When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace

by Le Ly Hayslip, Jay Wurts

It is said that in war heaven and earth change places not once, but many times. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is the haunting memoir of a girl on the verge of womanhood in a world turned upside down.

The youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in Ky La, her tiny village in central Vietnam. As the government and Viet Cong troops fought in and around Ky La, both sides recruited children as spies and saboteurs. Le Ly was one of those children. Before the age of sixteen, Le Ly had suffered near-starvation, imprisonment, torture, rape, and the deaths of beloved family members—but miraculously held fast to her faith in humanity. And almost twenty years after her escape to America, she was drawn inexorably back to the devastated country and family she left behind. Scenes of this joyous reunion are interwoven with the brutal war years, offering a poignant picture of Vietnam, then and now, and of a courageous woman who experienced the true horror of the Vietnam War—and survived to tell her unforgettable story.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Asia, War, Biography, Biography Memoir

400 pages, Paperback

First published April 29, 1989

About the author

Le Ly Hayslip is a Vietnamese-American writer, memoirist, and humanitarian, known for her work in rebuilding cultural bridges between Vietnam and the United States following the Vietnam War. Born in Ky La village, Vietnam, she endured a tumultuous childhood marked by war and personal hardship. At 12, American helicopters landed in her village, and at 14, she was tortured in a South Vietnamese prison for her "revolutionary sympathies."
After fleeing to Saigon, Hayslip worked in various jobs, including as a prostitute and drug courier, before marrying American contractor Ed Munro in 1969. Following his death, she married Dennis Hayslip, though this second marriage was troubled by domestic violence.
Hayslip's memoirs, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989) and Child of War, Woman of Peace (1993), recount her experiences in Vietnam and the challenges of adapting to American life. She founded the East Meets West Foundation, a charitable organization focused on improving health and welfare in Vietnam. In 1995, she received the California State Assembly award for her humanitarian efforts. Her life was adapted into the 1993 film Heaven & Earth, directed by Oliver Stone, where she made a cameo appearance.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful memoir about a Vietnamese American woman who lived through the Vietnam War as a young Vietnamese girl in the 1960s. I loved Le Ly Hayslip’s honest, visceral descriptions of what it felt like living in Vietnam as well as the horrible impacts of war. She shares her raw, unfiltered perspective on watching family, friends, and community members get incarcerated and/or killed, living in a state of constant distrust and uncertainty about her safety and the safety of those she cares about, and experiencing torture and multiple instances of sexual assault in her early adolescence. Amidst this personal account of the Vietnam War she shares some conversations and reflections about the motivations of different forces within the war (e.g., the Viet Cong compared to the Republican Army in the south) as well as an overarching desire for peace.

I feel so grateful that Le Ly Hayslip wrote this memoir and shared her experience living through the Vietnam War. As a Vietnamese American whose parents immigrated to the United States, reading this memoir helps me feel closer to my heritage and my parents’ experience. I wish that accounts like these were incorporated more often into the education system in the United States, as opposed to predominantly reading books by white men and/or from white men’s perspectives. Hayslip writes with a lot of candor about what she went through, and I feel like her narrative is invaluable as a result. Some themes that stood out to me include the sheer atrocity of war and how it damaged so many people’s lives in Vietnam, as well as the colonization – especially the sexual colonization – enacted by soldiers from the United States and how proximity to these mostly white soldiers carried power, which sucks and made me despise white supremacy once again.

Totally recommend to those interested in learning about the Vietnam War from a woman who actually lived through it. At times I felt like the narrative was a bit slow during the beginning, especially the first part of her journey back to Vietnam as an adult. I also took some issue with some victim-blaming language against sex workers later on in the memoir, how Hayslip expressed a sentiment that sex workers who “chose” sex work are to blame for not making better choices, which felt like such an awful thing to express given the environmental conditions (e.g., white supremacy, imperialism) that may have necessitated sex work. Despite these small constructive critiques I still enjoyed this book a lot and possess renewed anti-war and anti-imperialism sentiment after reading it.

