It seems wrong to choose "I really liked it" for the star rating here, because, in truth, I hated it: I was appalled at the story that was being told and the horrific treatment of these American POWs post-Bataan Death March. But the story itself was so well written, and the lives & stories of these soldiers are so important, and the author does a gripping job of telling exactly how bad it got for them. I don't understand why so many of my history classes were so boring, if there are things like this available... A sentence on "US troops left on the island after MacArthur pulled out of the Philippines were forced to march X miles and the casualty rate was Y%" means nothing compared to: "These guys were left behind. They marched for miles and miles, with their friends dropping by the dozens, and with no real sense of where they might end up. Eventually, some of them languished in these prisons for three years, thinking that Japan had won the war, and that all they had fought for had either been lost or had forgotten them, and even after some of them survived, even after some of them went on to have lives and families and hope they could never have imagined, some of them still felt that betrayal and abandonment every day of their lives." That's the story we should have been told, and I'm glad to have read it.