Stewart takes a few minutes on his show to lay into them for what he calls "truly shameful behavior."

The Framingham Patch (framingham.patch.com) and The Springfield Republican (masslive.com) have reported that the five Senators are sponsoring the bill to establish a commemorative chair memorial on U.S. capitol grounds.

The bill would direct the Architect of the Capitol to place a commemorative chair bearing the logo and colors of POW/MIA service members in a prominent location at the U.S. Capitol. The chair would remain unoccupied to serve as a reminder of the ongoing challenge of accounting for America's missing service members and in recognition of their sacrifices.

In many ways, the American prisoner of war (POW) was both a genesis and impetus for a national cemetery system.

During the American Revolutionary war, casualties were often buried where they fell, on military reservations or hospital grounds, or in family plots. There are some horrific stories of treatment of POWs during that time (e.g., Col Ethan Allen of the Green Mountain Boys, himself a POW for 3 years, wrote that 11,000 POWs were killed by their British captors.

It is clear that many American sailors, held as privateers, suffered harsh conditions as POW, and were joined by some other combatants held as POWs on one of three hospital ships or one of several prison ships (mostly in Brooklyn, NY but also Charleston and St. Lucia Harbors). The prisoners who died were often sent to a quick watery grave or taken nearby inland for speedy burial; identification of burial sites was haphazard if any.

For the larger spectrum of land-based casualties, many church yards set up small special sites for military burials or at least memorial slabs to commemorate same including multiple named and/or unnamed casualties. Practically speaking, many casualties fell not far from home; they did not die in large volume at any given time, and since British opposition troops were from overseas, all American casualties fell on "friendly" land presumably suitable for a respectful burial.

Burial circumstances during the War of 1912, the Mexican and Indian Wars as they related to POWs or distinctions between civilian to Indian prisoners versus military personnel held by enemy were murky. No formal burial/cemetery consensus was reached at any level during that time.

But the Civil War rendered any prior "ad hoc" methods inadequate and inappropriate for handling the massive battlefield casualties. The Civil War had been brutal with horrific losses on both sides, and whether Union or Confederate, the dead often fell far from home, almost always in viscerally hostile enemy territory.

Early on, in September 1861, War Department Orders #75 mandated the Quartermaster General assume responsibility for burial of officers and soldiers, ordered that a register of all burials be kept, and that a "headboard" be placed on each grave. First made of wood with painted or chalked data thereon, neither was durable in the elements.

As deaths came faster than land titles could be established, burials often took place prior to consecration of the interment sites; public health and immediacy of identifying bodies and durability of more permanent markers gained importance in planning for designated burial spaces.

For expediency, the first 14 official "national" cemeteries so designated in 1862 were primarily at already established special burial locations in Philadelphia or Annapolis, or at existing military properties or battle sites such as Gettysburg (dedicated 19 November 1863 with a short Address by President Lincoln) or Antietam, or military locales like Forts Scott or Leavenworth. One of the oldest and most beautiful of these was and is at the U.S. Soldiers and Sailors (later Airmen's', and now Armed Forces Retirement) Home in Washington, D.C.

In July 1862, via legislation primarily purposed for other things, Congress had empowered President Abraham Lincoln to purchase cemetery grounds and have them securely enclosed. However, throughout the war there was no lasting or official system to document missing or dead soldiers. Civilian vendors had a version of a dog-tag available, but few soldiers bought and wore one.

By 1863, according to esteemed author and POW expert Robert C. Doyle, and for a variety of reasons, treatment of POWs on both sides took a turn for the worse. Notwithstanding all of the explosive political rhetoric on both sides, after the cessation of further POW exchanges by General Grant in 1864, more POWs died, exacerbating the burial crisis.

A different sort of problem arose from the sheer masses of Civil War POWs on both sides. By the end of the war, 37 major POW camps were established in the North and another 38 POW camps in the South. Certainly some of the POWs captured and imprisoned died of wounds from the battlefield, but increasingly, the high mortality rate derived from lack of sanitation and disease along with crowding and other inherent conditions. It was thought that eventually some 56,000 died in POWs camps both North and South. Something had to be done to address this multi-faceted crisis.

One horrific example was the open-aired, filthy POW camp at Fort Sumter, GA (near Americus, often called Andersonville), where from February 1864 until liberation in May 1865, some 45,000 enlisted men and some women were POWs, of whom 13,000 died. While some died of war wounds, and a few from in-prison assaults, these deaths were primarily of starvation, malnutrition, diarrhea and communicable diseases.