[Lori Keeton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Le Ly Hayslip lived a life as a peasant in Ky La, a small village near Danang in the center of Vietnam. Her family taught her the ways of their culture - to love and honor family, traditions and their ancestors. Her father taught her to sacrifice one’s self for freedom. Her mother taught her about humility and the value of working hard - that it was not a disgrace to work like an animal on their farm. From the age of 12-15, Le Ly fought for the Viet Cong against American and South Vietnamese soldiers. The peasants like Le Ly’s family were taught to believe the ideas set forth by the Viet Cong and they believed and assumed all they heard was true. They believed the Viet Cong meant freedom, independence and happiness because Uncle Ho promised that the Communists would look after your rights and interests. Those loyal to the Viet Cong and Uncle Ho were brainwashed basically.
Even when things were at their worst—when allied forces devastated the countryside and the Viet Cong themselves resorted to terror to make us act the way they wanted—the villagers clung to the vision the Communists had drummed into us.

Le Ly remained in Vietnam until 1970, 5 years before the war’s end, having lived most of her young womanhood living the horrors of war. In 1986, she made a trip back to visit her family that she had left behind. For 16 years, she lived in San Diego and made a new life as a Vietnamese-American, not a complete part of either world. Seeing her family again was difficult and the new Vietnam she witnessed was as if the war had never actually ended. The people living under Communist rule were still as poor or poorer than they had ever been. Le Ly was writing this memoir and her remembrances of her life in Vietnam are beautifully and devastatingly described here. She does not leave out any details of her life. The details are many and the stories are horrifying. The memories spliced into her visit in 1986 are so smoothly and expertly written. Her experiences are too numerous to write about here and are best meant for readers to experience them as she tells them. I highly recommend this memoir if you are interested in reading of the war from the perspective of a young woman who made a way for herself out of the atrocious war zone.

In the prologue, Le Ly writes to the American GI who reads her book:
I have witnessed, firsthand, all that you went through. I will try to tell you who your enemy was a why almost everyone in the country you tried to help resented, feared, and misunderstood you. It was not your fault. It could not have been otherwise. Long before you arrived, my country had yielded to the terrible logic of war. What for you was normal—a life of peace and plenty—was for us a hazy dream known only in our legends. Because we had to appease the allied forces by day and were terrorized by Viet Cong at night, we slept as little as you did. We obeyed both sides and wound up pleasing neither. We were people in the middle. We were what the war was all about.
Your story, however, was different. You came to Vietnam, willingly or not, because your country demanded it. Most of you did not know or fully understand, the different wars my people were fighting when you got here. For you, it was a simple thing: democracy against communism. For us, that was not our fight at all. How could it be? We knew little of democracy and even less about communism. For most of us it was a fight for independence—like the American Revolution. Many of us also fought for religious ideals, the way the Buddhists fought the Catholics. Behind the religious war came the battle between city people and country people—the rich against the poor—a war fought by those who wanted to change Vietnam and those who wanted to leave it as it had been for a thousand years. Beneath all that, too, we had vendettas between native Vietnamese and immigrants (mostly Chinese and Khmer) who had fought for centuries over the land. Many of these wars go on today. How could you hope to end them by fighting a battle so different from our own?
The least you did—the least any of us did—was our duty. For that we must be proud.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the closest I have ever come to understanding the horror of war. You are in the story and with her the whole time.

[Ming Wei · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book many years ago, and I still remember how powerful, emotional, and in some parts upseting the book was. Set in the 1960s Vietnam, life was a living hell for many of the population and this books clever story telling drags the reader into the nightmare. What you expect from a story line engulfed in a war torn country, were simple, innocent average people do what ever they can to survive. I have to place this book in my favourites list. Would like to read it again in the future.

