Bitter Victory

Description for BITTER VICTORY: A VETERAN CORRESPONDENT'S DRAMATIC ACCOUNT OF HIS RETURN TO VIETNAM AND CAMBODIA TEN YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE WAR by Robert Shaplen:

Robert Shaplen has reported on events in Asia for more than forty years. He was among the last of the Americans to leave Saigon before its fall to the Communists in April of 1975, and ten years later he returned to Indo-China for a lengthy visit for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War. BITTER VICTORY is an account of his impressions and interpretations of life in postwar Vietnam and Cambodia, based on his travels and interviews with Vietnamese and Cambodians (some of whom he had known during the war), and on his analysis of the political, economic, and social problems in the two countries.

Shaplen's long perspective, reaching back to the French colonial period, embraces Frances's war in Indo-China, ours, and the current Cambodian conflict, enabling him to make comparisons and draw conclusions of which few correspondents are capable, at the same time bringing fresh insights to his descriptions of the major cities---Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Hanoi, Hue, Danang. His knowledge of the region and its history adds depth to his coverage of a wide variety of subjects that extend beyond his main concern with politics---including literature, medicine, and education. In describing how the goals of the Vietnamese revolution are largely unfulfilled, and in analyzing the complicated Cambodian situation, he makes a major contribution to our understanding of a corner of the world which has loomed so large in our history, our emotions, and our psyche.