good book
When I began to feel better after a week of sickness, not wanting to read anything and not having my computer intact for reading the internet, I picked up a paperback book that I’d bought months ago: Ghost Soldiers by Hampton Sides. I read it for two nights. It was fantastic. The back cover and inside leaves are loaded with snippets from favorable reviews – glowing praise from many sources. Dominic and I had seen, via DVD, The Great Raid, a movie based on this book and another. Well, this book was so good. It describes the Bataan Death March of U.S. soldiers and sailors who were abandoned by the U.S. War Department on the Bataan peninsula of the Philippines then surrendered to the Japanese invaders by their leader. Ghost Soldiers tells of imprisonment, suffering and dying for years in Camp O’Donnell and Cabanatuan prison camp until ‘the great raid’ of Cabanatuan death camp in January 1945.
I had heard from a WW2 veteran and read of the Bataan Death March years ago, yet I was amazed again at the brutality of the Japanese and the criminal neglect of the President of the United States, Frank Roosevelt, Secretary of War, Henry Stinson, the Department of the Navy and the Department of the Army.
‘Man’s inhumanity to man’ never ceases to amaze me, as does man’s willingness to survive and the spirit’s ability to push, push, push the human body far beyond expectations – ‘mind over matter.’ I highly recommend this book, Ghost Soldiers, and other books about POWs, such as The Passing of the Night, by Robinson Risner, Five Years to Freedom, by James Rowe, Why Didn’t You Get Me Out? by Frank Anton and Faith of My Fathers, by John McCain. They’re not everyone’s cup of tea, of course. But I find them fascinating.