Thus the already existent need to identify bodies and bury them properly developed into the inexorable problem of doing so expeditiously and in such manner as to avert further health crises. In the North, the frigid climate took its toll. (E.g., 1864-5, the period September to February, 1,848 POWs died at the Union POW Camp in Elmira, NY).

Significant action to resolve the dilemma was generated by a single woman, Clara Barton, who had achieved fame (and accordingly, some clout) as a nurse on the battlefield. She had been receiving letters from families trying to find their missing loved ones. In June 1865, she heard from a young former POW at Andersonville, a clerk named Dorence Atwater who has been paroled to work at the hospital there, who had diligently maintained his own set of death records.

Thus the already existent need to identify bodies and bury them properly developed into the inexorable problem of doing so expeditiously and in such manner as to avert further health crises. In the North, the frigid climate took its toll. (E.g., 1864-5, the period September to February, 1,848 POWs died at the Union POW Camp in Elmira, NY).

Significant action to resolve the dilemma was generated by a single woman, Clara Barton, who had achieved fame (and accordingly, some clout) as a nurse on the battlefield. She had been receiving letters from families trying to find their missing loved ones. In June 1865, she heard from a young former POW at Andersonville, a clerk named Dorence Atwater who has been paroled to work at the hospital there, who had diligently maintained his own set of death records.

Barton contacted Secretary of War Stanton and she and Atwater accompanied the Army expedition to Andersonville to identify the graves, hauntingly distinctive due to the lack of coffins and the close proximity between headstones still visible, tilting in the red Georgia clay. Many headboards were prepared and letters sent to families about their loved ones.

Then Barton took the program back to Washington and set up the Missing Soldier's Office (1865-1867), during which time she identified more than 30,000 MIA/POWs including nearly 13,000 who had died and were buried at Andersonville in a cemetery consecrated for that purpose.

In the meantime, spaces were becoming scarce at existing burial locations, so Quartermaster Montgomery Meigs recommended buying property at the mansion of Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Anne Randolph Custis, a granddaughter of George and Martha Washington. In May 1861, after Virginia seceded, the Union Army occupied the property, and the grounds were designated as a burial grounds for the war dead. The first Arlington burial took place in May 1864, and soon thereafter, Secretary of War Stanton designated the mansion and 200 acres of the land as a cemetery.

Immediately after the surrender by Lee to Grant in April 1865, the Quartermaster Department undertook a nearly impossible program, called the Federal Reburial Program, to recover, identify and bury all Union soldiers not otherwise claimed by family. For a number of reasons both on land and sea, this simply was not fully efficacious and the program ended in 1870, with 299,606 Union soldiers and officers having been located and re-interred in 73 national cemeteries, estimated at a sad 58% success rate. Additional national cemeteries were set up at various former POW sites including Andersonville (GA), Florence (SC), Salisbury (NC) and Woodland (NY).

A number of other locales in which there had been POW prisons endeavored on their own to facilitate suitable respectful burials, often in common graves. Instances include those 1,616 Confederate POWs who died at Camp Morton (1862-1865) in Indianapolis, IN, in a common grave which was moved eventually in 1931 to Crown Hill Cemetery. Some of these sites have since undertaken more fitting re-interments, and many local volunteers have endeavored to identify the deceased soldiers.

In Indianapolis, two policemen prepared bronze plaques with the names of the Southerners who died at Camp Morton, re-dedicated in a ceremony in October 3, 1993 that included representatives (and actual soil samples) from the 14 former Confederate states and territories. Other examples of new burial sites were the old cemetery at Fort Columbus on Governors Island off the tip of NY City, the POW hospital at Beaufort, SC, Point Lookout in Baltimore, MD, and Johnson's Island in Sadusky, OH.

After the Civil War, Congress passed amendments to the National Cemetery Act of 1867 to expand the coverage for veterans, and cemeteries were established far beyond Civil War battlefields and POW camp sites. New locations included Ft. McPherson (NE), Santa Fe (NM) and San Francisco (CA) where the cemetery on the grounds of the Presidio became the first on the West Coast. As they expanded, there were also improvements to the planning and appearance of each, one of the first major changes being replacing wooden headboards with marble headstones.

There are fantastic movies of historic focus, some of which have abundant embedded truth. Through one of those relatively recent documentaries, The Real Inglorious Bastards, seen on The History Channel, many have already met Fred Mayer.

