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Foreign Affairs Magazine , May/June 2002
Philip Zelikow
Laurence was as good a television journalist as any who covered the Vietnam War, going out in the field over and over from 1965 to 1970 and creating a renowned documentary, "The World of Charlie Company." After decades of writing, he has finally completed a memoir that relives not just the world of that company, part of the First Cavalry Division, but also the world of the TV reporter watching American infantrymen cope in every major phase of the war. His focus is always on soldiers in the field. Strategy and politics stay far in the background. Laurence helps a reader understand how TV tries to cover war -- the good and the bad. But above all, he matter-of-factly counters the familiar literary images of stylized characters in a surreal conflict. What stands out in this book is his plain, fair, and sympathetic observation of recognizably real Americans of every rank and the everyday detail that accumulates into the experience of war.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Stanley I. Kutler is the author of ''The Wars of Watergate'' and editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War.

John Laurence, a CBS correspondent in Vietnam, found a stray cat in Hue amid the rubble and chaos of the Tet offensive in 1968. That cat proved almost as intractable and difficult as the Vietnam conflict itself. Eventually, however, like the antagonists, the cat and Laurence worked out their own modus vivendi.

Laurence's eloquent, at times acerbic recollection of Vietnam is one of the finest books in its genre, comparable to Michael Herr's ''Dispatches.'' His Vietnam reportage was exceptional, almost artful; his summary and recapitulation more than three decades later is formidable, gripping and always informative. He deserves to be read thoughtfully and carefully.

For those with firsthand experience of the war, the memory is forever and vividly stamped into their lives. Laurence himself realized that ''I had left Vietnam but it hadn't left me.'' He traces his journey from his arrival in Vietnam in 1965, filled with optimism and idealism -- eager to be with the program, as the Army's public information officers urged -- to a profound disillusionment and cynicism that mirrored that of the nation and, more important, of the fighting men. He recalls the so-called Zippo squads, who torched the huts of peasants as part of search-and-destroy missions; the war had become, he writes, a ''death machine.'' He witnessed the important battle in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, and its signal of a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, Gen. William C. Westmoreland declared it ''an unprecedented victory.'' The other side had left the scene and their body count was higher than the American one; obviously they must have lost.

Most affecting are his accounts of the war's impact on the American soldiers and the Vietnamese peasantry. ''Pacification'' meant only more violence and dislocation. The An Lao Valley was prosperous farmland, worked by thousands of peasants. American officers designated it a Vietcong stronghold and ordered the area evacuated. They promised helicopter transportation for the locals, as well as food, shelter and medical attention. But they reneged, needing the choppers for other missions. They abandoned the peasants in what had become a free-fire zone. The villagers could stay or attempt to walk away, though they had never strayed much beyond their homes. Laurence interviewed the American colonel in charge: ''It's one of those things that happen in a war. These people have been disappointed many times before.''

When Laurence arrived in Vietnam, he believed the cause honorable and its success certain. After all, the United States had never lost a war. The 25-year-old reporter spent 22 months in the country, spread over more than four years, and the neophyte transformed into a soldier of sorts. When he returned in 1970, in time for the assault against the North Vietnamese command structure in Cambodia, he realized the war was hopeless, that South Vietnam was swollen with corrupt military and political leaders, and yet Richard Nixon proclaimed a determination to win. When he announced the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Nixon declared, ''The time has come for action!'' And Laurence thought, ''As if five years of bombing and killing Vietnamese has been inaction.''

By this time, Laurence found the killing beyond reason. ''And for what? For pride! For the egos and vanity,'' he writes, of Washington politicians and pundit generals. How can you maintain objectivity in such a climate, he asked a fellow correspondent, who insisted that if you opposed the war, you lost your objectivity. As if accepting the war salvaged your objectivity.

Laurence capped his Vietnam tours with ''The World of Charlie Company,'' an extraordinary documentary, broadcast by CBS in 1970. In ''The Cat From Hue,'' he discusses the making of the film in detail, and it stands as an epitaph of the war's futility. In the film, the soldiers speak for themselves. They know they neither should be, nor want to be, in Vietnam. By this time drug and alcohol abuse in the Army was widespread, and the disconnect between officers and G.I.'s had become ever more apparent. After initially approving and aiding the project, the military shut it down. ''The generals must have known, better than we, that when good soldiers argue openly about the wisdom of fighting a war, as they had in Charlie Company, the war is lost,'' he notes. Shortly after the film was broadcast, a West Point military instructor asked CBS for permission to show it to his classes.

