An interesting book in that it gives a number of diverse viewpoints. The POWs come from a variety of backgrounds and have different strengths, weaknesses, faults, and redeeming qualities. The number of POWs giving accounts makes it a little difficult to follow until you are well into the book. Human nature, good and bad, manifests itself not only in the treatment meted out by the captors, but in the actions and reactions of the POWs. Some handle themselves admirably and unselfishly while others who were unable to handle the oppressive conditions fall apart and go so far as to betray their fellow POWs and attempt to join the NVA. These individuals attempt to justify their actions through intellectualization but one gets the impression that they know, at some level, that they have betrayed the other POWs and their country. I would give this book 3 1/2 stars. The main drawback is that the individual stories are necessarily limited in scope and we do not delve deeply enough into each man's thoughts.

Zalin Grant does a masterful job of merging the interviews of the different POW's. The reader is able to take advantage of a wide array of viewpoints on their situation as prisoners. I found myself trying to decide which prisoner was the good guy and which was the bad guy. There was more animosity between some of the prisoners than their was between them and their captors! Anyone who drools over the prospect of learning more about POW life needs to add this tale to their respective library and enjoy!

This is one of the greatest books that I have read on the Vietnam War subject, and I have read many; its limited scope notwithstanding. Ostensibly, this book is the graphic of the experiences of a discrete number of men kept captive by the VC/NVA command. However, due to the complex subtleties of the book's structure, it becomes a bit more than this, especially because it encompasses a wider array of U.S. prisoners, and also Europeans, and South Vietnamese soldiers and mercenaries. The author has chosen to extract excerpts of interviews that he must have given to those men who volunteered to speak with him. The largest part of the book is given over to a group held in high mountain jungle camps in South Vietnam, and then of their march North to Hanoi and finally of theirs and others experiences in the so-called Hanoi Hilton. We are privileged to experience the lives of these men through their own eyes. We witness brutality, humiliation, bravery, cowardice, fear, humour, death, disease, insanity, depravity and, yes, love and friendship; both internecine and between the prisoners and their 'enemies.' The Vietnam War was, for the United States, a complex situation to say the least. The POW experience there does a wonderful job of conveying the complexities and difficulties this war posed for our society. Suffice it to say that one is left with a sense of awe for the strength and forbearance of these 'survivors' (but for one of the men, Theodore Guy, whose understandably disturbing and distorted views are explored a bit later in the book). One of the most beautiful aspects of this book is the testimonials that various POW's give to explain and ameliorate the weaknesses and 'failings' of their fellow prisoners. I was also struck by the underlying humility with which the prisoners spoke of their own experiences, some of which involved personal valor and heroism that all but one of the prisoners left unsaid, only to have their secrets unveiled by a different prisoner. I say that there is one stand out voice here that is filled with anger, hatred and braggadocio and that voice is Mr. Guy's. It stands in stark contrast to the testimony of the other prisoners, and one can't help but think that the author intentionally included this point of view. Guy was the senior officer in the so-called Hanoi Hilton for much of the time he was imprisoned and was unrepentantly gung ho during his tenure there. He set up lines of communication between the prisoners in order to help give strength to his fellow Americans and to enforce his policies of resistance to the enemy and to maintain this united front. He is embittered by the fact that a small contingent of the Americans there, members of the so-called Peace Committee, were cooperating with the enemy by making tapes and writing letters that condemned the American participation in the war. He even went so far as to attempt to stir up a firestorm after he returned home by going to the press with allegations of treason against some of these now-returned prisoners. Oh, and he also gets a few kicks in against his wife's activities while he was held prisoner. What makes this unadulterated venom such a bad reflection upon Guy's character is that, while he despises these men for their weaknesses, he admits himself that he was guilty of doing very similar things, but of course he only does them after he has reached the end of his mental and physical limits. It is an unfortunate truth that self-centered people are simply incapable of comprehending that different people are well, different. To wit, every man has his breaking point, his was simply different than those he condemns. Furthermore, he alone, in the telling of his initial capture incident tells of gung ho die hard heroic battle in the face of overwhelming odds. It strikes one as darned odd that nobody else, even men who describe fighting to the end, try to make themselves look like heroes. Anyway, you as the reader will be the judge of whether Guy's contrapuntal account strikes you as being somehow self-serving and inappropriate. Oh, there are two other accounts in the book that are equally disturbing. The first is of an American fellow who went over to the Vietcong. One wonders what that guy was thinking, tellingly, the prisoners who knew him best offer very interesting insights into his motivations and character without being accusatory. There is another account from one of the fellows that Guy hated most, John Young who was the 'chief' collaborator in the 'Hanoi Hilton.' He activities seem to have been disliked by every one, even those who were sympathetic to the so-called Peace Committee. I suppose that it goes to show that there just may be one in every crowd, and also that it is precisely for this that we should avoid placing our fellow countrymen into situations that can expose these fatal character flaws if at all possible. Our nation lost a lot of currency in waging war in Southeast Asia, let us hope that we are not on the brink of doing the same now in the Middle East.