Or for a reader of Gerald Schwab's OSS Agents in Hitler's Heartland: Destination Innsbruck or the award-winning Patrick O'Donnell's They Dared Return, this will be merely a reintroduction to Fred Mayer and some of his extraordinary friends.

These and other news media were resources for this article, and it may be stipulated that Mayer's life story is way better than fiction!

Frederick (Fred) Mayer, born in 1921 in Freiburg, Breisgau, Baden-W�rttemberg, Germany, was a gifted teen athlete, a youngster of firm beliefs, a risk-taker, innovative thinker, and a skilled tinkerer. Able to fix all sorts of things, Fred worked after high school as an apprentice diesel mechanic for Ford Motor Co. His father, Heinrich, had been awarded the Iron Cross Second Class as a LT in the Imperial German Army in WWI, for gallantry during the Battle of Verdun, and dared hope this might help protect his Jewish family.

But anti-Semitic Nazi winds began to blow more fiercely, and in 1938, at the insistence of Heinrich's wife, and after a two year fight to get visas, the Mayerses fled Hitler's Germany with the clothes on their backs to NY. The entire family worked at myriad jobs in Brooklyn. Feeling a patriotic debt owed to his new country, on December 8, 1941, Fred applied but was rejected by the draft board as an "enemy alien." Reflecting lifelong persistence,

Fred pled to take the place of his brother in college, was accepted at age 20 in the U.S. Army, and shipped off for boot camp at Ft. Rucker, AL and beyond. From the outset, Mayer demonstrated what they sometimes call in the intelligence trade "an instinctual adaptability."

In July 1943, in the blazing training heat of Arizona with the Eighty-First Infantry Division, Mayer drew special attention as he led field exercises for the Wildcat Rangers, an elite reconnaissance unit. In sum, having worked exquisitely and freely behind the pretend "enemy" lines, Mayer opted to take not only a few soldiers as "prisoners" (as was the exercise's goal), but to capture the entire HQ including the Brigadier General heading the outfit. The General was duly chagrined but sufficiently impressed that within a few weeks, a letter arrived for Mayer to report to the HQ in Washington of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

At the primary OSS training site, the 400 acre Bethesda, MD Congressional Country Club, new recruits were given physical and psychological aptitude-testing and then, via a lot of attention-getting live ammo, booby-trap tampering, stiletto sticking, grenade spinning and sniper training, swiftly crafted into spies, saboteurs and similar sundry operators.

Mayer met his own particular comrades, a mixed-bag group of what was tagged the German Occupational Group (GOG) ranging from former Luftwaffe pilots to Jewish death camp escapees, Polish deserters, a world class athlete and a former convict. Mayer loved the group and their purpose: to penetrate enemy lines and strike at the heart of Nazi Germany via what became the genesis of American special ops.

Mayer's all German-speaking group of 30 thrived at learning many things (e.g., sniping, knifing, demolition, infiltration). Five of the men were truly a special affinity group (Mayer, Wynberg, Steinitz, Gerbner and Rosenthal): all European Jew refugees and multi-linguists, with deep common bonds and beliefs.

Mayer was described in an OSS assessment report as "aggressive, husky, resourceful and a natural leader who has a remarkable ability to improvise in special situations." They went to Ft. Belvoir to learn "driving" skills; then to Ft. Benning for paratrooper qualification; then to Catalina Island, CA for survival/amphibious warfare. The five new friends and comrades were soon ready for "real action."

In early summer 1944, the OG's embarked on a troop ship for Europe which dropped them off in the wrong location, starting several months wandering in North Africa with considerable on-the-job learning along the way. Eventually contacting the OSS office in Italy, they were ordered to Bari where recruitment of infiltrating agents was not going well. Several Fall 1944 efforts to use German POWs had been jinxed by legalities/practicalities

Mayer and his group were charged to sort through the POWs and see with whom they could pair up to infiltrate behind lines. In January 1945, to test Mayer's credibility, dressed as a German officer, entered Allied POW Camp 209 near Naples.

Multi-faceted Operation Greenup in February 1945 asked Mayer, Wynberg and Weber, to scout the heavily fortified Austrian Alpine Redoubt area. Parachuting onto a frozen glacier lake but losing their ski package, they made their way on foot to Weber's family home.