Those who still regard Vietnam as a great moral crusade, who continue to insist that the military would have won had it been properly supported, and who blame the biased reporting of the news media for turning the nation against the war, probably would indict Laurence as a willing accomplice in the outcome. But he offers ample evidence of the futility and disillusionment felt by both Americans and Vietnamese. Pilots related their frustration with the ineffectiveness of their bombing; the military's daily press briefings had no correlation to reality; search-and-destroy missions had turned into the destruction of peasant villages, ostensibly to save them -- it was all there, waiting to be reported. John Laurence and the news media did not concoct the estrangement between reality and the official versions of the war.

The longest war in our history is of value today only for the lessons it taught. We are in Laurence's debt for his sober portrayal of the limits of American power. Why did we fight in Vietnam? Against a primitive socialism that threatened our capitalist system? To prevent falling dominoes? The Vietnamese had no such questions. They knew exactly why they fought. Political cadres won their hearts and minds with Ho Chi Minh's dictum ''Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.''

John Laurence returned to Vietnam in 1982. The strident slogans of Vietnamese nationalism and Marxism had fallen victim to Soviet incompetence, emerging trade relations with capitalists from Japan and the West and an incipient tourist industry. Laurence had his pocket picked in Ho Chi Minh City to remind him of the good old days in Saigon. While visiting Hanoi, he interviewed an American diplomat. The official commented on the new developments, and remarked, ''You know, it would have been a lot easier if they had just let us win the war.''

Los Angeles Times

Stanley Karnow, author of "Vietnam: A History," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

The shelves in my study are crammed from floor to ceiling with Vietnam volumes--novels, poetry, memoirs, photographs, sketches. It seems that every Army, Marine, Navy and Air Force unit has put out its own history. Veterans deluge me with recollections of their exploits; periodically I receive a now-it-can-be-told manuscript by a former covert agent. Bookshops and libraries are congested with retrospective, frequently self-serving analyses by officials, diplomats, generals and admirals. The previously secret tapes of presidential conversations are being published. The war is the subject of movies and documentaries, even a musical. It is taught in schools and colleges by instructors who weren't born when it began to students who weren't born when it ended. Lately enemy soldiers have been relating their experiences, which are remarkably analogous to those of our own grunts.

Given this surfeit, you might wonder whether there is more to be said about Vietnam that we don't already know. But, judging from John Laurence's phenomenal account, "The Cat from Hue," we have only scratched the surface.

The conflict lured a plethora of ambitious young journalists hoping to launch their careers, Laurence among them. He arrived in Southeast Asia in August 1965, as U.S. involvement was escalating; and, with interruptions for other assignments, remained for five years. As a correspondent with CBS he was present at such pivotal episodes as the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the siege of Khe Sanh, the fight for Hue and the American incursion into Cambodia.Several of his over-eager colleagues died trying to make their reputations, but he survived, which could explain the cryptic title of his book, "The Cat From Hue." It alludes to the filthy, forlorn kitten he picked up in the rubble during the horrendous struggle for the imperial city of Hue in February 1968. I construe it to be a metaphor for himself--as if he, like the animal, was endowed with nine lives.

With some notable exceptions, print reporters tended to cover the action only occasionally, as I did. But TV correspondents and cameramen were required to capture the images that their audiences could view in the comfort of their living rooms. Thus they had to be in the field constantly. And Laurence was in the thick of it, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, courting extraordinary risks. Friends accused him of obsessively nurturing a death wish. For him, it was his job.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who usually gathered just enough information to produce the brief sound bites that accompanied their footage, he accumulated more material than he could possibly use on the air. So his narrative is a catalog of detail, some of it numbing, most of it vivid, all of it significant. He was a combined audio and video system.

His delineation of infantrymen edging forward is not merely an inventory but illustrates the way heavily equipped American troops operated in the hostile terrain. They were an interminable human conveyor belt sweating in the suffocating tropical heat and humidity as they carried "rifle ammunition, machinegun bullets, mortar shells, hand grenades, rockets, tank gun canisters, high explosives, food, water, batteries, mail, medicine, morphine, IV fluids, bandages, body bags." He portrays the wounded and dying as they lay on tiers of blood-soaked stretchers in airplanes and helicopters, traumatized and sobbing in pain as they waited to be evacuated to hospitals. "Some of them had lost entire arms and legs, some only fingers, hands, feet, ears, eyes, pieces of skull." Implicit in his description of this grotesque scene is the message that we were not the invincible Rambos depicted by Hollywood. Nothing, however trivial, eludes Laurence's keen vision. When he seeks shelter in a house in Hue during the height of the battle, he notices that the garden in the rear is "tangled with tall vines" and "fat leafy plants," and hears beneath the foliage a "gurgling stream" and the screeching of "invisible insects."

