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The Cat from Hue

A Vietnam War Story

by John Laurence

ISBN: 1891620312
ISBN-13: 9781891620317
Format: Hardcover

Summary

This Vietnam War memoir is by a former CBS News correspondent who covered the war from the mid-'60s through 1970. He provides you-are-there coverage of the battlegrounds-including the bloody battle of Hue-as well as anecdotes about fellow journalists.

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Media Reviews

"[O]n a par with Michael Herr's DISPATCHES as literature-but, unlike Herr's book, scrupulously true, making it a stanout in a crowded field."

   -- Kirkus

"Laurence's eloquent, at times acerbic recollection of Vietnam is one of the finest books in its genre....His Vietnam reportage was exceptional, almost artful; his summary and recapitulation more than three decades later is formidable, gripping and always informative. He deserves to be read thoughtfully and carefully."    -- Stanley Kutler

   -- New York Times Book Review

"[Laurence] offers the most lucid account so far of American and South Vietnamese reasoning as well as of the tactics of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese."    -- Bruce Palling

   -- Times Literary Supplement

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published date: 2001
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.5 x 9.75 inches
Weight: 2.7 pounds
Pages: 850

Publisher's Notes

This is the true story of a young American reporter who went to Vietnam with an open mind and an innocent heart and was plunged into a world of cruel beauty and savage violence. His experiences in the war forced him to question all his assumptions about his country, the nation's leaders and his own sanity.
John Laurence covered Vietnam for CBS News from 1965 to 1970. He was judged by his colleagues to be the best television reporter of the war. He and his camera team lived with a squad of U.S. troops in the jungles of War Zone C to film "The World of Charlie Company," a documentary that received every major award for broadcast journalism. Despite the professional acclaim, the traumatic stories Laurence covered became a personal burden that he carried long after the war was over. He struggled with memories of the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Hue, incoming artillery at Khe Sanh and Con Thien, the wounding of those around him, the deaths of his friends, the killing of civilians, a colonel who smoked opium during the siege of his camp, American troops who fell in love with their dead comrades. Mostly, his conscience haunted him about a close encounter with a North Vietnamese soldier that forced him to make a decision of life and death.
After years of reckoning with his memories, Laurence has made sense of them in this memoir by weaving them into a compelling story. It is laced with humor, anger, love, and the unforgettable tale of a very idiosyncratic cat who was determined to play his part in the Vietnam revolution. In reconstructing his experiences, he has relied not only on his notes and memory, but also on hundreds of hours of film footage shot at the time. This gives the book an uncanny vividness and fidelity to facts.
The Cat from Hue is filled with bizarre stories of unexpected human behavior, of famous names and of unknown soldiers, of the worlds of the American grunt and the Vietnamese civilian, of incredible humanity and courage, of corruption and cowardice, and of the personal price of survival and sanity. Along the way, it clarifies the history of that murky war and the role that journalists (some of them as crazy as they were brave) played in altering its course. Finally, the book offers a secret to survival for those who still struggle, as he did, with the demons of Vietnam.
For anyone who was there, for anyone who wants to discover what it was like to be there, for all of us trying to understand what the Vietnam War meant and still means for America, The Cat from Hue is memorable reading.

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The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story

John Laurence

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