Overview
Former Vietnam POW Jacob Slaughter is sent to Hanoi to negotiate a trade agreement on behalf of the United States. Back in-country, he is escorted to a rotting building where he is outraged to find his former cellmate and friend, Captain Charles Wooten, still being held. Wooten's condition is pathetic but he's alive. How much longer is up to Slaughter. Slaughter returns to Washington and fights for the trade concessions Vietnam has demanded before they'll give Wooten and twenty-two other American soldiers their freedom. Although the president's cabinet seems anxious to remove the final barrier, they stubbornly dispute Slaughter's sighting of Captain Wooten, reminding him he brought home Wooten's remains two years earlier. As the pressure builds, Slaughter risks everything to peel back the White House's long-standing scab of denial and reveal the sad, treacherous truth about why six American presidents have been forced to abandon those prisoners-and why Captain Charles R. Wooten hasn't been allowed to come home, until Slaughter confronts political forces in Washington who've been keeping the prisoners a secret.Editorials
Ken Moore
DeMott combines exquisite action and heart-stopping suspense to create an indefatigable hero-a Vietnam War veteran who 25 years later is still trying to absolve undeserved guilt for surviving both the jungles and prisoner of war camps in Southeast Asia. The book's unusual title comes from the so-called K-code American military prisoners used when tapping secret messages between jail cells in Vietnam. The post-war plot of Walking K is realistic, although the collusion among American government officials is sometimes stretched, albeit not quite beyond the limit of belief. Still, the characters are credible and so well-developed that readers may even hear anxious gasps of breath when protagonist Jacob Slaughter is repeatedly faced with life-and-death decisions.
Walking K is not your ordinary Vietnam War book. It is instead an emotionally charged story about one man's effort to bring home 23 of his former buddies still alive in Vietnam POW camps all these years after the war's end. It's a one-man effort because nobody in this country believes POWs are still alive and being tortured on a daily basis. The plot suggests an American government policy that started at war's end with the release of POWs. Officialdom disregarded information that not all POWs were released and thus shamefully abandoned a handful of Americans. If that decision was disgraceful then, it has over the years evolved into deceit; fresh reports of live POWs are not only ignored, but denied by the government. In DeMott's novel, Slaughter has immersed himself into the POW/MIA movement while joining the federal bureaucracy to do whatever possible to help the cause. Slaughter himself was captive for two years in a Vietnamese prison. Released at war's end, his Marine captain in the next cell never made it home. Over the years, Slaughter has befriended and consoled the captain's family. Slaughter also has suffered a roller-coaster of emotions, aided and consoled by the woman psychiatrist with whom he has an affair. Now a low-level paper-pusher with the U.S. State Department, Slaughter is as puzzled as everyone else when the post-war Vietnamese government asks for him by name to be the American negotiator with whom they deal in trade talks with the United States. It is during those negotiations that Slaughter learns Capt. Charles Wooten, Slaughter's former POW cell neighbor, is still alive.
Thus Wooten-through Slaughter-becomes a pawn in Vietnam-U.S. trade negotiations. Yet, the American government is not excited by the prospect of Wooten's release. Slaughter can't understand that, or why the American presidency is being manipulated by corporations whose sole interests are financial-expanding their market into Vietnam. Slaughter's task, then, is to bring home 23 live POWs, a simple job that becomes convoluted and dangerous.
—Naples Daily News, January 11, 1998