This is a useful book, because it shows how effective Ho Chi Minh was in deceiving the OSS. In fact, we now know (from various biographies published in Hanoi) that Ho Chi Minh was a dedicated Leninist who had been a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, was trained in Moscow, and then spent decades as an agent of the Communist (Third) International promoting Leninist aims. True, he did talk like a true Nationalist when he met with the OSS, and he even quoted Thomas Jefferson and praised America. As the PENTAGON PAPERS (Gravel ed., vol. I, p. 261) note, "Ho . . . was an old Stalinist, trained in Russia in the early '20s, Comintern colleague of Borodin in Canton, and for three decades leading exponent of the Marxist-Leninist canon of anti-colonial war." Similarly, the PENTAGON PAPERS (vol. I, p. 50) note that in the late 1940s Ho assured various people he was "not a communist" and that Vietnam under his leadership "could remain neutral 'like Switzerland,'" but they conclude: "But these and other such statements could have come either from a proper Leninist or a dedicated nationalist. Ho's statements and actions after 1949, and his eventual close alignment with the Sino-Societ Bloc, support the Leninist construction." If anyone wants more evidence of Ho's nearly 50-year commitment to Leninism, see my VIETNAMESE COMMUNISM: ITS ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT (Stanford: Hoover Press, 1975), which relies heavily on communist party sources including Ho's own early writings. There is no question in my mind that Maj. Patti was a decent, honorable, and intelligent man. But Ho was a brilliant political warrior, and Major Patti and his OSS colleagues were simply out of their league in trying to figure him out. This book is useful in understanding Ho's cleverness, but not very helpful in understanding what the United States should have done in Indochina.

I have just returned from Vietnam with a group of Marines I served with in the 1st Bn. 5th Marine Regiment in 1969-70. We spent a couple of days in Hanoi and were fortunate to have an hour and a half with Ambassador Peterson at the U.S. Embassy there. It is a shame our decision makers in Washington did not listen to Mr. Patti during the months of 1945 that he was assigned to Vietnam primarily to oversee the orderly release of allied POW's after the surrender of the Japanese forces who were still very much in control of Vietnam. During that time he became close to Ho Chi Minh. I was fortunate to have known Mr. Patti and had several discussions with him about that time in his life. He made no bones about the fact that Ho was wanting help from anywhere he could get it, but he (Ho) felt that the United States was the most appropriate source for help in his country's move toward independence. Ho Chi Minh told Patti at their last meeting on Sept. 30, 1945, that "he owed only his training to Moscow and for that he had repaid Moscow with fifteen years of party work. He had no other commitment. He considered himself a free agent." Mr. Patti felt that our commitment to a ten year war in Vietnam began not with our many "advisors" in the early 60's or the landing of the Marines at Red Beach in 1965, but rather our decision to support the French Colonial rule rather than an independent Vietnam in 1945.

Ambassador Peterson acknowledges that what Vietnam has today would be more accurately labeled a Labor Party, rather than Communist. Free enterprise is alive and well in Vietnam today. No one can rewrite or project history, but who can say that if we had been the source of help to Ho Chi Minh's band of nationalists in the early days of their revolution, as OSS Maj. Patti repeatedly suggested, the country would be years ahead of where they are now, economically, and hundreds of thousands of lives would not have been lost in the process.

Archimedes Patti wrote an article that was published in the Far Eastern Economic Review on Jan. 5, 1983 immediately after his own return to Hanoi earlier that year. In that article he recounts being shown a beautiful house the Vietnamese had reserved for an American Embassy. That was 14 years before we established diplomatic relations with them! Mr. Patti ended that article with: "I found the people, the cities, the countryside still there, still the same, waiting, waiting for a better tomorrow. For Vietnam, time has stood still." From my view, and in the view of Ambassador Peterson, time in Vietnam is finally beginning to move. I think Mr. Patti was correct in his 1945 assessment. I think after reading his book you will agree.

