THE PARTY DOLLS:

A seasoned military journalist investigates the history and aftermath of an attempted escape from a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp in this nonfiction work.

Hayward first met Bill Baugh, the chief of public affairs at Colorado’s Falcon Air Force Station, in 1990 when the author was a 25-year-old Air Force sergeant. As their relationship developed, Baugh—a Vietnam veteran, a former POW, and a “fighter pilot with a resume that would make Rambo bow”—told the author the harrowing story of John Dramesi and Ed Atterberry’s dramatic escape from a Hanoi POW camp in 1969. Years later, as a staff writer for Airman Magazine, Hayward wrote an investigative piece on the escape, but it was rejected by his editors, he says, because the story’s complexities couldn’t be contained in the magazine format. Now, decades later and after multiple interviews with those involved with the attempted escape, the author offers readers a definitive history of it. Imprisoned in a former French movie studio known as Cu Loc (or “the Zoo,” as the prisoners called it), Dramesi and Atterberry managed the seemingly impossible—breaking out of a heavily fortified facility in the heart of North Vietnam—only to be subsequently recaptured. The dramatic event (code-named “The Party” by the inmates) is expertly retold in Hayward’s gripping narrative, but what makes this book special is its exploration of the POW’s struggles with moral complexities. Those who participated in the Party plan, Hayward says, believed it was their duty to escape—even if it jeopardized the lives of fellow prisoners; others had a different reading of the U.S. military’s code of conduct, believing that such an attempt would violate its mandates. (Even in the military’s black-and-white world, Hayward effectively notes, “there was a lot of gray.”) The book’s engaging prose takes readers deep into the heart of day-to-day prison life, ranging from long spells of monotony to bursts of extreme violence. It’s accompanied by an ample assortment of maps, photographs, newspaper clippings, and drawings by former POWs.

An often powerful examination of a jailbreak plot and the moral complexities of wartime.