FROM SAIGON TO KATUM

Bourret and Huynh, Vietnam War veterans on different sides of the conflict, share their stories in this nonfiction work.

As co-author Bourret, a United States Army veteran, was writing his memoir on his experiences in Vietnam, he was serendipitously introduced by a mutual friend to Huynh, a Viet Cong veteran living in Canada. What began as a few email exchanges evolved into this “double-memoir” pieced together by editor Huerta, who deftly alternates the perspectives of Bourret and Huynh chapter-by-chapter, tracking their parallel stories from the 1950s to the present. On the surface, the two men could not have been more different: Huynh’s story begins on the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, with bedtime stories told by his mother of how the French “ripped off our resources and how they enslaved our people.” Bourret’s early chapters take place in the American heartland of Nebraska and Wyoming, depicting the idyllic life of a baby boomer whose childhood centered around playing outdoors (“with war toys included”). As their lives converge in the 1960s around the conflict in Vietnam, similarities between the two young men become apparent in their narratives. Drafted in 1968, Bourret was buoyed by “a patriotic hype”; Huynh was similarly driven by an impassioned resolve to rid his nation of foreign interference. Yet, while Bourret would soon become alienated from the Cold War’s pro-war zeitgeist, and spends much of the book critiquing American foreign policy, Huynh maintains his belief in the nobility of the North Vietnamese cause. The book more than succeeds in its effort to tell “two sides of a complex story” through its parallel timeline structure, offering readers a poignant narrative that is accompanied by ample photos, maps, and original poetry. Even after fighting stopped, the effects of the war remained, as Bourret suffered from complications from exposure to Agent Orange and struggled to navigate Veterans Affairs bureaucracy, and Huynh fought to make ends meet in a Vietnamese economy wrecked by economic sanctions from the West.

A powerful reminder of the long-term devastating impact of war.