The view from Vietnam and South China at the end of WW2(best conveyed by General Stillwell, Bernard Fall and Patti) was overwhelmed by the paranoia and arrogance of JF and Allen Dulles and their heirs (JFK, LBJ, RMN, Henry the K). Patti may have been a tad naive, but he was also perceptive- the descriptions of Ho and his gang and what they wanted, and how they were going about it- are painful to read, because many, many people died needlessly after these encounters. We need to look very hard at this and other documentation of the actual situation in Viet Nam at the beginning of the US involvement- and during that involvement- before reaching what I believe to be highly suspect and unwarranted conclusions (e.g., Moyar's "Phoenix and the Birds of Prey"). For example, "Devil's Brigade," the story of some of the ex-SS and other German troops who avoided war crime trials in Europe by signing on with the French Foreign Legion for ten years of continued exploits up to and after Dien Bien Phu. Then there were the adventures of the Republic of Korea "Tigers" in central Vietnam- but who has written anything about them, or the Thai battalions? See- what the heck am I talking about?, right? Well, folks- we paid the bill for all those mercenaries, and a lot more (Nungs, etc.), and we're still paying debt that LBJ built up to buy those services, and the bombs, bullets, jets and aircraft carriers we wore out over there.

i was reading a book just recently and a part of the book was about the vietnam war. this immidiatly brought me to think about albert french's "patches of fire" which has stayed with me for ever after reading it a few years back. the reason this book is so special to me is that not only is the book so touching and amazing but i had the most unforgettable chance to meet the man himself. i so happened to be working at a restaurant where albert french was being interviewed by an english newspaper. this man was something out of the ordinary and was the kindest to me. we got talking while is was taking their order and i will never forget that moment. alert said he just wanted a simple lunch nothing to fancy, as long as it came with fries. he explained how he had been eating or rather not eating during his time in vietnam and how that had affected him for life. he started telling me a story, which is also in his book, about how his food had bacically been "alive" one day during his servicetime but cause of hunger and no other option had to simply eat it etc and his story could had gone on but i was busy serving other customers. and to cut a long story short, he said he was going to have his book sent to me, so i could sort of hear him out and so it happened.
reading "patches of fire" had an enormos impact on me, and i must admit that i truly cried finishing the book.
i give my highest recommandations for this book.

French gives the reader real insights into what war is like, and what Viet Nam did to the men that fought there. I have struggled to find books about Viet Nam and other wars from the point of view of real soldiers, not generals and journalists. This one does the job terrifically well.

French, as an African American gives us insight into what race meant before, during, and after the war. But the book does much more than that. What is remarkable and compelling for the reader is to see how much the black and white soldier had in common in the foxholes and rice paddies in Viet Nam, and then, as deeply troubled psyches, in the decades of recovery that our soldiers have gone through.

Finally, French's book is a fascinating book about writers and writing. Here is a man that first had to write to heal. In that he discovered his remarkable talents as an unschooled, but brilliant writer.

Albert French writes not only from the perspective of an American fighting in Vietnam, but also as an African-American, a view which is often neglected. I read this book for a college history course, and never before has an assigned text moved me to the point of tears. This book brings to life a time and place that many of us know little about. Though French obviously cannot, nor does he attempt, to speak for all Vietnam veterans, his story does offer an example of the long term effects of that period of time.

Keating ignores solid documentation on POW/MIAs and combines old Defense Department lines with unsubstantiated rumors. Her comments about the key area of satellite imagery and pilot distress symbols ignore basic published facts. All in all a total misrepresentation of the POW/MIA issue.

Rich Daly Researcher and Board member of the Minnesota League of POW/MIA Families and Minnesota Won't Forget POW/MIA

Ms. Keating has produced a first class expose of the deep and tragic situation that surrounds the subject of P.O.W.-M.I.A's of the Vietnam War. She shows with astute research and a concise writing style the way that so many money hungry glory seekers have perpetuated the myth of men left behind in Vietnam. It is a shame that many patriotic Americans have been taken in by this sham, kept alive by those more interested in money than in the lives of servicemen. It is time to face reality and lay aside this fiction. The evidence presented in this book should leave no one in doubt. We owe it to the men and women who served to honor the memory of their sacrifice and move on to a new day.