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of the problem reading history is that sometimes one tends to look at the overall picture; the strategic view, rather than the impact of an event on the individual Le Ly Hayslip has recounted her family's personal experiences during the Vietnam war from the perspective of those caught in the middle. Her story portrays the agony of the destruction of a centuries-old way of life and the ruination of a country. The village she lived in, Ky La, was just a tiny fanning village, one surely no one has heard of. Yet, the village's ordeal, first from the French, followed by the nocturnal terror of the Viet Cong, and finally the rain of American explosives totally obliterating its existence, was shared by much of the country. Pitted against the horror of modern warfare the family and village life disintegrated. First suspected of being a member of the Viet Cong, she was imprisoned and tortured by the South Vietnamese. Upon release the Viet Cong assumed she had become a collaborator and added her name to the death list. As she ran away from the village her allegiance to traditional values faded, she bore an illegitimate child, took American lovers, and under duress became a black marketeer. She worshiped at the "shrine of the street-smart and the shrewd, not at the altar of my ancestors." Despite it all, she despairs not for the future, but has tried to break through the cycle of vengeance and. now works for the East Meets West Foundation, an organization which hopes to reconcile the differences between the two countries.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the closest I will ever get to understanding my father's childhood as a peasant in South Vietnam during the war that Americans know as the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese know as the American War.

I heard vaguer, child-censored versions of my dad's stories of the pressures of two sides (Viet Cong & Republican) in his village, and the euphemism of being taken away for "personal discussion" by the Viet Cong, but reading this memoir of a woman with different-yet-similar experiences during said war without my dad to discuss it with, and as an adult with greater understanding, hit me more powerfully more than I could have imagined.

The tone occasionally strikes as a bit preachy, especially in the final third of the book, but it doesn't make the memoir of Le Ly's wartime experience, or her return and subsequent efforts to repair the wounds of that war—whether with her nuclear family or her countrymen—any less compelling. We're further along the path of reconciliation with our war wounds than we were when Le Ly originally wrote this book, but the themes of this work can and should be applied to anywhere or anyone who has been ravaged by war's often-debilitating experiences.

My father would have appreciated this book and its mission. I would encourage anyone to read it, though I'm not sure everyone would get as much out of it as I personally did because of my own Vietnamese heritage.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

4⭐

Essential for anyone wishing to understand the thinking of those caught up in the late war in Vietnam. A window into the culture and belief system of the ordinary people, through the story of one extraordinary woman.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hard to read at times, so I put it down and took a break from torture, rape, and the horrible deaths contained in its pages. However, it is DEFINITELY worth reading to get one woman's viewpoint of the situation in Vietnam during the sixties. I like that she seems unbiased. She does not particulary seem to take the side of the North, or the South, or the Americans. (Although she did become American, and seems patriotic to both Viet Nam and the U.S.)

If you live in a country where vitamins, chewing gum, and decent coffee are an every day part of life, this book will make you feel VERY grateful. It is really a book everyone should read....

[Simona · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Un essere umano è sempre un essere umano, a prescindere dall'etichetta che mettiamo sul suo corpo".

[Alisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this book. It literally took me years to read---because it didn't grab my attention and beg to be read every day. After visiting Vietnam, I wanted to understand the war from a local's perspective, and I think this book achieves this exactly. The author grows up in a central village that is torn between the Viet Cong and Republican (the side the US was on) forces--and they have to feign allegiance to both of them at different times, in order to survive. I believe it gave a balanced perspective of the differences between the two, each one's strengths and weaknesses, and how unfortunate it was for many of the Vietnamese people to be caught between the two forces. Add in the American soldiers, and the story gets even more tumultuous and harder to stomach. Theft, black markets, rape, sex with a price tag--all part and parcel of being a young woman during the Vietnamese War. In the end, the 20 year old woman ends up marrying an American older than her father, in exchange for coming to the US and having her young family provided for. The story is told from two different time periods--one during the war, and the other when she returns in the late 80's and fears Viet Cong retaliation for a refugee's return to a country that is still in the depths of communism. I preferred the storyline set during the war, and found the latter story to be long-winded and less interesting (until the VERY end, when she is reunited with her family). Overall, I did not like the writing style. It was overly-descriptive and flowing with insignificant details that made it take forever and a day to get through. I have now picked up her second book that talks about her arrival to the US, and already I can tell I will like the writing style better (her co-Author is different). I think there is value to this book, but I give it 3 stars due to how slow of a read it was, and my distaste for the writing style.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a nonfiction autobiography of one woman's life in Vietnam during the war. This contains much tragedy as this woman returns to her home country after having lived in the U.S. for a while. She toggles back and forth from her reunion with her family that stayed in Vietnam and the memories she had while growing up in a war torn country. There are scenes that were hard to get through. There was so much rape in this. It was so sad that this was someone's reality.

