War is not romantic.

It is bleeding and dying and holding a lifeless comrade in your arms. It is storming a beach through a hail of bullets. It is fighter planes spiraling from the sky and Americans being taken captive. In Scars of War, author Marilyn Swinson tells true and often horrifying stories of war.

Based on one-on-one interviews with more than forty veterans

All members of the Combat Airmen/Joshuas Troops of Mayodan, North Carolina, Swinson brings the narratives to life as the soldiers relay a variety of war experiences: a soldier aboard a ship moored at Pearl Harbor on that fateful December morning when Japanese bombs rained fire from the sky, and a seventeen-year-old young man forced to endure the horrors of the Bataan Death March, only to face three and a half years of torture and deprivation in Japanese concentration camps. A pilot lives to fly again after his plane hits the ground traveling three hundred miles per hour, igniting sixteen thousand pounds of jet fuel. A battle-weary Marine finally sees Old Glory raised on Iwo Jima.

Scars of War

Provides a firsthand account of the pathos and pageantry of war from those who survived.