Five Years A POW

A Novel of Vietnam and Coming Home

February 1968. A helicopter goes down over the Vietnamese jungle.

Sergeant Marcus Coleman survives the crash, the fire, and the capture. He does not survive it unchanged.

They take his weapon. They take his dog tags. They take the photograph of his three-year-old daughter from his wallet and put it in a stranger's pocket.

For five years, Marcus endures bamboo cages, concrete cells, and the ropes of the Hanoi Hilton. He is starved, beaten, and ordered to read propaganda into a microphone. He refuses. They break him. He refuses again. The only thing that keeps him alive is a decision he makes on his knees in a rice paddy: he is going to see his daughter again.

So he builds her a room in his mind. An apartment on Livernois Avenue in Detroit. A kitchen. A high chair. A girl with brown eyes holding a spoon. Every night for five years, he walks through that apartment and holds onto the daughter he is missing — the one who is growing up without him, learning to walk and talk and read while her father counts days on bamboo and taps messages through prison walls.

Then the war ends. Marcus comes home.

And home is harder than the cage.

His daughter is eight and doesn't know him. His wife waited three years, then did what she had to do to survive. The bed feels like a trap. The fireworks sound like Hanoi. The man who comes home is not the man who left, and the family he comes home to is not the family he remembers.

Five Years A POW is a novel about what captivity takes and what coming home demands. It is about the men who endured — and the families who waited. It is about a father, a daughter, a photograph, and the decision that kept one man alive when everything was designed to break him.

For readers of The Things They Carried, Matterhorn, and The Nightingale.