Susan Katz-Keating has written one of the three best books on the Vietnam War MIA issue. Sadly, the issue has been -- and continues to be -- exploited by charlatans, frauds, wannabes, and some honest people who have been misled by the others. Ms. Keating puts the claims of the MIA enthusiasts to the test of logic and reality and their case loses at every turn. Tragically, the real losers in this whole affair are the families of the missing men, many of whom are still having old wounds ripped open by shameless self-promoters. The other two books that I recommend are: "M.I.A.: Mythmaking in America," by H. Bruce Franklin, and, "M. I. A.: Accounting for the Missing in Indochina," by Paul Mather. The Franklin and Mather books are also available from Amazon.com.

As if we don't have enough books about Special Forces in Vietnam, here is still another one. Dockery's writings do not have the flow, and this short book takes longer than needed. The reader gets information about some of the missions, equipment, and the Brown Water Navy. The Navy Seals did not contribute as much as the Marines and Army in Vietnam. Still we get another book about Special Forces.

This book is written differently than most books I've read, and its a nice break when you're constantly reading. It seems that every other chapter is dedicated to giving backround information on how equipment/lines of intel etc. work and operate, the subsequent chapters build off that information without the reader getting lost on meaningless details. Maps are also included which arent necessary but give the reader an idea of what part of the country these events took place. Quiggs review has pretty much nothing to do with the book, im not sure he even read it.

I know Kevin Dockery personally. He is a master in writing SEAL history and his background search is complete. QUIG's review is absurd, he has no military background equivalent to SEAL's. He should stick to reading other topics that fit his mentality.
Dockery's book is worth every bit of reading. J.H. "Hoot" Andrews, USN, Ret., Plankowner, SEAL Team TWO

This book is waaaay to detailed. If you want to know all kinds of facts that really have nothing to do with the battle, like what every politician was thinking, what every correspondent was reporting and all kinds of other side facts, this book is for you. It begins with no real history or set up and concentrates on the embassy in Ho Chi Mihn City like that's the center of it. No way. I enjoy history, but why does almost every historical book I read have to be an epic bogged down by minutia. Give me a really strong overview with only the essential facts, and if I want to know every detail I will pursue further books. I have so many books like this I can't finish, and I'm a patient reader. That's it!

Contrary to the previous reviewer, I think Oberdorfer tackled the Tet subject comprehensively and covered all bases in explaining the turning point of the Vietnam conflict.
Oberdorfer begins the book by fully explaining what really happened at the American Embassy that fateful January night in 1968. Although most Americans today believe the Embassy was 'overrun,' Oberdorfer explains the true story of a platoon of Viet Cong blasting a hole in the wall to enter the compound but never being able to enter the Chancery building. I believe the reason Oberdorfer starts his book off with the subject is to dispel the 'overrun' myth of VC running through the building capturing documents and, even though it was a minor military skirmish compared to the street-by-street fighting in Hue and siege at Khe Sanh, the American Embassy attack was the paramount event which woke America up to what was happening in SE Asia.

Also, the previous reviewer complains the book focuses too much on the politics and media coverage of Tet, not realizing Oberdorfer's main point of the book is that Tet might have been won on the battlefield, but it was an epic defeat on American televisions and in world newspapers. The Tet offensive's primary aim was to cause political upheaval in America to give the Communists a victory exactly like what defeated the French a decade earlier. In a 1947 tract by Hanoi called "The Resistance Will Win", it states "...as a result of the long war the enemy troops become weary and discouraged, and are tormented by home-sickness. The French economy and finances are exhausted; supplying the army is difficult, the French people do not want the war to go on any longer. The movement against the diehards in France goes stronger and more fierce. World opinion severely condemns France...world movement for peace and democracy scores great successes, etc. ...

Subtract France from the quote and insert the US and there is the political reasoning for starting the General Offensive. Also, Tet not only caused US and ARVN troop casualties, but it ended a presidential administration and forever changed how the news is presented to the American public by the media. A study of Tet not involving the White House, LBJ, McNamara, Clifford, or for that matter Cronkite, the Wall Street Journal and Time, would be like reading about the light bulb and failing to mention Edison.

