Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting

ISBN-13: 9780803222618 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 360 str.

Beverly Deepe Keever

Opis

Chosen for 2015 One Book One Nebraska In 1961, equipped with a master s degree from famed Columbia Journalism School and letters of introduction to Associated Press bureau chiefs in Asia, twenty-six-year-old Beverly Deepe set off on a trip around the world. Allotting just two weeks to South Vietnam, she was still there seven years later, having then earned the distinction of being the longest-serving American correspondent covering the Vietnam War and garnering a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Death Zones and Darling Spies, Beverly Deepe Keever describes what it was like for a farm girl from Nebraska to find herself halfway around the world, trying to make sense of one of the nation s bloodiest and bitterest wars. She arrived in Saigon as Vietnam s war entered a new phase and American helicopter units and provincial advisers were unpacking. She tells of traveling from her Saigon apartment to jungles where Wild West styled forts first dotted Vietnam s borders and where, seven years later, they fell like dominoes from communist-led attacks. In 1965 she braved elephant grass with American combat units armed with unparalleled technology to observe their valor and their inability to distinguish friendly farmers from hide-and-seek guerrillas. Keever s trove of tissue-thin memos to editors, along with published and unpublished dispatches for New York and London media, provide the reader with you-are-there descriptions of Buddhist demonstrations and turning-point coups as well as phony ones. Two Vietnamese interpreters, self-described as darling spies, helped her decode Vietnam s shadow world and subterranean war. These memoirs, at once personal and panoramic, chronicle the horrors of war and a rise and decline of American power and prestige. "