A British foreign correspondent's often stirring chronicle of his
life and times covering the war in Indochina during the years
1970-75. Swain, an award-winning Sunday Times of London reporter,
looks back at the most memorable moments of his life: his
assignments in Phnom Penh and Saigon during the last five years of
the American war in Indochina. He does so with a no-frills memoir
that also contains, among other things, his trips back to Cambodia
and Vietnam in the 1980s, and his three-month kidnapping by
revolutionaries in Ethiopia in the late 1970s. The heart of the
book, though, is Swain's white-hot recreation of the fall of Phnom
Penh to the Khmer Rouge. Acting on "an irresistible impulse," Swain
scrambled aboard the last flight into Phnom Penh from Bangkok on
April 12, 1975. Along with several other journalists, he witnessed
the first weeks of the infamous Killing Fields, the holocaust waged
by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian people. Swain's account of
the insane forced evacuation of the entire population of
refugee-swelled Phnom Penh is not for the faint of heart. He sets
out in often gruesome detail what he calls "the greatest caravan of
human misery" he saw "in five years of war." Swain includes an
account of his personal brush with death, after he and the American
journalist Sidney Schanberg and the latter's Cambodian assistant,
Dith Pran, were detained by guerillas and threatened with
execution. Swain's version of that incident, and of Dith Pran's
subsequent surrender to the Khmer Rouge, jibes with what Schanberg
wrote in "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" (on which the movie The
Killing Fields was based). Swain, Schanberg, and Pran lived through
their Cambodian nightmare. But Swain also tells the stories of many
others who perished along with hundreds of thousands of their
fellow Cambodians. An accomplished memoir that will be remembered
for its evocation of the horrors of the Cambodian Killing Fields.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed
in David Puttnam's film, The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of
the Mekong river. This is his account of those years, and the way
in which the tumultuous events affected his perceptions of life and
death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the
Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks, surrounded by
mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women, the odours
of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and
corruption.
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