Mayer posed as an elite106th Alpine German Army officer, staying at and radioing back data from the Innsbruck officer's barracks. His intel gathering was extraordinary, ranging from the exact location of Hitler's Berlin bunker to details permitting destruction by the US Air Force of 25 of Nazi trains.

Mayer developed local agents and had Weber's sister, a nurse, bandage his head to support his disguise in a particularly audacious event to put him into an intel-rich rest area for convalescing soldiers. The result: engineering details, train schedules and staggering insights.

Three months later Mayer posing in beret and civies as a French electrician fleeing the advancing Soviet forces, worked in a German aircraft plant until one of his black market contacts turned him in to the Gestapo as a spy. During his torture-filled captivity, he initially spoke only German but eventually said he was American working alone while protecting his extraordinary harvest of detailed, quality data of industrial and strategic nature.

Another German-American OSS agent, fellow POW Matull, was also separately tortured by the Gestapo, and when shown a photo of Mayer, said he recognized him but described him as a "big shot," a ploy that worked well on several levels (e.g., Mayer was reputed to be so "high up" that he should be interrogated by someone of equally high stature.

Mayer was taken to Franz Hofer, a local official who had seen the handwriting on the wall and wanted to surrender to Americans rather than Soviets. Hofer introduced Mayer to his wife and the German ambassador to Mussolini's government, Rahn. It was Rahn who personally took Mayer's report that he was "captured but OK" to Allen Dulles, the OSS man in Bern.

On May 3, 1945, Major Bland West, an intelligence officer with the American 103rd Infantry Division of the Seventh Army entered Innsbruck and was met by a car with a white sheet flying. A beaten, bruised Mayer, the American Jewish German immigrant, took West to accept the German surrender of the city. Former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), William J. Casey, called Operation Greenup, "By far the most successful of OSS operations mounted from Bari."

Mayer was awarded the Purple Heart and Legion of Merit. Then, as now, many thought he deserved the Medal of Honor. After being discharged from the OSS in 1945, Mayer worked at General Motors and as a power plant supervisor for Voice of America, during which time he traveled the world. Mayer stayed in touch with many of his OSS friends, particularly the special five. In 1990, the Austrian government awarded him the Tyrolean Order of the Eagle in Gold.

In mid-April 2013, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) introduced information into the Congressional Record relating to Mayer, and wrote to President Obama to further recognize Mayer's service to the country.

Mayer, at 92, is a long way from his original Black Forest home. But he still exhibits the handshake of a man who mows his own lawn and chops wood on a regular basis at his relatively quiet WV (Jefferson County) home. It's a split-level he built himself for his family in the 1970's. He volunteers every Monday for Meals on Wheels. His best friend is still Hans Wynberg.

Some 83,000 service members still remain missing from the Pacific theaters of WWII, Korea and Vietnam. The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), with primary headquarters in Hawaii, sends teams out across the world to search out, retrieve and identify remains of missing American service personnel.

Hawaii is both an idyllic and practical location for the work, as it is nearer many of the search sites in the Pacific theaters of WWII, Korea and Vietnam, where retrieval is rendered more difficult, as the soil is acidic and remains deteriorate quickly, often leaving only teeth. To further its effort, JPAC HQ is building a new 136,000 square foot structure in Hawaii to support the work of its 500 member staff.

But Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam (in the U.S. Pacific Command) is remote from mainstream CONUS families and workers. And JPAC is also charged with helping MIA's families. Facebook, Twitter and other social media have facilitated the closeness for families to the searches for loved ones.

Collateral to the MIA issue, after September 11, 2001, it was clear that a mainland forensics laboratory was necessary to react quickly in time of tragedy or terrorist strikes. These exigencies served as immediate impetus for expanding JPAC capabilities.

After a long search and two years of construction, JPAC has opened an impressive new $5 million satellite forensics laboratory at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Sophisticated equipment and myriad long-wheeled tables reside in the stark, white-tiled, 27,000 square foot forensics lab located in a former bomber plant. For novelist Patricia Cornwell aficionados, the facility is a huge, fascinating magnification of the fictional Dr. Kay Scarpetta's forensic crime lab.

With 14 people now at work at Offutt, a work force that will increase to 50 by 2016, a glance at the internet sites advertising for myriad specialists (e.g., anthropologists, archaeologists, forensic odontologists and support personnel) reflects a window on the range of needs and capabilities for the satellite center. And MIA families are welcomed.

Over 55,000 hands served on the USS Intrepid over its 31 years of service. If you're one of them, you're being invited back for a visit this summer for what promises to be quite a party.

