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I won't elaborate on the subject matter of this book, but I will say, as a Vietnam War veteran, avid reader over many decades of modern Vietnamese history, as well as a student of the Vietnamese language, I found this a very moving read. The vast amount of material was well organized and well recounted here. I particularly gained new insights into Vietnamese life in the North during and immediately after the French colonial interlude.

The agonies of Saigon in its final hours are movingly evoked here. Obviously, for a detailed and well-documented treatment of the final years of the Republic of Vietnam, one should turn to Frank Snepp's excellent, "Decent Interval." Nonetheless, where Mai makes a real contribution is her gripping account of what befell those in her family and many other Vietnamese loyalists who were unable to escape the new regime.

All in all, a well-written and valuable memoir and I enthusiastically recommend it for any level of interest in Vietnam. I would have given it a full 5-star rating if not for the author's unsatisfactory and superficial treatment of the less-than-monolithic Viet-Minh/PRVN leadership, notably the enigmatic and complex Ho Chi Minh, and, in view of the attention to the disastrous Land Reform policies rightfully given in this narrative, the interim eclipse of Ho by the radical pro-China faction exemplified by Truong Chinh as a prime cause. For this, one should read the excellent works of William J. Duiker, especially his "Ho Chi Minh." Secondly, I found the lack of a detailed map with provincial delineations in a narrative where geography plays such an important role downright inexplicable.

I am Vietnamese and I moved to the US when I was 9 back in 1995. Having been born after the war and resettled at a young age, I have been trying to learn more about Vietnam and its history, particularly the events that took place during the war. This book is a fascinating accounting of one family's history through the war with the French, the rise of the Viet Minh in the north, the fall of Saigon, and their resettlement in the US, Canada, France, and Australia. It was a very moving and poignant personal account and Mai is a good writer. Mai is not a historian and she doesn't claim to be one. This is just her family's accounting of events, but it does give a lot of insight into people on both sides of the war, and why the South might have lost. One of the best book purchases I have made!

This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary woman. Of all the Vietnam narratives I've read, this is the first to give us a detailed picture of life in a Vietnamese mandarin family, a milieu which most of us who were there never knew existed. Moreover, this is a history of Vietnam seen from all sides because Mrs. Elliott's family members were involved in all the events that shaped the modern history of her native land from the French occupation to today's united Vietnam under communist rule. She spares no details and some of them must've been very painful for her to write about, especially the foibles of certain prominent family members whom she describes objectively and without emotion, and with all their warts. That kind of honesty is refreshing in a book like this and frankly makes her subjects' vulnerably human in spite of their extraordinary accomplishments. No mistake about it, the Duong family produced some extraordinary individuals but in Mrs. Elliott's narrative they put their robes on the same way everyone else does.

Mrs. Elliott is also the author of the magisterial RAND IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. She was a RAND employee in the 1960s working as an interrogator and translator in the Vietcong Motivation and Morale Study commissioned by the Department of Defense. This effort produced hundreds of in-depth interviews with Viet Cong and North Vietnamese POWs and defectors which today are a priceless archive of the ordinary communist fighter's life in the jungle. When Lee Lanning and I wrote INSIDE THE VC AND THE NVA we relied heavily on these interviews some of which were conducted by Mrs. Elliott herself. We used other RAND reports, particularly "Documents of an Elite Viet Cong Delta Unit: The Demolition Platoon of the 514th Battalion," authored by Mrs. Elliott and her husband, David.

If only we'd paid closer attention to what the Elliotts and their colleagues were finding out about our communist enemy in Vietnam we might've gained valuable insights. And, as she very perceptively points out in this book, if we'd only done a similar study on our South Vietnamese ally we might've taken a different course in Vietnam than the one that led to disaster and the vast diaspora Mrs. Elliott describes in this book.

Mrs. Elliott was only a child when the first Indochina War ended. She grew up in a privileged environment, went to the best schools, was educated at Georgetown at the American taxpayer's expense, married an American intellectual, and was safe here in the States when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese juggernaut. She never knew the ordinary people of Vietnam, the soldiers, the bar girls, the prostitutes, the street vendors, the street urchins, the rural villagers, not like the average GI and if he was an infantryman, he knew the Vietnamese countryside better than this author ever could, better, in fact, than many of his communist enemies fresh off the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Of her siblings none were killed in the war.

But when the Duongs fled their country in 1975, those who didn't stay behind to experience concentration camps or victory in the ranks of the VC and the NVA, they came with nothing except a will to survive and provide for their children. A hundred-year membership in the mandarinate was worthless to these new immigrants. We should never forget it's people like them who've made this country what it is.

Yes, Mrs. Elliott reveals in this book that she shared the anti-war views of the American intelligentsia which at the time outraged me and if I'd have met her back then I don't think I'd have liked her -- I'd have considered her a communist stooge. But she was right that the way we & our South Vietnamese ally were pursuring that war would end in failure and while she had close relatives who were devoted communists, she's not one herself, she's Vietnamese and that is a BIG difference.

My son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren have all been back to Vietnam. It's not the same country it was in 1975. Mrs. Elliott doesn't beat you over the head with this fact, but it's clear and one might wonder who really won that war. My barber, a Vietnamese immigrant, wasn't even born when I first went there & he was but a baby when I left. That, Mrs. Elliott tells us in this book, is how we come to terms with the past, by living through and beyond it. Her family did it and so can the rest of us.

I first heard Mai Elliott on Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History Podcast, reporting on her work for the Rand Corporation interviewing Viet Minh and Viet Cong prisoners of the US. Her telling of her family's story beginning with her mandarin great grandfather and his brother and continuing until the evacuation of Ho Chi Minh City provides rich insights into life in Viet Nam during the French and American occupations. Her writing is reportorial and free of political bias, finding fault with the mindless cruelty of the early Viet Minh cadres, the French government, and the American military. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who genuinely wants a better understanding of this important time in Viet Nam.

Wow, what a great book. So much interesting family history. Even though I was a teenager during the Vietnam war. I was not fully interested until recently. This book tells you why it happened and what was going on in Vietnam years before the Americans got involved. Now I have a greater understanding. This books gives a fair look at all sides. Wonderfully written. Thank you for a great read.