Customer Reviews

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

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3 star:		(1)
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This book can be rated fairly only as what it is: a very rare narrative from a soldier who had a unique (but not unpredictable) experience. It should be available to all historians of American and Vietnam studies as a view that opens other doors: the events and background that made PFC Daily react as he did. The Army did not well train all soldiers and the 1960's were a very personal journey for all. Daily by his own words was lost before he was captured;lost inside and in society. America let the standard for soldiers slip rather than just this single soldier who was failed by his officer corps and country. I judge a veteran by how he views himself: as a part of a unit better said a family or otherwise. Daily is the failed soldier. I wonder if anything was changed from the first edition? I doubt his exact words were used...........

The entire issue of Officer versus Enlisted POW is truly not well applied in a review of this book and should be studied in other places...3 stars for historical importance and less than one as a reading experience and my regret that the author was not better guided in the book writing as in his military experience.

This book was not worth reading under its 1975 incarnation and is even less so now. All the factual inaccuracies and mis-spellings seem to have survived intact and so has Mr. Daly's boring justification of the unjustifiable, namely why he completely sold out both friends and country while he was a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War.

On one level it's easy enough to empathize with Mr. Daly, an unsophisticated, religious young man, a conscientious objector, who was tricked into joining the army by the promise of a non-combat assignment. Mr. Daly promptly found himself in a rifle company in Vietnam where he was soon taken prisoner and held for several years in the hellish jungle camps run by the Viet Cong, suffering incalculable deprivations and abuse; all American P.O.W.'s did. However, Mr. Daly lost any claim to legitimate conscientious objector status the day he signed a letter written by another member of the infamous "Peace Committee" that asked his Vietnamese captors for the right to join the North Vietnamese Army. He did this not in the jungle but in one of the camps in Hanoi, where he was already currying favor with the NVA by writing and broadcasting anti-American propaganda. In return for these and other actions Mr. Daly and the other members of the PC, always few in number, were accorded special, more lenient treatment. The criminal charges that were brought against Mr. Daly and all other members of the PC after repatriation were dropped when one of their number committed suicide rather than face his imminent trial; none were "acquitted" as the book's jacket states. Rather, Mr. Daly and the others were given a pass on their dishonorable actions in an effort to begin healing the country's wounds from a long and pointless war.