Bean Camp to Briar Patch: Life in the POW Camps of Korea and Vietnam, by John N. Powers

Grand Prize winner 2013 Great Midwest Book Festival 

Silver Medalist winner(Reference) 2013 Stars and Flags Book Awards 

Finalist 2013 USA Best Book Awards 

Winner (History) 2014 Pacific Book Awards

Synopsis
"Bean Camp to Briar Patch" is unique in that it describes all the major POW camps from both the Korean and Vietnam wars. The majority of former POWs will not talk freely about their experiences. This means many family members know little about the prisoner of war experience of their father or grandfather, or in a few cases, their mother or grandmother. Bean Camp to Briar Patch is written specifically for those family members. In one single source they now have information on the location of the camps and the conditions in those camps.

Researching the POW experience is difficult because most books concentrate on the experience of one individual. However, there were thousands of prisoners during the two wars and over thirty major sites at which they were held. Conditions varied from camp to camp and even within sections of a single camp. In some cases a camp is only briefly mentioned in a few sources which are difficult to locate today. The information in Bean Camp to Briar Patch was gathered from eighty different sources, with some of those sources including hundreds of actual debriefings of returning POWs. In a very few cases lists are included as to who was in a specific camp. The book has 214 pages with over thirty maps, photos, and diagrams. Some reviews are included below.

Praise for "Bean Camp to Briar Patch"
"A gut-wrenching masterpiece of research driven by Powers' credence that the American people should be aware of what so many of our Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen endured while serving our country." ~Lt Col. Pat C., USMC (ret) Veteran of WW II, Korea, & Vietnam

*****

"An excellent job in collating and documenting a fascinating but little known portion of our military history... a perfect sized analysis of the prisoner of war camps... This is definitely a must read for scholars of military history." ~Bob Doerr - Military Writers Society of America review

About the Author 

John N. Powers was a Staff Sergeant in the US Air Force, serving in Intelligence Operations with a B-52 unit in the Strategic Air Command and with F-100/F-4 units in Vietnam and Europe. Using the GI Bill, he earned a Bachelor's degree in American history and secondary education and a Master of Science in Teaching degree in elementary education from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Powers taught for over thirty years, most of that time teaching American history. He currently works part-time as an emergency room coordinator and serves on the Wisconsin state medical mediation panel. In 2002 he began researching the Prisoner of War history of 203 US Marines who were captured in north China as Pearl Harbor was being attacked. His wife's father, Platoon Sergeant Harold A. Hoffman, was one of those men. That research led to the establishment of the web site northchinamarines.com. The American Ex-POW organization then asked if he would write about POW camps in Korea and Vietnam. Work on those projects led to the realization there was no single source for family members of POWs from those wars to find information on camps and conditions in those camps.

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