Enclosed in a courtyard, the pastel stucco, tile-roofed villa was "graceful,

harmonious and elegant," and probably belonged to an upper-crust Vietnamese clan. Laurence pictures the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents as they convened weeks before with their progeny to celebrate Tet, the lunar New Year, the sacred holiday. Their house would have been decorated with "bright-colored flower blossoms, lanterns and handmade prints," and smelled of fresh-baked pastries and other delicacies. They would have assembled to exchange gossip, and observe such ancient rituals as tending family tombs and honoring ancestors. The elders would sit with the children, laughing and regaling them with folk tales. Then, while they slept off the festivities, the war burst upon them with the "convulsions of a volcano." The sudden Communist attack--aggravated by the cataclysmic American bombings--killed thousands, whose mangled cadavers were bulldozed into mass graves.

Contrary to the canard that the press corps opposed America's intervention in Southeast Asia, virtually all the journalists who covered the conflict during its initial phase firmly believed that the commitment was necessary. David Halberstam, invariably cited as an early critic of the war, commented in 1964 that Vietnam was "a strategic country in a key area [and] perhaps one of only five or six nations in the world that is truly vital to U.S. interests."

Other reporters, myself included, echoed the same thesis until we perceived that the American forces, despite their overwhelmingly superior firepower, faced adversaries prepared to accept unlimited losses to achieve their goal. We witnessed their corpses piled up like cordwood following every clash and saw that the enterprise was fruitless.

It is unsurprising that Laurence would ultimately discover after slogging through the snarled jungles, mangrove swamps and flooded rice fields that the U.S. crusade to obstruct the spread of communism was not only futile but catastrophic: "America came to Vietnam to save it from evil," pulverized the land and "ended up sacrificing its own soul."

He predictably excoriates President Lyndon B. Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Gen. William Westmoreland and the rest of the U.S. leadership for their "blind plunge into a maelstrom of anguish." Nor does he spare the slick spokesmen insulated in their air-conditioned Saigon offices who blatantly lied or contorted the truth in their endeavor to persuade the public at home to support the campaign in Vietnam even though they knew that it was failing badly. Their daily news conferences, a litany of phony

statistics and rosy forecasts, were eventually lampooned as the "Five O'Clock Follies." The phrase "credibility gap," which skeptics applied to the calculated policy of deception subsequently practiced in Panama, Grenada, Somalia and the Persian Gulf, originated in Vietnam.

Fortunately Laurence resists the temptation to bloviate on the global

consequences of Vietnam though he concludes on a banal note, suggesting that the "best legacy" of the horrendous venture would be a "deep and sincere love between people of the two countries" based on "where we have been together [and] what we have endured." But that lapse is a minor flaw in a dramatic personal chronicle that will stand as a unique contribution to the colossal array of Vietnam literature.

Washington Post

John Prados is director of the Vietnam documentation project of the National Security Archive. His most recent book is "The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War."

In a sense, the cat in John Laurence's fine memoir of reporting the war in Vietnam is a stand-in for so many of the people who were affected by the conflict. Laurence encountered the cat at the height of the battle for Hué in 1968. The animal, then a kitten, sauntered into the room in a Hué house where the journalist sat hastily consuming a lunch of combat rations before going back to cover the action. Seeing the cat a few more times, and appreciating how it survived amid the heat of battle, Laurence concluded the animal was lucky and adopted it. Thereafter, the cat accompanied Laurence to every front in South Vietnam, and to New York, London and his various homes after the war. "Meo" -- its name the Vietnamese word for cat -- saw danger everywhere, and found hiding places so secure that its owner called them bunkers, from which it would emerge with lightning quickness to bite and scare anyone at all.

This feline plays an unusually large part in The Cat From Hué, but the author's canvas is so large that Meo's adventures ultimately amount to only a small part of it. Returning to Vietnam off and on from 1965 to 1970, Laurence witnessed many of the key battles of the American war: the Central Highlands, the Ia Drang valley (both in 1965); battles in the "Street Without Joy" (1966); the fall of A Shau Special Forces camp (1966); the famous Marine fight at Con Thien (1967); Hué and Khe Sanh during the Tet Offensive (1968); and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia (1970).

