The narrative begins in 1960, on the eve of an abortive coup against the Diem government. An honest and ethical ARVN colonel and his dedicated wife represent the best of the Vietnamese people, and their opposite number, the coldblooded leader of a Communist terrorist cell, is in his own way equally devoted to his country. While the novel's pace is sometimes slowed by the interpolation of historical material and a smattering of Christian and Buddhist theology, it builds to a climactic account of a terrorist attack. Only Trigg's determination to show the possibilities of reconciliation as dramatized in a scene between the widow and the terrorist leader strikes a false not. An extensive bibliography attest to the book's assiduously researched background.
Line drawings add local color.
The author chooses to blend the personal and the political, filtering the events that followed the coup through the lives of characters who were changed forever by violent political upheaval. Trigg, who lived in Saigon for 1959 to 1964, offers well-researched insights into the struggle between North and South Vietnam and the role that U.S. and British politics played in the war. Those of us there in the late 1950s and early 1960s were captured, hooked, by the challenging problems of a people waking to the idea of freedom from tyranny, from foreign occupation.