Customer Reviews

Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam

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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 traveled back to Vietnam in 1989 to see how that country has changed in the fourteen years since the end of America's involvement in the war. Did the Vietnamese people really win? Morley's goverment provided guide, Ms. Mai, is assigned to escort and provide him access to the sites he reported from during the war. Ms. Mai envies the freedom that women in America have. All throughout the country it is apparent that the Vietnamese people still live with the scars of the war. It is an inescapable reality of their existence. Now, under communism, the Vietnamese people are worse off ... and it is made very clear in this book. Morley writes that the one thing many Vietnamese citizens resent the most is that they do not have the ability to hop on a Freedom Bird to escape the harsh realities of their daily existence. This book provides a fair perspective on what the Vietnamese people think of their victory.

Twenty years after Safer left Vietnam, he returns to a now unified and impoverished Vietnam, where these is homelessness in Saigon, and where a corrupt elite now rule from Hanoi. He visits the victors and those who suffered for supporting the wrong war. This is a book of 25 of his encounters, including meeting a Time correspondent who was a Viet Cong spy, to a former Mike commander living in poverty.

Safer relives and reviews some classic stories. He relates how he got the Stone Face name. He relates how the North Vietnamese were not always the masters of the conflict. One man relates how he blew up four tanks he thought were South Vietnamese, only to find that they were his, a form of enemy friendly fire. This is a good story about the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

I recommend this book, and am surprised that Safer has not written more. He is a good author.

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.

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.

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.