Make no friends. War is hard enough as it is. Sure. It sounded like good advice from well-meaning superior officers, but it was impossible to do. Soldiers grow closer to one another and develop deeper relationships than civilians will never know. They boot together, train together, work together, fight together, are petrified in battle together, and even sometimes die together. Some of them ended up prisoners of the Japanese together. There they face war at its worst. Their lives already hanging by a thread, companions from different parts of the country and even from different parts of the U.S. military find themselves at the mercy of their captors. Eventually chosen as part of the "fit" prisoners who will finish out the war in Japan making enemy war materiel, they have hopes that their suffering will ease and they will survive the war. Then the unthinkable happens. Their transport torpedoed by Allied submarines, they replace the horrors of death at Camp Chang' for the horrors of death under the merciless sun on a tiny raft floating in the Pacific Ocean. Will they survive? And what about the mental strain on their compatriots who sent hundreds of fellow Allied soldiers to a watery grave?
