Scars of War
by
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The year was 1942. Japanese soldiers clearing out gun pits came upon seventeen-year-old Damon Conrad Alberty—tattered, barefoot, sick, starving. They shoved a bayonet into the teenager’s face and directed him to the main road where a burgeoning assemblage of ragtag prisoners awaited. They were taken to Mariveles, on the southern tip of Bataan, and divided into columns of one hundred. Japanese Lieutenant General Massahuro Homma, charged with delivering the prisoners to Camp O’Donnell in the Philippine province of Pampanga, discovered that there were far more captives than he had anticipated, too many to transport by truck. The only way to get them to the camp was to make them walk the ninety miles. Thus began the infamous Bataan Death March—a forced transfer of seventy-five thousand fatigued, malnourished American and Filipino prisoners of war, the brutality of which resulted in the death of over ten thousand men. The trek—estimated by Japanese high command to take only a couple of days—lasted ten instead.
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About the Book
War is not romantic. It is bleeding and dying and holding a lifeless comrade in your arms. It is storming a beach through a hail of bullets. It is fighter planes spiraling from the sky and Americans being taken captive. In Scars of War, author Marilyn Swinson tells true and often horrifying stories of war.
Based on one-on-one interviews with more than forty veterans, all members of the Combat Airmen/Joshua’s Troops of Mayodan, North Carolina, Swinson brings the narratives to life as the soldiers relay a variety of war experiences: a soldier aboard a ship moored at Pearl Harbor on that fateful December morning when Japanese bombs rained fire from the sky, and a seventeen-year-old young man forced to endure the horrors of the Bataan Death March, only to face three and a half years of torture and deprivation in Japanese concentration camps. A pilot lives to fly again after his plane hits the ground traveling three hundred miles per hour, igniting sixteen thousand pounds of jet fuel. A battle-weary Marine finally sees Old Glory raised on Iwo Jima.
Scars of War provides a firsthand account of the pathos and pageantry of war from those who survived.
About the Author
Marilyn Swinson is a retired family counselor who enjoys teaching, writing, and occasionally acting. Her greatest loves are God, family, and country. She coauthored a book of Christian poetry and prose, Taking the Long Way Home. Swinson lives with Nick, her husband of fifty-six years, in Stoneville, North Carolina.