Among Laurence's many tales of combat is a striking account of a confrontation among allies when, at Plei Me in 1965, Green Beret guru "Chargin' Charlie" Beckwith came close to a shootout with a South Vietnamese armored commander. Another fascinating episode is Laurence's talk with Marine Gen. Robert Cushman during the Hué battle. Cushman, who led all U.S. forces in the northern part of South Vietnam, asked the reporter for his impressions from the front lines at Hué. Laurence reported on the exhaustion and losses of the rifle companies trying to recapture the Citadel. Cushman promised the units would be relieved. Laurence, who had started the war in August 1965 believing everything he was told, recounts that by 1968 "the war had enclosed us in a hard shell of cynicism."

Laurence did some of the earliest television reporting on Vietnamese refugees, and so is particularly evocative in describing the Army's operation Masher in early 1966, when preparations made to handle displaced villagers were distinctly rudimentary. On the perennial subject of atrocities, Laurence saw American paratroopers at An Khe beating up their enemy prisoners as early as the fall of 1965. He also documents the use of force against civilians by devoting several passages to the casual use of U.S. firepower in Cambodia. At the same time, however, he produces battle chronologies in Cambodia, Hué and Con Thien that are replete with accounts of the selflessness and heroism of the troops. As he writes of his time in Hué, "I had become accustomed to miracles. They happened every day . . . . The line between life and death was so fine and was being crossed so often . . . [miracles became] as real as anything else."

There exist a goodly number of reportorial memoirs of Vietnam, but the large majority are those of print journalists. John Laurence learned his trade in radio, in the newsroom at New York's WNEW, before joining the Columbia Broadcasting System. CBS sent him to Vietnam at least three times, with side trips to the Philippines and Thailand, and stints on a domestic beat, including an assignment to the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago. But Vietnam remains the heart of Laurence's journalistic narrative, as well as of his combat reflections. There are stories of reporters, such as the New York Times's R.W. Apple and Charles Mohr (who, Laurence writes, looked like a correspondent for Field and Stream magazine); of George Esper, Sean Flynn and others, including renowned combat photographers Eddie Adams and Tim Page. There is the tragic story of Look magazine writer Sam Castan, killed in action near An Khe in 1966 right after his birthday. Laurence himself has an epiphany in Cambodia, losing his innocence in a life-or-death situation where he picks up a gun and shoots down the enemy. Morley Safer gets downed in a helicopter crash. And Sean Flynn's inherited good looks (he was Errol Flynn's son) did not prevent his disappearance and capture in Cambodia in 1970. Perhaps the highlight of the TV exploits recounted here was the time Laurence chartered a Boeing 707 jet to fly some film to Hong Kong for onward transmission to make the evening news: The gambit failed due to bad weather over Kai Tak airport, but a backup feed from Bangkok worked fine.

Tension between the media and the military is also evident here. One story Laurence scripted on the morale problems of a company in the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) led to quiet advice from a friend and Army public information officer to watch out.

The Cat From Hué is engaging and informative -- better still, it is a good read. Laurence had some trouble crafting this book, spending a year trying to write in the late 1970s, and returned to the project only recently, after teaching himself to write very differently than he had in his television career. But the result is very satisfactory. Even Meo, were he still alive, would be purring.

London Sunday Times

Vietnam is the war that refuses to step back in line. Not only the films and literature it spawned, but also its continuing use as a marker in global political discourse, keep it fresh in our minds.

To get an idea of the number of civilians killed in an underdeveloped Asian country by the world’s most advanced nation, multiply the human damage done in Manhattan last September, say, 100 times. At its best, America stands for values that are humane, rational and articulated, therefore civilised. But at its worst, it has produced some world-class war criminals. Men such as Slobodan Milosevic and Osama Bin Laden should certainly be brought to book, the argument goes, but so, too, should Henry Kissinger.

Otherwise where is the level playing field? The war in Vietnam was primarily a catastrophe for its peasant population. Countless agricultural villages, laid down over centuries, and overlaid by rich accretions of custom and kinship, were wiped out, often in a matter of hours; sometimes, thanks to a wanton use of napalm, in minutes. Yet the same war was also a debacle for America itself. Not since the civil war had its people been as sharply divided as they were from around 1966 until the final evacuation of Saigon in 1975.

