Englishman’s Vietnam war story ‘is just fiction’

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IT WAS billed as one of the publishing sensations of the year: the true story of a gallant young Englishman who joined the US Army and suffered terrible torments in Vietnam.

Tom Abraham’s account of how he was captured by the Vietcong and pushed into a bamboo cage half submerged in a rat-infested lake suggested that he could be the inspiration for the Oscar-winning film The Deer Hunter.

In his book, The Cage, published last month, Abraham recounts how he escaped and returned to England with a chestful of medals, including the Silver Star, then married, had children and built a successful business career.

More than 30 years later, according to the blurb on the