Former fighter pilot recounts his experiences as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.

The harsh conditions, the daily routines that occupy a prisoner's time, and above all, the psychological struggles and behavioral quirks of captives forced to live in close confinement are conveyed with devastating simplicity and candor. Throughout, the author constantly probes his own conscience, questioning motivations and decisions. What emerges is a multileveled portrait of an individual determined to retain his humanity in an uncivilized environment.

'I'm No Hero' is the story of Charlie Plumb, but it is also the story of all POWs who faced an isolated world of degradation, loneliness, tedium, hunger, and pain. It is no pretty story. It tells of the torture room with walls built to muffle human screams, of the 'rope trick' and 'fanbelt' techniques designed to make a man talk, of illness, of insanity. But it also tells of the ingenuity and creativity which allowed the men to outsmart their guards and to set up communication systems, classes, escape plans, and to maintain their chain of command. It is a revealing story. It pictures men who are reduced to the basics physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It shows how these situations can be survived with individual integrity and pride intact. It tells of growing relationships with God which came as a result of desperate need. It outlines a closed society's methods of developing rules which allow members to live together in harmony. It is a story of hope, for it suggests that the techniques used by POWs to survive their conditions can be used by others to overcome similar situations faced in day-to-day living.

A former Air Force officer describes his harrowing six-and-a-half-year ordeal as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, describing the deprivations, fear, loneliness, torture, and uncertainty of life as a POW and his determination to survive.

On 12 February 1973, after nearly eight years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, I became a free man. Although I still had to serve a couple of years at stateside hospitals to salvage a badly wounded leg, my new quarters seemed princely compared to my squalid prison cells. Furloughed from the Navy hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and facing a long, solitary drive to my parents home in New Jersey, I decided to bring a tape recorder along and recount my experiences while the memories were still fresh. Maybe someday I would write a book. I knew I had a unique vantage point and a story to tell. As the fourth U.S. pilot shot down in North Vietnam, I was one of the oldest of the old-timers among the POWs. During my captivity, the number of Americans killed in the war grew from sixty to nearly sixty thousand, and the treatment of POWs shifted from neglectful to brutal to halfway humane. Moreover, of the nearly six hundred Americans held prisoner in North Vietnam, I may have had the widest range of experiences.

The story opens in the stinking latrines of the Schubin camp as an American and a Canadian lead the digging of a tunnel which enabled a break involving 36 prisoners of war (POWs). The Germans then converted the camp to Oflag 64, to exclusively hold US Army officers, with more than 1500 Americans ultimately housed there. Plucky Americans attempted a variety of escapes until January, 1945, only to be thwarted every time. Then, with the Red Army advancing closer every day, camp commandant Colonel Fritz Schneider received orders from Berlin to march his prisoners west. Game on! Over the next few days, 250 US Army officers would succeed in escaping east to link up with the Russians - although they would prove almost as dangerous as the Nazis - only to be ordered once they arrived back in the United States not to talk about their adventures. Within months, General Patton would launch a bloody bid to rescue the remaining Schubin Americans. In The Big Break, this previously untold story follows POWs including General Eisenhower's personal aide, General Patton's son-in-law, and Ernest Hemingway's eldest son as they struggled to be free. Military historian and Paul Brickhill biographer Stephen Dando-Collins expertly chronicles this gripping story of Americans determined to be free, brave Poles risking their lives to help them, and dogmatic Nazis determined to stop them.