The League of Wives: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home [Audiobook]

"A remarkable true story of love, war, courage, constancy and change - as a group of naval housewives transformed themselves into powerful advocates for their missing husbands." (Liza Mundy, author of the NY Times best seller Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II)

This program is read by the author.

The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington - and Hanoi - to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam.

On February 12, 1973, 115 men who just six years earlier had been high-flying Navy and Air Force pilots shuffled, limped, or were carried off a huge military transport plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. These American servicemen had endured years of brutal torture, kept shackled and starving in solitary confinement, in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons, the worst of which was the Hanoi Hilton.

Months later, the first Vietnam POWs to return home would learn that their rescuers were their wives, a group of women that included Jane Denton, Sybil Stockdale, Louise Mulligan, Andrea Rander, Phyllis Galanti, and Helene Knapp. These women, who formed the National League of Families, would never have called themselves "feminists", but they had become the POW and MIAs' most fervent advocates, going to extraordinary lengths to facilitate their husbands' freedom - and to account for missing military men - by relentlessly lobbying government leaders, conducting a savvy media campaign, conducting covert meetings with antiwar activists, and most astonishingly, helping to code secret letters to their imprisoned husbands.

In an unpausable work of narrative nonfiction, Heath Hardage Lee tells the story of these remarkable women for the first time. The League of Wives is certain to be on everyone's must-listen list.