Story
Col. Charles E. Shelton “The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” Gustave Flaubert In the early days of the Vietnam War, Charles Shelton, was shot down over Laos while taking reconnaissance photographs of Viet Cong and Laotian military POW camps on the shared border between the two countries. It was his thirty-third birthday. His plane was armed only with cameras, but his fighter jet escorts saw his parachute deploy, watched him float to the earth and land in the steaming jungle, and they talked to him repeatedly over his radio throughout the night. He spent three days hiding from Viet Cong and Laotian patrols before being captured and transported back to one of the very prisons he had been sent to photograph. Over the next years, he was tortured and beaten and robbed of his freedom. In return, he killed three Viet Cong interrogators with a folding chair while he was locked in chains. He attempted to escape numerous times. He refused to be beate