The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York, where the ship is now permanently moored, is holding a Homecoming Weekend party August 16 - 18 for all former crew members. The event is part of the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the USS Intrepid's commissioning.

The Homecoming Weekend will feature programs and events specifically tailored for former crew members and their families. Most of these will be open to the public as well. Entrance to the museum will be free of charge for former crew members and their family members over the homecoming weekend.

There will be public guided tours of the ship and behind-the-scenes curator-led tours of the museum's collection storage facility. For some former crew members, this will be the first time they have been aboard their beloved ship since the completion of their service.

The USS Intrepid was the third Essex-class aircraft carrier, one of 24 such vessels, built during World War II for the United States Navy. She was the fourth US Navy ship to bear the Intrepid name. (See box below.) And she was destined to become one of the most successful and stalwart ships in US history.

Commissioned August 16, 1943, the Intrepid was built to carry a crew of 2,600 officers and enlisted men. (During WW II, the crew swelled to 3,300 - 3,500) She was 820 feet long and with a displacement of 36,380 tons full load. She was capable of cruising at 33 knots (61 km/h) with a range of 20,000 nautical miles.

Decommissioned shortly after the war's end, the Intrepid was then modernized and recommissioned in the early 1950s as an attack carrier, and eventually became an antisubmarine carrier.

During World War II, Intrepid took part in several campaigns in the Pacific Theater, most notably The Battle of Leyte Gulf (considered the largest naval battle of the war and possibly in history). Twenty years later she served three tours of duty off Vietnam. After that she conducted submarine surveillance in the North Atlantic during the Cold War.

Toru Hashimoto had been riding a wave of success as a rising political force in Japan. But the young, blunt-speaking mayor of Japan's third largest city and founder of the country's nationalist-leaning Japan Restoration Party recently found himself in hot water, forced to explain earlier remarks about Japan's wartime use of "comfort women."

When Hashimoto appeared to defend the practice of subjecting women from across the Asian peninsula to brutal conditions working as prostitutes in Japanese military brothels, often after having been tricked or coerced into service, Criticism came from all quarters ranging from victims' groups to Japanese Prime Minister Abe.

Hashimoto's travails came on the heels of a progressive collapse in the influence of his party, which just six months ago seemed poised to become Japan's major opposition party, ahead of scheduled parliamentary elections this summer.

The Financial Times reported on May 27, "Some in Japan see Mr. Hashimoto's provocations as a deliberate attempt to rekindle enthusiasm for his cause � an attempt that went too far and backfired. A lawyer who first gained public attention as a sharp-tongued television commentator, he has built his career on a rare and often bracing contrarianism and may have overestimated the public's appetite for attacks on what he sees as suffocating political correctness." Click here to see �Comfort women' gaffe wounds Osaka mayor

As Hashimoto scrambles to regain his footing he faces backlash in the US as well. His comments, which he has alternatively tried to apologize for and defend, were rebuked by the U.S. Department of State, the U.N., and human rights and private advocacy groups among others.

There is a Hebrew word for the period between death and burial: "aninut." Col. Peter Jones Knapp's exceeded the span of his lifetime, which itself exceeded the traditional three score and ten, by eighty-eight years. He wasn't Jewish, but still, it has to be some kind of record.

Knapp was a Civil War veteran and survivor of several Confederate prison camps, including Andersonville. He was born June 2, 1842, in Sandusky, Ohio, and died Apr. 13, 1924 in Kelso, Washington. He and his wife were, in the fullness of time, finally laid to rest, on April 13, 2012, at the Willamette [OR] National Cemetery, near Portland.

It's a long story.

A nineteen year-old Knapp enlisted with Company H, 5th Infantry, Iowa Volunteers, in July 1861, and followed General Ulysses Grant down the Mississippi to Vicksburg. After months of battle, he came down with typhoid. Too ill to travel, he and other men were left in an abandoned building without medical attention for three weeks.

Knapp witnessed the surrender of Memphis and survived the Battle of Iuka (MO), where his regiment lost more men in 80 minutes than any other regiment lost in any other engagement of the entire war. He also lived through the battles at Shiloh, Vicksburg and Missionary Ridge.

Military historians said Missionary Ridge was "the war's most notable example of a frontal assault succeeding against entrenched defenders holding high ground." Of the 56,000 Northern soldiers engaged in the battles for Chattanooga (Orchard Knob, Lookout Mountain, and Missionary Ridge) 5,824 were killed, 2,160 wounded and 300 missing, including some taken prisoner by the Confederates. Knapp became one of the prisoners.

