Additionally, cowardly prisoners toadied to their captors either by ratting on Garwood’s food missions or telling the VC what they wanted to hear: that Garwood was indeed a CIA operative. When the most sycophantic prisoners were released early, they tried to cover the tracks of their own collaboration with the enemy by alleging that Garwood, retained by the Vietnamese precisely because he would not cooperate, had deserted to the enemy and was even leading them on raids against his erstwhile Marine comrades.Tiring of Garwood’s obduracy, the Vietcong condemned him to death in 1970 after a mock trial before a “people’s tribunal”. The day before his scheduled execution, the camp where he was being held was bombed by American planes and he was the only survivor. Concussed and badly wounded, he awoke to find himself in yet another POW camp, this time largely housing South Vietnamese prisoners, and there he remained until his release in 1979. Once he returned to the USA, he was again subjected to endless interrogations and “debriefings” before being court-martialled on five separate charges: desertion; persuading US forces not to fight; mistreatment of other US prisoners; wearing enemy uniform and weapons; and accepting a position as interrogator with the VC.

Jensen-Stevenson argues persuasively that the US authorities were determined to convict him and would heed no evidence that worked against their preconceptions. On the one hand they accepted as gospel the self-serving denunciations of the true collaborators who had known him in the POW camp; on the other, they were angry at Garwood for having exposed them as liars – no less a personage than Henry Kissinger had stated categorically in 1975 that there were no US prisoners or even deserters left in Vietnam.Alongside her main story the author provides a subplot about a Marine Colonel named Tom McKenney, who was part of a “dirty tricks” hit squad specially trained to “take out” US deserters and malingerers. McKenney, a gung-ho character with the kind of fervent moral certainty displayed in John Wayne’s flagwaving movie The Green Berets, came to loathe Garwood, who throughout his 14 years of captivity was portrayed in US propaganda as the Benedict Arnold of the Vietnam War. The author’s sections dealing with McKenney are the most horrible in the book. It is possible, just, to argue that the Vietcong were driven to their atrocities by a desperate fight for homeland against a foreign aggressor. But what could possibly justify the dark world of lies, backstabbing, treachery and assassination mounted by the CIA and other covert operations groups? So deep was their cynicism that these men refused to rescue their own pilots who had ditched in the China Sea, even when they had their location pinpointed, and left them to die a horrible death in the water.On his return to the US McKenney pondered the evils he had witnessed, noted all the lies and falsehoods, and was able to establish conclusively that Garwood was the victim of a spectacular miscarriage of justice. Jensen-Stevenson’s book ends with a scene of redemption as McKenney passionately seeks forgiveness from the man he had once sought to kill.

But the US government never admitted its mistakes and its cover-ups. Despite being due $150,000 in back pay, Garwood was never paid a cent by the Marine Corps and held in limbo, neither in the Corps nor out of it, until 1986, when he was released to make a living as an odd-job man. It is difficult adequately to convey the quality of eternal nightmare that pervades this book.. It’s a tough world out there.

Barely had the leftover turkey from last weekend’s Thanksgiving holiday been wrapped in aluminium and stashed into the nether reaches of the fridge when the knives came out in Hollywood. The much-awaited sequel to Babe got off to a slow start over the four- day holiday and – bam! – the head of production at Universal Studios, Casey Silver, found himself tossed out of a job.
Meanwhile, the distributors started getting impatient with the same studio’s syrupy melodrama Meet Joe Black. It wasn’t that it was doing badly – $36m in two weeks are not to be sniffed at, especially after some of the worst reviews of the year – but the feeling was that it wasn’t doing nearly well enough. The industry press wrote it off, and it was duly yanked from hundreds of screens.Thanksgiving is the hottest movie weekend of the year, an occasion for all Hollywood’s most venal instincts to come to the fore.