For more than a half century, the media, general public, and even scholars have classified literally hundreds of these former prisoners as "brainwashed" victims of a heinous enemy or, even worse, as "turncoats" who betrayed their country.

The most notorious reinforcement of this condemnation appeared in the well-made but badly distorted 1962 film, The Manchurian Candidate, but ... countless novels and short stories, myriad news accounts, and even scholarly treatises perpetuated this negative image.Carlson explains that in the early 1950s, the Cold War and McCarthyism left the American public paranoid about the Red Menace and were quick to accuse returning POWs of collaborating with their communist captors.

Carlson states that "their conduct, rather than manifesting personal or societal weaknesses, as their critics charged, was far more likely to reflect the changing conditions of their captivity.

Several prominent events are covered in detail, including the Tiger Death March, which happened in October 1950 when over 800 prisoners were forced to march 100 miles in nine days, resulting in the death of almost two-thirds of them, and the mass killings of American POWs: the Hill 303 massacre, where 41 were executed on a hill above Waegwan in South Korea in August 1950, and the Sunch'ŏn Tunnel Massacre where almost 70 American prisoners were murdered outside a tunnel near Sunch'on in North Korea in October 1950.

[6] It stated that the book will appeal to historians and those associated with the conflict, but felt that general readers may find it "too weighted" in favor of first-hand testimonies.