By Page H. Gifford
Correspondent
Journalist, author, and historian Marc Leepson will speak on March 5 at 10 a.m. to the Friends of the Library about his latest book, The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW’s Story of Courage and Resistance in the Hanoi Hilton.
Leepson is the author of numerous books on topics ranging from the Civil War to biographies on Francis Scott Key and the Marquis de La Fayette.
After graduating with a degree in history from George Washington, Leepson spent two years in Vietnam from 1967-69. He said he majored in history at George Washington only because you had to choose a major. He returned to start his graduate studies after he left the Army; went into an Masters of Arts program to study 17th-century English history and planned to get his Ph.D. and teach. He added that didn’t happen because of finances and a tight job market in the early ‘70s.
He got his first job in journalism as a proofreader at Congressional Quarterly in Washington, D.C., and worked there for 11 ½ years, the last nine as a staff writer. He has freelanced since 1986 and has written nine books as well as articles for magazine and newspapers.
“Aside from the mid-twentieth century Vietnam War period, I’ve been most intrigued by the Early Republic, between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. I served in the Vietnam War and that was the catalyst for my interest, although it didn’t come until a decade after I came home from the war,” he said. “As for the Early Republic, I learned a lot about it doing the research for my books Flag: An American Biography and What So Proudly We Healed, my biography of Francis Scott Key. I found it fascinating to see how much the issue of slavery affected American life and politics during those years, and that, in retrospect, it led to the outbreak of the Civil War.”
Recently his focus has been on Vietnam. In his current book, he tells the incredible story of U.S. Navy Seaman Apprentice Doug Hegdahl, who survived as a POW by fooling the Vietnamese with the best performance of his life. In vivid and riveting detail based on his interviews, archival research, and his experiences in the Vietnam War, Leepson, has written a story about the youngest and lowest-ranking American POW captured in North Vietnam.
“Doug Hegdahl has never been properly recognized for his extraordinary efforts, and his story has never been fully told.”
“When I arrived in-country as a 22-year-old U.S. Army draftee in December 1967, I could barely find that country on a map. Nor did I know much about the war, other than that we were told we were fighting to stop the spread of worldwide communism,” he said. “It didn’t take very long for me to realize that the U.S. was doing the bulk of the fighting, that the South Vietnamese by and large were pleased to let us do it, and the authoritarian South Vietnamese government was not exactly beloved by the people, and something was very wrong with that picture. I later learned that Vietnam, a long-time French colony, had been fighting for its independence since the end of World War II, and many Vietnamese saw the Americans as another Western nation threatening its independence.” Leepson’s book comes at a time when we are reminded of the post-World War II era in history and politics when Communism was a threat.
“I also learned that Vietnam and China had been enemies for thousands of years and fought a border war in 1978, three years after the end of the American War. So much for an international Communist conspiracy,” he said. “Virtually everything I’ve read since then about Vietnam, the country, its history, and the war, has buttressed that perspective.”
