After the War Was Over; Hanoi and Saigon

New York: Random House, 1992. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Good. David Lindroth (Cartographer), Russell Farrell (Ja. 22 cm, [8], 131, [5] pages. DJ has some wear and soiling. Staple holes in fep. Includes two page, black and white map. Cornelius Mahoney Sheehan (October 27, 1936 - January 7, 2021) was an American journalist and war correspondent. As a reporter for The New York Times in 1971, Sheehan obtained the classified Pentagon Papers from Daniel Ellsberg. His series of articles revealed a secret United States Department of Defense history of the Vietnam War and led to a US Supreme Court case, New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), which invalidated the United States government's use of a restraining order to halt publication. He received a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for his 1988 book A Bright Shining Lie, about the life of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Sheehan released the book, After the War Was Over: Hanoi and Saigon, in 1992. It was inspired by his visit to Vietnam three years earlier. This book recounts the author's trip back to Vietnam the year after A Bright Shining Lie was published, and the lingering effects of the war. Derived from a Kirkus review: A view of Vietnam since America's involvement, by the author of perhaps the best book on the war, A Bright Shining Lie. Here, Sheehan covers his visit to Vietnam in 1989 with his wife, Susan—who, with him, coauthored some of this material for a series of New Yorker articles and whom Sheehan credits here for her insight and her editing skills. Sheehan sees a Vietnam suffering not from the American war but from a prolonging of the agony by the rigid regime of Le Duan, with its prosecution of new wars and its Stalinist economics. In 1986, as General Giap relates in a longish and candid interview, came doi moi, or ``the new way.'' Out went the collective farms and heavy industrial projects; in came a free market. Within a year, Vietnam was exporting rice, and the currency had stabilized. Still, it's a desperately poor country, the North in particular, as Sheehan's tour of hospitals demonstrates: They are under equipped and cannot afford to stock antibiotics or basic vaccines. In Saigon, Sheehan is overcome with memories and seeks out his and Susan's old haunts, as well as those of John Vann, subject of much of A Bright Shining Lie. Like the North, the South is a society run by party faithful—and the privileges of rank have hearkened to them, leaving out a great many of the ``mutilated.'' Even so, the armies of homeless have been eliminated, and no one is starving. In Saigon, Western influence is strongest, ready for the moment when the American embargo drops and Vietnam becomes the economic powerhouse everyone is anticipating. Already the BMWs proliferate. Essential for your Vietnam shelf.