Oberdorfer's does a great job balancing his information by devoting whole chapters to subjects like the history of Vietnam, pre-Tet America, the shockwave that hit the US after the attack, the 'shot seen around the world' of the Saigon police chief shooting a VC prisoner on the street, the military disaster of Tet to the Viet Cong ranks, the battle of Hue and a section on one of the most decisive months in US history - March 1968.

My only gripe is that the book was first written in 1971, which interestingly gives the reader an unusual perspective as the war was still going on, but is begging for a complete Afterword section to fill in the gaps as more information on the North is now available. BTW, there is a great Chronology at the end of the book which makes it easy to follow the play-by-play and would be a student's dream in helping research information.

Gives the reader a good idea of how the Tet offensive changed the course of the Vietnam War. Gives good descriptive accounts of the battle at the U.S. embassy and Hue. This is a must book for those who want to know more about the Vietnam War.

Unfortunately this is another myopic book about the 'Vietnam War,' that would have you believe the US fought alone in Viet Nam.

Both the design and content are seriously lacking for the intended audience, grades 7+. Important facts are left out while other facts are pathetically incorrect; most captions are mislabeled, and many 'documents' are indistinguishable from the narrative text. Sadly, even in 2003 it appears America still has Post Traumatic Stress Denial with parts of our own history.

This book should be very popular with teachers who teach that wars are more than battles and dates, who want students to go beyond pop culture's depiction of the experience of the individual soldier in Viet Nam, and who want students to understand that even publicly confident leaders are often baffled, uncertain, ignorant of history, or wrong. No textbook on this complex war can even begin to cover everything, of course. Instead of details about military operations, this book concentrates on presidential decision-making, personal responses on both sides, and efforts (e.g. songs, posters, propaganda leaflets) to persuade public opinion one way or another. The material in this book on how to read documents and on propaganda by both sides should be especially effective in the classroom. In fact, the book's great strength is its inclusion of (and guides to understanding) documents such as the 1945 Viet Minh Declaration of Independence, a state department policy statement, the 1954 Geneva conference's Final Declaration, and various responses to that declaration. Defenders of U.S. involvement in the war will likely be unhappy with parts of this book, including the suggested bibliography, but no book on this war will please everyone, and probably no book on this war can truly be neutral. Fortunately the inclusion of essential primary documents allows teachers of any persuasion to use this book. The materials from the Vietnamese side are probably especially valuable here, because those materials are not familiar to American students. As a documentary history this book naturally includes no classroom activities; for that, teachers might want to consult Echoes from the Wall (a free curriculum distributed by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund) and Lessons of the Vietnam War, by Jerry Starr's Center for Social Studies Education. A teacher might also want to supplement this history with a few disparate excerpts from Bill McCloud's wonderful collection, What Should We Tell Our Children About Vietnam?

Because of my work I see a great many books on Vietnam and the Vietnam era but this one really stands out as something special. Not only is the book an excellent introduction --it is also full of material that is fascinating even to those who know the subject well!
Steven A. Leibo Ph.D.
author of _East, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific_ 2002

While this book is not a military log of each and every battle on the Vietnam front, it is a very valuable book. It offers an honest, heart-felt, even heart-wrenching view of the EFFECT of the war on American, Soliders, and the Vietnamese

Gloria Emerson's early loose calculation of the closing costs of Vietnam remains extraordinarily valuable. When our government leaps before it understands/examines, then insists upon continuing long after many bright people have recognized a sequence of policy errors, this is what can happen. Episodic/impressionistic, widest possible scope, home & away. Strikingly even-handed, though Emerson developed a very strong set of opinions. Wonderful book. Terrifying war/time.

The system of rating books by the number of stars which a reader is willing to bestow is perfect for this book. In a section called "Odd Things, But Not Forgotten," the reader is thoroughly informed of how a general was awarded a silver star, how the New York Times sent a reporter named Gloria Emerson to the Awards and Decorations Section to see why the men had made up the perfect dream when they didn't have the kind of documentation normally associated with acts of valor, and how newspaper readers responded to the story. The high point for me was a poem by a draftee, which ended with the perfect attitude for a military mind. "Let me go into battle, / a hero I shall be. / I'm forty-four, I'm still alive, / and the army's mind is me." It made me glad that I served out in the bush, and not as a clerk in some headquarters.