He was held first at Andersonville and later transferred to prisons at Charleston, Libby and Belle Island. Eventually he escaped with a group of others. Starved, without even a shirt on his back, and almost blind from sickness, he had to be led as they managed their way back to the Union lines.

After the Civil War, Knapp re-enlisted and served 15 months in the Indian War. In 1870 he married Georgianna Eliza Pearson at Muskegon, Mich. Their marriage would endure for over 53 years.

The Knapps headed west in 1887, resettling in Kelso in Washington State. In the early 1890s they adopted a daughter, named Minnie Mae, their only child. Knapp ran a saw mill, developed a coal mine in Cowlitz County with one of his brothers and was a police judge. He was elected justice of the peace after his mill retirement, and was commandant of three different posts of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), where he was in charge of indigent veterans' benefits for years.

On April 13, 1924, just shy of his 82nd birthday, having survived two wars, Peter Jones Knapp succumbed to the frailties of age and passed away in his wife's arms. Noted the Kelso Kelsonian in its obituary, "Mr. Knapp was the last of thirteen children and is survived by his wife and a daughter, Mrs. May Elliott. Funeral services were conducted from the Kelso Presbyterian church, Wednesday, April 16, with final services at the Portland Crematorium." No mention was made of interment.

What transpired after Knapp's death and the circumstances that led to an extraordinary burial service almost a century later, with full military honors and complete with Civil War re-enactors, historians, press, civilian and military brass and 300 relatives and friends he never met, is another story in itself—several stories as it turns out.

First is the story of a chance encounter with a Confederate sharpshooter during the Vicksburg campaign.

Knapp, patrolling with two other soldiers, spotted the sharpshooter behind a large piece of metal boilerplate and shot him in the eye through the peephole he was peering out of. An extraordinary shot. Thinking it had inflicted a mortal wound, the band moved on with their patrol.

This proved a miscalculation, and the episode with the sharpshooter, one Willis Meadows of the Alabama Volunteer Infantry, was to gain national press attention many years later (1921). It even wound up memorialized by Ripley's Believe it or Not. (See sidebar, right.)

The story about the story might have been a transient sensation, but various papers kept it alive, revisiting it periodically. A Central Point, OR, resident, Henry Kilburn, brought it to the local newspaper editor's attention in 1950. He had in his possession photos of the two protagonists, another of the bullet Meadows had expelled and Knapp's hand-written diary.

Henry Kilburn was the biological brother of the Knapps' adopted daughter. It was Mae Kilburn Knapp who, on a visit to Oregon in 1950, had given her brother the story, the diary and the photographs that he brought to the Central Point editor.

Robert Wyatt Granston was born December 28, 1916, in the Hamlet of Richmond Highlands, north of Seattle, Washington. After high school, he enrolled in the Navy ROTC program at the University of Washington. Following graduation Granston was chosen and commissioned into the Supply Corps of the Navy. Six months later, he volunteered for the Philippines and crossed the Pacific on board the USS Henderson, arriving in Manila on May 1941.

Ensign Granston's first duty assignment was at the Cavite Naval Yard as Assistant Supply Officer and subsequently a Supply and Disbursing Officer of the Receiving Station. The after duty "good life" of tennis, golf, travel, and movie queens came to an abrupt halt following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and attacks on the Navy Yard by the Japanese on December 10, 1941.

Near the end of January Granston was moved from the Section Base at Mariveles to the Island of Corregidor. Corregidor had been under fire from Japanese bombardment since the end of December. On May 6, 1942, he was in Queen's Tunnel when General Wainwright surrendered.

From the first bayonet drawn by a Japanese soldier in the tunnel to Bilibid prison, Camp 3 and Camp 1, and the Oryoku Maru hell ship Granston endured slave labor, beatings, and inhumane conditions.

After more than three years of his captivity on August 6, 1945, lives lost in the Asian-Pacific war had reached unfathomable millions. The numbers were growing by roughly 150,000 Allied and Axis lives (substantially civilians) a week.

As the battles moved closer to the main islands, the Japanese became better at fighting their enemy causing more losses. The Surgeon General had ordered almost half a million body bags for the planned initial land invasion on Kyushu.

Granston and the other prisoners of war held faced certain execution if the Allies invaded the main islands or sooner death due to their deteriorating physical condition.

