For five years, American airmen vanished into the prisons of North Vietnam. They were starved, left to heal on their own, locked in the dark, and broken on ropes in cells the world would come to call the Hanoi Hilton. The Geneva Conventions promised them protection. In Hanoi, those promises existed only on paper.

Then, in September 1969, Ho Chi Minh died.

Within months, something changed. The beatings thinned. The food improved. Men who had spent years alone were brought together, and the taps on the wall gave way to voices. No one told the prisoners why.

Drawing on the memoirs of the men who lived it, from Everett Alvarez, the first American captured, to Jeremiah Denton, Robinson Risner, and Sam Johnson, this book follows the prisoners from the shoot-downs to the cells to the long road home. It also looks at the other side of the wall, to the leaders who inherited a war and a nation in mourning, and asks whether the death of one man changed the fate of hundreds.

It is a story of cruelty and endurance, and of a mystery that historians have never fully solved.