The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War Pow's Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton

On April 6, 1967, twenty-year-old U.S. Navy Seaman Apprentice Doug Hegdahl fell off his ship, a guided-missile cruiser, in the Gulf of Tonkin. Close to exhaustion after nearly four hours in the water, he was picked up by a small fishing boat and soon found himself in Hỏa L? Prison, the notorious North Vietnamese POW camp the prisoners called the Hanoi Hilton. Under intense interrogation, Hegdahl pretended to be a country bumpkin who could barely read or write. His captors fell for the ruse, calling him "The Incredibly Stupid One."

But Doug Hegdahl was far from stupid. Possessing a razor-sharp memory, during the next two years he memorized the names of 254 fellow prisoners and senior officers ordered him to accept an early release. After coming home in August 1969, Hegdahl shocked his debriefers by rattling off the names of the men. Hanoi had admitted holding only a few dozen, although the U.S. military had reliable intel on scores of others. With Hegdahl's names, 63 missing servicemen were reclassified to Prisoners of War.

But that's not all. In addition to divulging the names, Doug Hegdahl told the Pentagon about the systematic torturing of the American POWs in Hanoi and reported many other hitherto unknown details about life inside the Hanoi POW camps. The new information became an important factor in North Vietnam's fall 1969 decision to make life immeasurably easier for the 500-plus POWs held in Hanoi and assuaged the doubts and fears of dozens of POW families.

In a vividly written book based on archival research, personal interviews, and his experiences in the Vietnam War, Marc Leepson, for the first time, tells the incredible tale of the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam. Doug Hegdahl has never been properly recognized for his extraordinary efforts, and his story has never been fully told. It's a story of survival--has own and scores of POWs.

As a U.S. Navy historian put it: the North Vietnamese "made a bad mistake when they released Seaman Doug Hegdahl."

Marc Leepson graduated from George Washington University with a history degree in 1967, served in the U.S. Army for the following two years, including a tour in Vietnam, and earned an MA in history from George Washington. He was a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly for ten years before becoming a full-time freelancer. His work has appeared in magazines such as Smithsonian, Military History, Civil War Times, American History, Vietnam, and World War II, and in newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. He is senior writer, arts editor, and columnist for The VVA Veteran (the magazine of Vietnam Veterans of America) and has written reviews for Publishers Weekly and Kirkus. He has been interviewed on The Today Show, the History Channel, MSNBC, Fox News, NPR, and many other TV and radio shows. His previous books are Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler from the Vietnam War and Pop Stardom to Murder and an Unsolved, Violent Death; What So Proudly We Hailed: Francis Scott Key, a Life; Lafayette: Lessons in Leadership from the Idealist General; Desperate Engagement: How a Little-Known Civil War Battle Saved Washington, D.C., and Changed American History; Flag: An American Biography; and Saving Monticello: The Levy Family's Epic Quest to Rescue the House That Jefferson Built. He lives in Middleburg, Virginia.