The Only War We've Got: Early Days in South Vietnam Review

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(More customer reviews)This is an amazing book. Before Vietnam became a household word, Ford bought a ticket to Saigon so he could see the war for himself. There were only a few Americans in Vietnam at the time, reporters and advisors and helo crews--no combat troops tho they all saw combat from time to time, including Ford. He goes on an armored invasion of a seashore town, slogs through the jungle with Vietnamese Rangers, patrols with the American Green Berets, and celebrates the Fourth of July by shooting up the Saigon River with a gang from the U.S. Navy.
Ford's Vietnam isn't the one you generally read about. He loves the country and admires the Americans he meets in his travels. They in turn love their work, at least the men in the field do. But between the lines you can see that things will go terribly wrong with America's adventure in South Vietnam.
Belongs on the shelf of every student of the Vietnam War.
Carleton Ross

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It's the summer of 1964. The bush hat, not the steel helmet, is the favored headgear of the 16,000 American advisors in South Vietnam. They love their work, and they're very good at it. How can they possibly fail?Covering their war are 40 foreign reporters, including novelist Daniel Ford. Armed with a camera and a notebook, he wanders the country on foot and by military transport--helicopter, jeep, landing craft, junk, armored personnel carrier, and an Air Force flare ship--from the Mekong Delta to the Central Highlands. Once or twice a week, or whenever he is reunited with his Hermes portable, he types up an account of what he has seen and done. Here is that journal, 36 years after it was written. It is a freeze-frame picture of the Vietnam War before it became a quagmire. "How good-hearted we were!" Ford says of himself and the men he met in his travels. "And how badly it all turned out."

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