Left for dead at Nijmegen : the true story of an American paratrooper in WWII / Marcus A. Nannini.

Prologue -- Homework -- Camp Grant -- Camp Toccoa -- Fort McClellan and Buffalo, New York -- Fort Benning/ Camp Mackall -- Camp Shanks- on the move at last! -- Nottingham, England -- Operation market garden -- Road to Nijmegen -- Keizer Karel Plein -- Nijmegen -- Dinner with "Herr Reichsf�uhrer" -- Lent, Holland -- Stalag XII-A -- Five days in hell -- Stalag VII-A -- Hans Schwaniger -- Escape! -- Recapture -- Stalag VII-A, again! -- Liberation -- Paris via M�unchen -- Home at last -- Postwar life -- Afterword: Looking back in sketches.

"A nonfiction biography written by Marcus A. Nannini, who spent several years interviewing Gene Metcalfe, who was determined to become a paratrooper, enlisted and was part of Operation Market Garden, a paratrooper landing in Nijmegen, Holland. It was his first foray into the field of battle, the culmination of years of training in every aspect of the paratrooper's skills in war-craft. Operation Market Garden was, from the outset, a poorly timed and executed operation, one for which the Germans almost seemed to have advance notice. For Metcalfe, his inability to hear the order to retreat resulted in an injury that led one of his comrades to believe he was dead. While he was stunned and rendered unconscious for a while, Metcalfe was indeed not dead. Over the next 24 hours, he would be imprisoned in a strange castle-like building and interviewed by Heinrich Himmler himself. Thereafter, until the war ended, he would languish in a series of gulags wherein Allied soldiers were deprived of food, forced into hard labor and doomed to die slow and agonizing deaths."