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.

Amazon.com
With over half a decade of service as a war correspondent in Vietnam, John Laurence earned deserved accolades for his reportage, especially for his documentary The World of Charlie Company. In this superb book, The Cat from Hue, he returns to that time, drawing on long-buried memories to capture the confusion, deceit, and terror of the era.

In 1968, John Laurence unhappily found himself dodging bullets and poking among ruins of the ancient Vietnamese city of Hue, eventually wandering square into the sights of a gun held by a North Vietnamese soldier, who could easily have shot him dead but did not. It was not his first encounter with mortal danger, and not his last; as this long, intricately constructed memoir unfolds, death greets the reader on nearly every page, along with the more mundane facts of war--the language of soldiers, the things they carried, the numbed resignation to battle as "an edge against fear." (Superstition plays a role, too: Laurence figured that the "coins, charms, four-leaf clovers, religious medals and all kinds of talismans" that he kept with him would somehow shield him from bullets, as perhaps they did.) In the company of a shell-shocked kitten, the cat of his book's title, Laurence goes on to document the lives and deaths of young soldiers during the invasion of Cambodia, men who, though personally decent in the main, were part of "a monster that inflicted so much random violence and death it produced an entire new body of evil, a catalogue of cruelty that overshadowed any possible virtue that might have come from defeating the Communists."

Harrowing, sometimes hallucinatory, written from among the weeds and rubble, and one of the best in a crowded field, Laurence's book deserves the widest possible audience. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author
John Laurence was a foreign correspondent for CBS and ABC News who covered many of the most important events of our times: from the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 to the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire. He reported more than fifteen wars and revolutions. He lives in rural England with a tribe of abandoned cats.

Keywords: The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story, Books, John Laurence, Vietnamese Conflict, 1961-1975, Personal narratives, American, Laurence, John, History - Military / War, History, Military - Vietnam War, Biography, Memoir, Historical - General, Biography & Autobiography