Author: Marc Liebman

Publisher: Deeds Publishing

ISBN: 978-1-944193-71-3

In the 1980s there were many action packed movies such as Rambo and Missing in Action as well as various writings concerning American prisoners-of-wars that were believed left behind in Vietnam.

With Marc Liebman's novel, FORGOTTEN the spectre of POWS left behind is once again back in the public eye.

Structured as a kind of double narrative, Liebman's deals with six American POWS who were captured in 1970 and spent twelve years in captivity. Incidentally, they were never reported as being POWS but rather missing in action. When the war ended and although the Vietnamese claimed to have returned all POWS, there were rumors that some had been left behind in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but nothing had been confirmed.

During their captivity, the American prisoners were used as slaves by an organization turning raw opium into morphine that eventually found its way to the USA and elsewhere. The leader of the prison camp, a defector from the South Vietnam military to the North, Lieutenant Colonel Pham was aided and abetted by corrupt North Vietnamese military officials as well as some members of the Vietnam government. After the war ended, the leader had hoped to ransom off the prisoners to the Americans for considerable sums of money believing that they would consent to pay for their release, failing which they would be killed.

The second tale concerns the wife of one of the captured naval aviators who becomes an expert and ruthless unemotional hit woman known as La estrella roja de la muerte (The red star of death). Apparently, she spent four months in Cuba with the help of an American militant radical left-wing organization, The Weather Underground, whose goal was to create a clandestine revolutionary party to overthrow the U.S. Government. As she turns to embracing the world of an opportunist capitalist, she evolves into a free lance gun-for-hire murderer and travels all over the world where she has disposed of people in Chile, Argentina, Italy, England, Australia, Canada as well as the USA. Using several aliases she doesn't care whom she kills as long as they pay the substantial fees she commands. Her work is referred to her by someone known as The Broker. She also finds herself attracted to females and becomes a lesbian involving herself in numerous liaisons.

FORGOTTEN is a smartly plotted work of fiction with strong writing, although, if there is one fly in the ointment, it is that it could have been shortened by about 150 pages. It will take more than one sitting once the reader picks up the novel, nonetheless, he or she will be well-rewarded and undoubtedly will not wish to put it down until the last page of the frenzied ending. There is quite a bit of double-cross and vengeance that color several pages in this fast paced thriller. In addition, readers are treated to vividly rendered characters and deeply affecting vivid scenes wherein Liebman brings to life the horrendous conditions and experiences of American who were POWS during the Vietnam war. Thrown in is the cowardice of a US aircraft commander who, although had the opportunity, did not come to the rescue of one of the POWS before he had been captured. Also mixed into the yarn is a former POW and a CIA operative who are determined to have the six survivors killed because what theses POWS know what incriminate the two who had been involved in a devious plot that would lead to their imprisonment.

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