Tiger in the Barbed Wire: An American in Vietnam, 1952-1991

This is a fast-paced, colorful memoir by one of the few Americans to live in Vietnam during both the French & American wars. In the 1950s, Foreign Service officer Howard Simpson patrolled with French paratroopers, reported on Hanoi s fall to the Vietminh, & was nearly machine-gunned in street fighting. In the 1960s, at a time when coups were the order of the day, he was a press advisor to Prime Minister Nguyen Khanh. When he returned to Vietnam recently to observe the shooting of a movie about Dien Bien Phu, he interviewed the legendary Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of the North s victory. Lively . . . entertaining.