November 9th, 2020

Jim Laurie’s The Last Helicopter: Two Lives in Indochina...is a book that almost demands that a reader, upon completing it, sits back and digests what has just happened.

Laurie covered the last years of the Vietnam War for NBC News, and later for ABC News. In 1975, he witnessed the fall of Cambodia to the Khmer Rouge, and left Soc Sinan behind as he fled on the last helicopter out of Phnom Penh. This was the first—but not the last—time that Laurie’s career, hubris, and self-interest combined to separate the couple.

After leaving Indochina, Laurie went on to report on wars and political upheaval throughout the world in a career what would span more than five decades.

In his book Laurie offers the reader his views of the hostilities that took place in Southeast East Asia, China, and elsewhere. In that regard, we get a foreign correspondent’s look at things that most people only get to see from a distance.

During the intervening time, Laurie continued to search for Sinan, and finally found her. The story of her rescue and departure from Indochina makes for page-turning reading.

Jim Laurie honored Sinan’s request for her ashes to be spread upon the Mekong River off the banks of her native Cambodian village birthplace. Her Buddhist spirit, he writes, reached back to those in attendance.

full.https://vvabooks.wordpress.com/2020/11/ ... im-laurie/

Amazon

A story of a young woman left behind and a young reporter coming of age in a world of war; a gripping memoir of Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1970's.

As brutal wars in Cambodia and Vietnam come to swift and cataclysmic ends, a young reporter plans a last minute rescue of a woman he loved. The rescue fails.

He is helicoptered out of the Cambodian capital days before its collapse and goes on to Vietnam in time to see the fall of Saigon. He vows somehow to return to keep his promise of rescue.

Meanwhile, his former lover, Sinan, is trapped in what she calls "my prison without walls" at one of the Khmer Rouge's infamous commune work camps.

Drawn from recorded interviews with Soc Sinan and from the contemporaneous writings of Jim Laurie, The Last Helicopter captures the drama and tensions of the 1970s, while recalling places of grace and beauty now gone forever.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Last-Helicopt ... 1735120308