The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labor lies.— Vergil, The Aeneid
Not since Edmund Gosse’s classic memoir, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, has an estranged son written more nobly of his father than Douglas Valentine. Nobly because, apart from a brief author’s note, the son is absent from the book, except as a faithful and creative amanuensis to his father’s chilling, dark, life-long secret of his WW II years as a prisoner of war of the Japanese. A secret so horrifying that a reader can’t help but realize that its harboring throughout the thirty plus years of the son’s life could do nothing but poison his relationship with his father as it ate away at his father’s soul.
Responding to his ailing father’s call to come home and hear his tale of the war experiences that have tormented him his whole life, the son discovers that his father has awakened him to his vocation as a writer. By listening, the son receives the gift of telling. He answers the call. And in telling his father’s story (originally in 1984; see 2016 edition here) the son opens himself to other serendipitous opportunities that would result in other books exposing the treacherous secrets of state criminals, notably the CIA (The Phoenix Program) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). While these latter books have made Valentine’s reputation, his…