Or, as John Laurence puts it, “The enemy and its people were being wasted for nothing. America came to Vietnam to save it from evil, and ended up sacrificing its own soul.” From the American viewpoint, it was precisely that: a loss of national integrity, within a generation of signal victories against fascism in the second world war, and holding a line in Korea.

Donald Rumsfeld and others on Capitol Hill at this awkward moment in time will greet the publication of The Cat from Hué, a monumental, close-quartered reconstruction of what went wrong, with at best an involuntary wince, for neither Laurence nor his book can be easily or safely brushed aside. As a television journalist, Laurence covered Vietnam for CBS News, in particular the opinion-shaping Walter Cronkite early-evening slot, doing three “tours of duty”: from when Lyndon Johnson first committed US ground troops in 1965; before, during and after the critical communist Tet offensive of early 1968; and again in 1970, just as the war widened into Cambodia.

Laurence and his film crews courageously attended many of the hottest sites of a famously diffuse and phantasmagoric battleground. They were there for the push into Cambodia from Tay Ninh, and, before then, the hand-to-hand bloodbath of Hué itself. Drawing on broadcast material, diaries and his own and others’ recollections, Laurence reconstitutes these and other episodes in formidable detail. Along the way, he is shot at, mortared, rocketed and narrowly survives helicopter and aeroplane mishaps. If he saves one enemy life, in self-defence he colludes in the dispatch of another. Little by little, though, he begins questioning the methods and objectives of those in command. And so it is that the young Kennedian idealist, my country right or wrong, yet determined to uphold a native tradition of honest reportage, becomes a thorn in his government’s side.

In the beginning it was all so clear-cut. “Our first loyalty,” Laurence writes, “was to the American public to be truthful, then to the Marines we accompanied to be fair, then to CBS News to be competitive and hardworking.” But, as the war unfolds, the tensions within and between such shibboleths are made woundingly manifest. The alternative to becoming a “player in the official Saigon information/propaganda game” is to commit treason in all but name. Laurence bit that bullet, and, to the credit of his CBS minders, emerged as one of the media antiheroes who fatally undermined America’s naively jingoistic commitment to Indochina.

The end product is this engrossing, gargantuan book, 20 years in the writing, and worthy to stand beside such other Vietnam classics as Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie. Every crafted chapter tells a story and makes a point. Yet even so, The Cat from Hué is oddly disjunctive. Just as, over its 840 pages, the war unravels, so, too, does its author. Laurence learns, but in learning is discombobulated.

Increasingly, media coverage, not the war itself, becomes the object of his focus. Grunts and Marines, and sometimes their communist adversaries, are lauded for their insane valour. But it is the fate of Laurence’s fellows that evokes his deepest empathy. There are, too, extended passages about the charismatic English photo-journalist Tim Page, and Page’s Saigon bivouac, known as Frankie’s House, where drugs, rock’n’roll, sudden sex and (incongruously) Buddha ruled the roost. Laurence was and wasn’t part of that scene, the war bohemians, the surrogate combat junkies. Part of his attraction both as a writer and as a man is his ability to move vividly between disparate contexts. He is equally at home in the spluttering colonel’s office or the frontline bunker. But there is a nagging sentimentality — quoted letters to his American sweetheart and future wife Joy, and also the detailed biography of the titular cat, a stray adopted in Hué, then shipped back to America.

Nothing though can prepare us for Laurence’s far-fetched denouement. “After all the hate, all the violence, all the cruelty,” he writes in conclusion, “the Vietnam war has to be about love.” This is cognitive dissonance writ large. Its combatants and its observers may very well individually have grasped the value of love, either for a buddy under fire or for a pet under duress, but it is not what prompted and sustained “Vietnam” at all — as Laurence himself is a foremost witness.

Justin Wintle’s books include Romancing Vietnam and The Viet Nam Wars.

Booklist

The length of this book may discourage some readers, but those truly interested in learning about the Vietnam War from someone who was there will find this a must read. Laurence was a CBS news correspondent who covered the war from 1965 to 1970. The book begins with the brutal Tet Offensive in 1968, with Laurence in the burned-out vestige of Hué, where he finds a feisty kitten that doesn't seem to like Americans. Laurence flashes back to 1965, when the war got into full swing and large numbers of American troops first arrived on the scene. He deftly charts how and when--if not why--the American objective of "winning the hearts and minds of the people" comes to require burning villages, killing farmers, and having as their closest allies a corrupt South Vietnamese regime. More and more he finds that in order to report the war he must put himself increasingly at risk, and he does so, at no small physical and psychological danger. Like Michael Herr's Dispatches (1977), this is an important perspective on an atypical war, up close and personal.

