BLACK GLASSES LIKE CLARK KENT: A GI's Secret from Postwar Japan

Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2008. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Soft cover. New/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction prize, selected by Robert Polito. In 1946, Terese Svoboda's uncle served as a military policeman in occupied Japan. He was assigned to guard convicted fellow Americans--GIs gathered from all over the Pacific. "The Captain called a meeting for all the MPs. He said the prison was getting overcrowded, terribly overcrowded. He said he was going to have to start executing the prisoners, the ones in the death cells." Svoboda's uncle remained a silent witness to the unqualified punishment of American prisoners, many of them African Americans. His closely guarded secret remained under wraps for decades. As a child Svoboda thought of her uncle as Superman with "black Clark Kent glasses, grapefruit-sized biceps." At nearly eighty, he could still boast a washboard stomach--and tell war stories. With the news of Abu Ghraib, he fell into a terrible depression, and the tapes he sent Svoboda ended abruptly with his suicide. Svoboda launched her own investigation, traveling to Japan, digging through buried files at the National Archives, and contacting the surviving vets who served with her uncle. BLACK GLASSES LIKE CLARK KENT reveals how the vagaries of military justice can allow the worst to happen and be buried by time and protocol. New trade PBO in pictorial wraps. NF44