Book description
Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in
David Puttnam's film,
The Killing Fields
, lived in the lands of the Mekong river. This is his account of those
years, and the way in which the tumultuous events affected his
perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes
the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks,
surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, and the exquisite women,
the odours of opium, and the region's other face - that of violence and
corruption.
Jon Swain left Britain as a teenager. After a brief
stint with the French Foreign Legion he became a journalist in Paris,
but soon ended up in Vietnam and Cambodia. In five years as a young
war reporter Swain lived moments of intensity and passion such as he
had never known. He learnt something of life and death in Cambodia and
Vietnam that he could never have perceived in Europe. He saw
Indo-China in all its intoxicating beauty and saw, too, the violence
and corruption of war, and was sickened by it.
Motivated by a sense of close involvement with the Cambodian people
he went back into Phnom Penh just before the fall of the city to the
Khmer Rouge in April 1975. He was captured and was going to be
executed. His life was saved by Dith Pran, the New York Times
interpreter, a story told by the film The Killing Fields.
In Indo-China Swain formed a passionate love affair with a
French-Vietnamese girl. The demands of a war correspondent ran
roughshod over his personal life and the relationship ended.
This book is one reporter's attempt to make peace with a tumultuous
past, to come to terms with his memories of fear, pain, and death, and
to say adieu to the Indo-China he loved and the way of life that has
gone for ever.
