In love and war

"This is the true story of Jim Stockdale, a navy fighter pilot shot down and taken prisoner during the Vietnam War; and his wife, Sybil, who, back home in California, carried on a valiant fight on behalf of her husband and all other POWs during the eight years of his imprisonment. Vice Admiral Stockdale entered the fray as a commander in 1964, when the American commitment totaled about 16,00o men, and left it in 1973, when the number was about the same. In between, however, our commitment had shot up to over thirty times that number. The truth about the Tonkin Gulf incidents--and how they precipitated our huge investment of treasure and blood--is a story Jim Stockdale has protected for twenty years, almost eight of them at great risk in a Communist prison. Sybil and Jim tell their story in alternating chapters--Jim recounting his experiences in prison during those years; Sybil telling of her struggle to get the U.S. government to acknowledge the inhumane treatment of POWs in North Vietnam and to enforce the terms of the Geneva Convention--all the while raising four sons on her own. ... It will likely contain some surprises for American readers, but nothing is revealed here that is not already known by the North Vietnamese government."--Prologue.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.