This is one of two books I regard as essential to an understanding of our intelligence failures in Viet-Nam. DeForrest was a former military enlisted man who ended up managing a great deal of the prisoner interrogation for a major Agency facility in-country. His story ties together a number of important themes, from the failure of Ivy League types to understand what they were dealing with to the inadequacies (and sometimes the superiority) of vast numbers of "contract" case officers who would normally not have been hired, to the very real value of systematically debriefing all prisoners and entering the results into a database amenable to search and retrieval, something we don't know how to do today. Across every major military operation since Viet-Nam, it has been my experience that we have no table of organization and equipment, completely inadequate numbers of trained interrogators and translators, and no commitment to the tedious but essential work of extracting knowledge from large numbers of hostile prisoners.

I bought this book because I had heard many things about Elders that made me think, "God Lord, how did she ever become the Surgeon General, she sounds like a radical sex obsessed idiot." then i read the book, and it confirmed my previous hypothesis. And from watching Fox news, I've also learned that she is promoting a book about how pre pubecents should engage in sex and be given condoms in school. She has also previously tried to have Grade Schools teach MASTURBATION to children. She sounds like a lunatic who came into power not from intelligence or morality, but because of other reasons that I will not say because people tend to get up in arms about certain topics. I Found the book to be badly written, and though she only CO WROTE it, I can only imagine how it would have been if she had written by herself...

Dr. Elders memories are both inspirational and heartbreaking. She is truly a woman who came up from the depths of despair and poverty by her own bootstraps. She never backed down from those hypocrites in Washington and Arkansas and in her book she makes no apologies for anything that she has said or done. I feel like I know her better now that I've read her book, it is truly heartwarming and worth a read. The writing was well done and very well presented. This book deserves more than five stars. You go Joycelyn!!!! This book has made me believe that I want to dedicate my life to helping those of our country who are less fortunate, helping them will concrete goals and ideas, instead of empty promises that leave them hungry and homeless with no hope. Joycelyn is truly an American hero, and one of the greatest women of the century