Joseph Sherman first saw Saigon in 1925, a wide-eyed fifteen-year-old on a hunting expedition with his family. Through five decades, he returned again and again, drawn back as much by the strange and magical land as by Lan, the Vietnamese beauty he could never forget.
He was there when the hatred of a million coolies rose against the French and he was there when the Legion fought its last and bloody stand at Dien Bien Phu.
He saw military advisers fire their first shots in America's hopeless war against the blood red tide of revolution and he climbed aboard one of the last US helicopters as they fled the fallen city of Saigon.
