Edition:
Paperback Edition, Presumed First Printing Thus
Publisher:
Cooper Square Press
Published:
1986
Alibris ID:
16465163504
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Seller's Description:
Very good. ix, [1], 259, [5] pages. Includes black and white map of Vietnam in 1967 facing the title page. Also includes 25 black and white illustrations, as well as a Glossary. Chapters include Sunny Saigon; Learning the ropes; Getting to know the Viet Cong; Under fire; Managing the news; Playing the game; Big monkeys; Taking a breather; Australia: "Land of great interest"; Sitting ducks; Ambushed: Hill 875; Lunar surprise: Tet 1968; So long Saigon; and Dinh fights Hanoi. Hugh Duncan Lunn (born 1941 in Brisbane, Queensland) is an Australian journalist and author. During 1967 and 1968 he covered the Vietnam War for Reuters. Gradually, the futility of the American position in Vietnam began to emerge to the outside world, and Lunn tells us how that realization grew among his press colleagues. Reporters became suspicious of the U.S. military's official line as they toured "pacified" areas that were anything but. His year in Vietnam reached its climax with the Viet Cong attack on the American embassy in Saigon, and the Tet Offensive in January 1968. Lunn is an Australian who covered Vietnam for Reuters in 1967-68. He describes his experiences and his friendship with a Vietnamese man who worked with him. From February 1967 to March of 1968, Australian journalist Hugh Lunn reported on the war in Vietnam for Reuters. He joined several military missions into the combat zones, learning the terror of jungle warfare from the front lines. Lunn's record of his experiences reveals attitudes to the war from numerous sides-American soldiers, foreigners living in the capital, and Vietnamese, some intrigued by the American presence and some outraged. Throughout Vietnam, Lunn discovers telling signs of how wrongheaded American strategy was and how desperate American journalists were to show the war as progressive From the author's website: When you write a book about the Vietnam War the story never ends. Forty-five years after I was there, people still write to me about the War. People I've never met visit Saigon and send me photos of the Continental Hotel with my room marked with a cross, or ask if some building in a picture was the Reuter office. Foreign correspondents e-mail reminiscences or check details from the 1960s. Saigon 1967. I arrived age 25 in Vietnam to cover the war for Reuters. I was befriended by a local reporter, Dinh, who warned me "very quick and easy to be killed". Dinh knew things that I could not: Vietnam is always too short of fortune-tellers; my Melbourne roommate Bruce Pigott is "not long-live man"; and Heaven hurts fair women for sheer spite. Faced with the daily US military news briefings where fantasy is put out as fact, I found myself questioning a war that could not be won, and my role in it. My year of duty was almost up when the cataclysmic Tet Offensive changed everything. Four friends were killed. I finish the book with Dinh's final revelation that the most trusted and influential Vietnamese journalist in Saigon was, all along, a Viet Cong colonel.
