Broyles, former Newsweek editor, spent four weeks in Vietnam in 1984 visiting sites familiar from his days as a combat Marine, talking with people and asking probing and provocative questions. He interviewed mountain tribesmen, fishermen, Amerasian children, Communist Party officials, academics, and former members of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. In his own reminiscences from the war, Broyles conveys the moral ambiguities in a fresh and moving way, and in his narrative of the 1984 visit he conveys the pathetic state of postwar Vietnam. Although he felt "a certain satisfying irony at my old enemy being hoist with its own petard," he left Vietnam "with a sympathy for my old enemies I had not had before. " Few books capture the essence of the Vietnam War and its aftermath so vividly as this one.