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.
Marilyn Swinson is a retired family counselor who enjoys teaching, writing, and occasionally acting. Her greatest loves are God, family, and country. She coauthored a book of Christian poetry and prose, Taking the Long Way Home. Swinson lives with Nick, her husband of fifty-six years, in Stoneville, North Carolina.