Living Dangerously: In Sweet Delusions and Datelines from Shrieking Hell

Review\n"Don Tate, whom I knew as a correspondent in the old days in Saigon and have seen many times since, captures the mood, the ethos, and the suffering of the Vietnam War in this saga of love and hate, arrogance and humiliation in the battlegrounds of Vietnam and the social whirl of Saigon. He takes us from "the Continental shelf," the veranda of the legendary Continental Hotel, and the raucous streets of the South Vietnamese capital, then back, again and again, to scenes of life and death in remote jungles and rice paddies. This is an epic of war and love that captures, in fiction, the debacle of Vietnam in the period of the disastrous Tet 1968 offensive and the "second wave" that formed the turning point of the war. On the way, he satirizes the phonies and loonies, from blowhard journalists to chest-thumping generals, all guilty in the tragedy of the war."
Donald Kirk, one-time Vietnam correspondent, author, "Tell it to the Dead: Stories of a War, " and "Wider War: The Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos."\nLiving Dangerously: In Sweet Delusions And Datelines From Shrieking Hell is a history-driven story casting a wide net over the Vietnam War, called the most important event of the second half of the twentieth century. It is a story with flashbacks and live action, from the battlefield to the bedroom, politics and the military, to a his-her war of sweet, bitter, and brave love.\nJim Jordan is a war correspondent reporting on the wildest, weirdest, and most impossible conflict ever. Susanna Robinson is a young beauty, more complex than the curvy little beach bombshell she seems. Susanna endures both the shooting war and the grab-and-growlers (chief among them a brilliant English wordsmith and scumbag). This is 1968, a year like no other – riots, protests, assassinations, radical cultural changes, and an array of memorable characters caught in Vietnam’s shattering Tet Offensive.\nShades of soldiers, women, and news-types, including cognac-nipping, Sean Donlan, a fainting French photographer, who’d rather be shooting his bony beauties along the Seine, a passionately anti-war female correspondent, and the old English, America-despising scoundrel by-lined E. Drudgington Blow. Winston Churchill he is not. Tales emerge of courage and puking-in-the-dust cowardice, of gritty-funny realism. Full of fury and fright, tortured rights and wrongs, Living Dangerously captures the essence of great war novels such as The Red Badge of Courage and Catch 22.\nDonald Tate won the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award for his war coverage in Vietnam in 1968. During his seven years as Vietnam war correspondent for Scripps Howard Newspapers in Vietnam, he covered the major actions of the war. He also covered the Indo-Pakistani conflict, the war in Cyprus, the Arab-Israeli war, and various revolutions. Later, with The Stars and Stripes he covered hotspots in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. A native of Memphis, Tenn., he now resides in Panama City, Florida, with his wife and daughter.