A review by mary_soon_lee
In Love and War by Jim Stockdale

4.0

In September 1965, Jim Stockdale, a naval fighter pilot, was shot down over North Vietnam, and spent the next seven years as a prisoner of war. In this book, in alternating chapters, he and his wife Sybil recount their experiences. I found it an informative account of this aspect of the Vietnam War, but an uncomfortable read. The prisoners were tortured. Their families suffered. The politics of the Vietnam War upsets me.

I note that the portrayal of the Vietnamese captors struck me as racist. I may be over sensitive on this issue. (My father was ethnically Chinese and spoke English with an accent.) I have no sympathy for men who committed or sanctioned torture, and racism by their victims is understandable (the treatment of the American prisoners in North Vietnam was appalling). Yet still the depiction of the Vietnamese troubled me.