This memoir is of a young, newly married American tank crewman captured during the fall of the Philippines at the start of World War II. Among the ten percent of Americans who survived the infamous Bataan Death March and subsequent incarceration, Les Tenney tells a story about the triumph of the human will. The author spent three-and-a-half years as a Japanese prisoner of war. Forced to walk under the hot Asian sun for 12 days to a prison camp on Bataan, American and Filipino POWs died by the score from thirst, woulds or disease, or were executed along the way by brutal Jqapanese guards. Tenney managed a daring escape early in his captivity, joined a guerrilla band and fought the Japanese again, but he was soon recaptured and put on a notorious "hell ship" bound for Japan. With a fierce determination to see his wife and home again, Tenney endured the rest of the war as a slave labourer in a Japanese coal mine. Then one day he saw a strange cloud over nearby Nagasaki, and he set off through Japanese towns to find the US forces. Only on returning to the US did he discover that his wife had remarried. With the determination and relentlessly positive attitide that helped him survive his tortuous ordeal, Tenney got on with his life. Tenney"s wartime experiences and a subsequent close friendship with a Japanese native bring a unique perspective to the current debates over Japan"s wartime culpability, the morality of the atomic bombs and American-Japanese relations today.