Showing titles in Vietnam War

The true story of Captain Sounthone Ratanakone is simply incredible. He was born into royalty in Laos and was a war hero and a CIA operative in the Secret War in Laos during the Vietnam War. The captain barely survived being a POW in a communist concentration camp (which the communists to this day deny ever existed), made a death-defying escape, had to escape the communist regime again once he had settled back home, and lived in a refugee camp. Til the Last is a story of heroism, patriotism, and self-sacrifice at the highest and most dramatic levels.

During basic training in the army, it was common practice for the recruits to exercise and march to the cadence of popular songs of the time to keep the trainees in sync. It also took the trainees' minds off the exercise—sometimes strenuous—that they were engaged in, and a five-mile forced march before breakfast was tolerated with little grumbling. Although the cadence was always the same, the words were often changed to reflect the reality of military duty. At the time, the words of the Coasters's hit song "Poison Ivy" were adapted to fit the life of a grunt in Vietnam.

My memoir traces the events of my early life from 1962 to 1974 when my family found itself in the epicenter of the Vietnam War. When I was eleven years old my father, then Commander James Stockdale, was shot down and declared "missing in action" in September 1965. The emotional impact of that news devastated me, my mother Sybil Stockdale, and my three brothers, but we struggled to carry on somewhat normal lives.