About the book
Copyright: 2013
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-2261-8
360 pages
Get the book
Death Zones and Darling Spies
Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting
In 1961, equipped with a master's degree from famed Columbia Journalism
School and letters of introduction to Associated Press bureau chiefs in
Asia, twenty-six-year-old Beverly Deepe set off on a trip around the world.
Allotting just two weeks to South Vietnam, she was still there seven years
later, having then earned the distinction of being the longest-serving
American correspondent covering the Vietnam War and garnering a Pulitzer
Prize nomination.
In Death Zones and Darling Spies, Beverly Deepe Keever
describes what it was like for a farm girl from Nebraska to find herself
halfway around the world, trying to make sense of one of the nation’s
bloodiest and bitterest wars. She arrived in Saigon as Vietnam's war
entered a new phase and American helicopter units and provincial
advisers were unpacking. She tells of traveling from her Saigon
apartment to jungles where Wild West–styled forts first dotted Vietnam's
borders and where, seven years later, they fell like dominoes from
communist-led attacks. In 1965 she braved elephant grass with American
combat units armed with unparalleled technology to observe their
valor--and their inability to distinguish friendly farmers from
hide-and-seek guerrillas.
Keever's trove of tissue-thin memos to editors, along with published and
unpublished dispatches for New York and London media, provide the reader
with you-are-there descriptions of Buddhist demonstrations and
turning-point coups as well as phony ones. Two Vietnamese interpreters,
self-described as "darling spies," helped her decode Vietnam’s shadow
world and subterranean war. These memoirs, at once personal and
panoramic, chronicle the horrors of war and a rise and decline of
American power and prestige.
Source:
University of Nebraska Press
Book review: 'Death Zones' offers fresh look at Vietnam