Kirkus Reviews

An extraordinary grunt's-eye view of the Vietnam War, by a former CBS News correspondent. Line troops and combat reporters, writes Laurence, are a superstitious lot. As an "edge against the fear," he himself wore the same set of threadbare fatigues each time out, didn't polish his boots, and carried "coins, charms, four-leaf clovers, religious medals and all kinds of talismans"-everything, in short, but a weapon, the lack of which, he hoped, would keep him from being killed. He may have been on to something, for, while covering the 1968 siege of Hué (where he encountered the shell-shocked kitten, the cat of the title, that figures in so much of the narrative), Laurence wandered into the sights of a North Vietnamese army soldier who could easily have shot him dead but, inexplicably, did not. He had many other brushes with death covering military operations up and down Vietnam from 1965 to 1970, but he's careful to keep his focus on the soldiers, civilians, and other participants less willing than he to be caught up in the fire. That focus is close, and it yields affecting views; of a group of young field marines, for instance, he writes, "War seemed to make them more humane, more gentle, at least with each other, as if everybody involved in this violent undertaking was trying to behave his best, not knowing what might be coming next." Among the many high points here is a long section describing the author's time with a star-crossed infantry unit during the invasion of Cambodia, a tour that yielded the documentary The World of Charlie Company. Though many of its threads eventually come together, Laurence's narrative reads less as a coherent story than as a loose, slightly hallucinatory string of anecdotes, which, considering the circumstances, seems altogether appropriate. The result is on a par with Michael Herr's Dispatches as literature-but, unlike Herr's book, scrupulously true, making it a standout in a crowded field.

Library Journal

A CBS News correspondent in Vietnam between 1965 and 1971, Laurence has written one of the longest, most thorough memoirs of the Vietnam War. His title refers to a small kitten he found in the rubble of Hué during the Tet Offensive and whose courage and feistiness symbolized the determination of enemy troops. Although Laurence came to believe that American military involvement in the war was a grave mistake, he nonetheless developed a profound admiration for American soldiers and marines. Countering conventional wisdom, he also notes that most American troops seemed to appreciate the work of television reporters, especially those in the field. Powerfully written, if somewhat too detailed, this memoir is a major accomplishment by the journalist who brought us The World of Charlie Company, an award-winning documentary about his time with the American soldiers in the jungles of War Zone C. Highly recommended for all libraries.

Anthony Edmonds, Ball State Univ., Muncie, IN

Publishers Weekly

The cat is the least of it in this terrific, if overlong, opus that evokes the Vietnam War from an on-the-ground TV correspondent's point of view. During the war, Laurence put in three tours of television duty in the war for CBS News. He provides riveting, searingly evocative depictions of the U.S. Army, Marines and South Vietnamese Army in action in the American war's early days (1965-1966), at its height (in 1968) and during the 1970 Cambodian incursion. Laurence and his crew specialized in covering the war up close, and he saw more than his share of action. His depiction of the bloody 1968 battle of Hué which Laurence accurately calls an "urban brawl between two armed and largely adolescent tribes, a street fight of fast action and merciless bloodletting" is frighteningly realistic. Laurence spices his extremely readable narrative with many direct quotes taken from his audio and videotapes of the fighting men in action and, later, as they reflect on the war and their parts in it. He also gives a clear picture of his day-to-day life in the war zone, along with revealing wartime portraits of many other Vietnam War correspondents and photographers, including Peter Arnett, Morley Safer, R.W. Apple Jr., Gloria Emerson and others. Aside from the unrevealing title, the only problem with this book is Laurence's penchant for cramming in vignettes, as if he couldn't bear to leave anything out, perhaps telling us too much about himself in the process. High on the superfluous list is virtually the entire cat story, which involved Laurence's adopting and shipping home a bedraggled feline he rescued from the battle of Hué. Buffs will be riveted, though as will anyone who survived the era. (Sept.)

Forecast: Look for steady sales among regular readers of Vietnamiana and excellent coverage via Laurence's media cronies. Despite its size, this book is a possible breakout among boomers, if not among those on either end of the age spectrum.

Link to web page with Audio Interviews with author by Dick Gordon of NPR