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 US 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 H¿a Lò 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.

But Doug Hegdahl was far from st...