SAIGON TO PLEIKU

In this memoir, a Vietnam veteran reflects on his eye-opening, transformative disillusionment as a conscript in Saigon in 1962.

Noble was drafted into the Army in 1961. Only nine months after graduating from Yale, he was dispatched to Saigon to become an undercover counterintelligence special agent. For the next year, operating as a civilian, the then-22-year-old private opened a field office in the Central Highlands of northern Saigon to collect intelligence. In just one of many frank and revealing confessions appearing throughout this affecting memoir, the author openly admits to rushing to an Army fort’s library prior to his deployment to learn where Vietnam was, only to discover useless resources. “To find out that the army intelligence center’s atlas was so out-of-date was my first hint of things to come,” he writes of America’s ambiguous objectives and impending failure in Vietnam. In straightforward yet descriptive prose, Noble describes his 12 months in Saigon and Pleiku as “very intense and personally formative” and seared into his memory. He recollects his wartime experiences as a blond, 6-foot-2-inch “young, greenhorn special agent” by drawing from about 60 letters and postcards he’d sent home to his mother. She returned the material to Noble prior to her death in 2002. Using these letters and postcards, along with pages of photographs and spirited anecdotes, he reconstructs his striking wartime experiences and coming-of-age with vivid clarity. Despite the extreme cultural and language divide, the author expresses a fond appreciation for the Indigenous Montagnard tribes of Vietnam’s Central Highlands that he continuously observed and the human connections he experienced. They taught and instilled in him an unfettered sense of human dignity “whatever their social and cultural background or level of economic development.” Ultimately, through Noble’s clear-eyed perspective, the octogenarian’s memoir becomes a testament to his drastic transformation. Starting as a true supporter of United States government policy who believed he was drafted to assist “a struggling democracy fighting an aggressive communist dictatorship,” he eventually became a staunch dissenter—participating in anti-war rallies and marches in the late ’60s and aggressively protesting American military ineptitude.

A rich, resonant wartime chronicle of the enduring effects of war on an unprepared soldier.