Aldrich Ames was a one of the most destructive traitors in American history, and thus, not surprisingly, there are a number of Ames-related books in print, of varying degrees of insightfulness, whether directly focusing on him or featuring particular aspects of his case such as the decades long internecine CIA/FBI conflicts.

Circle of Treason's advantage is that it was written by two of the five primarily responsible CIA principals for the Ames "collar," specialists in the clandestine service especially of the Soviet Union. It reflects both their personal and professional viewpoints as co-workers with and then pursuers of Ames, before, during and after the mole hunt including the often noisy backlash that followed at all levels within and without the Company including on The Hill.

The Ames story of vast treasonous duplicity may have been often told, but this is an insiders' perspective, with clarifying details and upfront identification of the vicious damages, the sad glories and the assorted "warts" of the case. It provides an extraordinarily detailed discussion of the agents and their secrets betrayed by Ames, with stunning assessments of the devastating losses for all structural and human components.

The Circle of Treason provides all that one might expect but also some remarkable surprises. On the one hand, the authors, Grimes and Vertefeuille, both career CIA employees, forthrightly address the innately convoluted path to the CIA's alerting to, eventually identifying and bringing down Aldrich Ames.

In that regard, as observed by longtime OSS/CIA veteran operative Betty McIntosh, author of Undercover Girl and Sisterhood of Spies, "is an extraordinary tribute to their training, ingenuity and access to CIA top secret files, Soviet agents collaborating with CIA, FBI colleagues and their own CIA training over 25 years. It took them three years to uncover the CIA mole in their midst. The book is a tribute to their work." Left unsaid is that the two women authors are worthy successors to the spy-crafty primarily historical women about whom McIntosh has written so articulately.

That said, perhaps the even more extraordinary contribution made by Circle of Treason is the detailed and utterly unexcelled core access to CIA inner-workings, whether by binder or performance, by departmental organization, job title, name by name, and in some cases, personality versus reputation.

One would be hard pressed to read a book that is more convincingly an instructional manual for operational endeavors, taken virtually from file drawer by locked file drawer, safe, vault, drop and safe house.

They are not fancy folks, Jani and Robert Bergdahl, but a bright, hardworking, solid, unflinching couple, she with piercing brown eyes and straight cut shoulder length brown hair; he with a strong, straight forward look, directed fierce eyes in a ruddy face surrounded by a batch of slightly unruly reddish beard.

Someone hands him a bandana emblazoned with POW on the front. He explains that the beard is but a chronology of his son's captivity since June 30, 2009. They look a bit out of place, not uncomfortable but somber and eager.

They certainly never expected to be banked on all sides by the strong-hewn, solid look of the black motorcycle leathers of Rolling Thunder, their escort and guard, an impermeable human backdrop to support them as he spoke what he had come all the way to the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington to say.

The Bergdahls journeyed from a tiny town in Idaho, Hailey, population 6,000, from whom one precious citizen is currently absent, their now 26 year old son, Bowe. They have not and are not now trying to buck the establishment, one with which they certainly never intended to become buddies, but such intimacy has been thrust upon them by circumstances that everyone would wish to be different. Robert's words are spoken in a strong, convincing manner, and clearly straight from his depths:

"Bowe, your family has not forgotten you, your hometown has not forgotten you. Your state of Idaho has not forgotten you, and thanks to all of you here today, Washington, D.C. has not forgotten you."

"Bowe" is Bowe Robert Bergdahl, born March 28, 1986 in Sun Valley, ID, and assigned to the 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, 4th Cavalry Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division out of Ft. Richardson, AK.

The exact details of the circumstances of his capture in Afghanistan's Paktika Province vary but it appears that his captors were a Taliban-affiliated Haqqani group led by senior leader Maulvi (Mullah) Sangin Zadrain (who is shown on one of the videos with him) who then moved him to Ghazni Province. It is publically unclear whether he is now in Afghanistan or Pakistan.

The senior Bergdahls are a couple following the spirits and actions of hundreds of families before them, in a handful of wars, simply trying to get their precious family member returned from captivity. Since he was last home, they have seen him on five videos made by his captors, the last one in May 2011 his face showing considerable bruising.

Sometime in late August or early September 2011, Bowe purportedly jumped from a first floor window of a mud-brick house in Pakistan where he was then imprisoned and headed for the underbrush and mountains; according to three seemingly reliable militants present at the time, he was recaptured three days later.