This may be the best book written about the American involvement in Vietnam. The smells, the mood, the feeling of Saigon all vibrate through these pages. Poetic, deeply insightful, moving; it conveys the hopelessness of the American effort in the most human terms, through the eyes of a romantic foreign correspondent. Though set in 1964-65, Kaiko seems to get the essence of the war, long before it played out. A brilliant book.