point naturally and without the obvious hand of the author.

Finally, Louise Erdrich tells a story about the effect of rape that goes beyond the victim herself and shows the corrosive result in the lives of those close to her.  Both her husband and son are changed irrevocably by the crime.  They become different people.  People you may not like as much as you did when the book starts.  You may not like them, but you understand. 

The Round House takes us from particular lives of Native Americans to the universal lives of human beings.  That makes her mainstream.  And the way she does it makes the author and her work worthy of the National Book Award.

The Glass Palace

Amitav Gosh's The Glass Palace (published in the U.S. by Random House, 2001) is historical fiction at its best:  entertaining, informative and compelling.  For those who like to immerse themselves in in a weighty multi-generational saga that not only concerns itself with family but with the fate of nations, its a perfect read. 

The novel revolves around the life and loves of Rajkumar, who starts the story as an eleven year old Indian orphan in the Burma of the 1890's.  He is in perfect position to witness the defeat of Burma's last king, and his deportation to exile in India.  Rajkumar, a very advanced eleven year old, finds his life long love in one of the queen's child attendants.  Their story anchors a book that explores the politics of independence and the economics of colonialism through the end of WWII and beyond. 

The Glass Palace surprised me by giving me a quick course in the process of harvesting teak in the depths of a rain forest and bringing it to market across the world.  It introduced me to the Indian National Army, with its doomed 25,000 Indians who joined Japan in the hopes of expelling the British from India after the war.  As the book ends the reader is given a peek into the bewilderingly crazy society of the military dictatorship in Myanmar.  These things are not part of the usual knowledge of Americans, even those who like history. 

Amitav Gosh invites the reader to put aside the frustrations of our modern high-tech life and join him in exploring the past of a land most of us can hardly imagine.  You'd do yourself a favor in accepting his invitation. 

The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Anyone interested in the possibility of intelligent life on other worlds would do well to read Robert Gray's well written The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Palmer Square Press, 2012).  This intriguing explanation of the use of radio astronomy to look for life outside our solar system begins with the 1977 discovery of a strong non-natural signal with an antenna operated by Ohio State University.  This is called the "Wow!" because that's the comment written in the margin of the printout of the signal by astronomer Jerry Ehman.  Gray patiently explains the system used to find this signal, the reasons it could not have been natural, and describes the puzzlement of scientists when the brief burst of radio power wasn't repeated.  He then proceeds to carefully describe the history of SETI (Search for ExTraterrestrial Intelligence) from that moment up until his book went to press in 2011.  The effort is now expanding to frequencies other than radio, and scientists are widening their net to catch signals more subtle than the  powerful  radio pulses encountered in the Wow! incident.  Although Robert Gray is an engineer by training, he is an amateur astronomer with competence and knowledge impressive enough to cause the managers of the world's largest radio telescope, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, to extend him blocks of time to search for radio signals from extrasolar civilizations--twice.  This volume also contains a valuable bibliography of books and articles, plus an extensive list of links to web sites dealing with the subject.       

This is a good book to start with if you are becoming interested in SETI.  If you are, you'd be in good company.  One fact that surprised me in Gray's book was that some really heavy hitters, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and and former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold have donated millions to looking for ET.  The little green men should guard their browser secrets well--free enterprise is on the way.  

Writing About Amelia Earhart-Part III

After all these years, and all those books, mystery still surrounds the person of Amelia Earhart.  Who was this woman who dared so much so often?  What drove her to take such risks, to give up so much of herself to flying?  That the questions are still asked tells us something about her desire to keep a part of her life away from the public's view.  She wasn't so much shy as reserved.  As time went by she realized both the rewards and drawbacks of a very public life.  The rewards were obvious.  She was a top earner on the lecture circuit.  Her books sold well.  She met and befriended some of the most interesting personalities of the period, everyone from Will Rogers to Eleanor Roosevelt.  The drawbacks were less obvious, but burdensome.  The type of record setting flying she did was very expensive, and as she made longer and more difficult flights the costs ate up her speaking income quickly.  She was one of the most recognizable women in America, so there was no such thing as feeling alone in a crowd.  And the crowds!  She truly hated and feared the mobs of people who wanted to touch her, even snatch at a scarf or hat as she moved through them at the end of a flight.  But what she did was by its nature public; the animalistic mindlessness of the throngs who pressed around her was unavoidable. 

That reserve, born of an awareness she was always being watched by people she didn't know, but who knew her, has left its own questions.  In 1992, researching what became The Truth Of It: Amelia Earhart's Private Journal I was privileged to speak to a number of women who were active in aviation at the same time as Amelia.  Even after forty-five years some of them were still bitter that she had been privileged to accomplish what they hadn't.  They attributed her success to her upper middle class background and posh social connections.  A couple of them told me she was "known" to be promiscuous.  The facts just don't support any of that.  Her dad was a talented lawyer who couldn't make a living because of his alcoholism.  She was raised by grandparents in Atchison, Kansas, hardly a social Mecca. 

Probably the promiscuousness is an after-the-fact result of publication of her famous letter to George Putnam, given him on the morning of their wedding.  She had grave doubts about the viability of mixing married life with an aviation career, and announced she might need to establish a separate residence where she could sometimes go to be alone.  She also told him she wouldn't hold him to any "medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly."  She demanded the right to end the marriage in a year if she wasn't happy.  You have to realize Amelia was raised in what we nowadays call a "dysfunctional" family.  Her experience of marriage wasn't a joyful one.  The biggest objection to the "promiscuous" Amelia, however, is the fact that she was watched wherever she went, and knew it.  Numerous biographers have been unable to turn up any evidence of extramarital affairs in her life.  And they've looked.  Lacking evidence, I have to agree with them.  The Amelia you read about in history is probably the Amelia that was. 
This novel available at #AmazonKindle .

Writing About Amelia Earhart - Part II

How do you write about someone like Amelia Earhart?  She led a life like few have before or since.  She was at once a very public and a very private person.  This has given us a somewhat uneven picture of her.  We have minute by minute accounts of Amelia's record flights, but have only a general idea of the details of her domestic existence.  I took my lead from a statement by her husband, George Putnam.  In his autobiography, Wide Margins, he wrote:   "There is, perhaps, another story to be written, if one could catch the spirit of the Amelia Earhart that was, and in a book that should be a novel tell a grand true tale of a modern American pioneer who was a woman."

Putnam's statement suggested to me that Earhart's story was really too big to be presented as straight biography.  A faithful biography would have given facts precedence over the spirit of adventure that enlivened Amelia.  It also hinted how she saw herself.  First, a pioneer of the air, but also a woman living in what was still a man's world.  And challenging that world.  Only the fictional method could catch the grand purpose driven life that set all those records, and upset all those men.

The first person journal seemed obvious to me.  Amelia Earhart's story was inconceivable unless she told it in a voice that was believable.  Finding that voice was the trick.  Luckily, I'd always felt drawn to Amelia, to her independent, self-sufficient, but playful approach to life.  And she left a clear record of that approach in her own published books, 20 hrs. 40 min.:  Our Flight In The Friendship, and The Fun Of It. Reading them, and some of her private letters, gave me a feeling for how she expressed herself.  When I sat down to write it seemed to flow, an indication to the writer that he's found the right voice. 

Of course, there are hazards in the first person voice.  Some may find the voice differs from what they expect.  Others, after a few thousand words, may begin to tire of it.  The only solution for these problems is a story that provides excitement on every page, with unexpected twists and turns.  If you don't like my Amelia I apologize and wish you better luck on your next read.  I won't apologize for the excitement or the twists and turns.  They're hers.