Book Condition: New. Bangkok 1997 repr. from 1976; 303 pp., 16 pp. illus., 150 x 210 mm, pbk. Weight 0.520 Kgs. Terzani, Tiziano; Saigon 1975: Three Days and There Months. This book reminds us of the fall of Saigon and the defeat of the Americans in South Vietnam. Many people today visit Vietnam and in the back of their minds they connect that country with a long, painful war that happened many years ago. But how did that war end? Here is a unique eye-witness account of that dramatic, epochal event written by a journalist who had been in Indochina as a war correspondent for over four years when, on April 27, 1975, he slipped back into Saigon. The city, surrounded by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces, was in panic and thousands of people were trying to escape. Foreigners, including most journalists were soon evacuated by American planes, ships and helicopters that landed on rooftops just before the communists moved in. Terzani decided to stay and he reported on the next ninety-four days: the last-ditch negotiation attempts, the panicked US evacuation, the precipitous conquest of Saigon, the anxious waiting for a bloodbath that never came, and the first signs of transformation and reconstruction. Terzani, whose reports of the takeover at Doc Lap Palace on April 30, 1975, were the first news-bulletins out of the new Vietnam, brings an informed passion to this exclusive story. He provides dramatic revelations about the last few days of the American presence: how the Americans blocked negotiations to gain time for their own evacuation, the story behind the abortive baby-lift, the unmasking of agents on both sides. He offers an incisive picture of Saigon waiting, of the Americans escaping, of communist troops marching triumphantly into the city center shouting "Giai Phong! Giai Phong!" "Liberation! Liberation!"
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