Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam

This is one of those books someone gives you for Christmas because you are a Vietnam veteran, and you digest it to see what it has in common with your experiences. While I was a helicopter pilot in the Delta, and nowhere near the places Morley visits in his periodic reporting forays, one gets the message of what anyone who frequented this tropical country eventually got. "The place sort of grows on you," one journalist comments to another. That's what happened to all of us; we experienced the other side of the world as young men. This was an out-of-the-culture experience that only we knew we were certainly having--despite the efforts of our media, politicians, and college protesters to define it. Another book the Vietnam vet needs on his bookshelf to help sort out the morass this bureacratic farce was paid for in our military blood.

This is a book which has affected me greatly both as a person who grew up in the Vietnam area and as a professional journalist. Safer succeeds in creating pictures of Vietnam which were never before filed. It is a crime that this book is not in print.

In August 1965, Morley Safer's report on the destruction of a Vietnamese hamlet called Cam Ne -- along with film footage of a U. S. Marine using a Zippo lighter to ignite one of the thatch huts -- ignited a firestorm of protest back in the States. In 1989 Morley Safer returned to Vietnam with a 60 Minutes film crew to meet with and interview North and South Vietnamese military and political leaders and other survivors of that war. "Flashbacks" is the illuminating and riveting story of that journey. Whatever your feelings were about that war, you will find this book a fascinating glimpse into what we did there and how things look now. Safer's writing is superb

Morley Safer returns to Vietnam for a retrospective of the conflict; revisiting both north and south. This slim history provides a thoughtful look at the rationale for that action, and a cathartic opportunity for Safer to examine what he did as a young man.