This book posed some serious questions. It had my mind reeling. War changes people. It molds them and forces them down paths that wouldn't have been on their radar otherwise. What were they capable of doing to survive?

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are planning a trip to Vietnam....this book is a must read. Author wrote her memoir in 1989, telling of her childhood during the Vietnam War. Family members served on different sides. Continues to her life as a young woman surviving in the war torn country....and then her escape to the United States. She returns to Vietnam in 1986, to visit family and to gather material for her book. How had life changed? Who do you trust. I thank Nancy B. for recommending this book. What will we find when we visit Vietnam this November??

[Poppy || Monster Lover · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although this book was very short, it was still powerful. I do not share the same worldview as the author and I want to rage at the people she has forgiven. But I appreciate her authenticity and desire to share her story to creat positive change.

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

We all know war is a bad thing, but reading this book really gives an insight as to how it damages the land over which its raged. The way community and life is ripped to pieces and the fabric of society unravels and is rewoven as something less appealing is well portrayed. To come through this and be able to share the story as well as attempt to rebuild and heal says a lot for the authoress.

The violence is never glorified, nor is the atrocities, but told in a way that taps into your emotions and grips at you unforgettably. Forget the film, even though the key events are portrayed, the book is far tougher with the Hollywood romanticism stripped way.

If you want an understanding of how war affected the people of Vietnam, and how much of a piece of heaven it destroyed you need to read this book. I finished reading this on the train and it was hard not to cry my eyes out, not just for the events and family of LeLy Hayslip, but for all the people she knew and met and the beautiful way of life that is so sadly lost now.

[Crazytourists_books · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always find it very hard to write (something like) a review about memoirs and autobiographies. It's someone's life, experiences and emotions and who am I to say anything about them. 
I have the same feeling again; this has been one of the most brutal books I have ever read and at the same time it made me cringe a lot. It seems to be too lenient towards the USA and the undeniable (humanitarian) crimes they committed in Vietnam. I am not sure how much of this leniency is Hayslip's point of view and just how much her (american) co-author's (Wurts). 
The writing style wasn't my favorite, and the print I read was awful but it is definitely a powerful book, about the life of a strong woman in/from a devastated by war country.

[Courtney Lercher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no words for this book. Honestly just an incredible work of nonfiction showing the true and misunderstood horrors many Vietnam civilians experienced during the war and after. Would highly recommend this book - it’s brutal and honest and just something everyone would benefit from reading. Adding the movie to my watch list asap.

[Vanessa's on StoryGraph (vnhi) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great intimate look at why some joined the North in the war and what some had to endure just to survive. Also, was a great way to start a dialogue with my parents about their own experiences and what they thought about the narrative in this book.

[Teresa Goethe · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book greatly helped me to understand the history and Vietnamese perspective of the conflict that ravaged Vietnam from the 1950s into the 70s. The resilience of Le Ly Hayslip and her messages of the importance of compassion and forgiveness are very inspiring.

[Georgiana 1792 · Rating 5 out of 5]

È il memoir di Bay Ly, la sesta figlia di una famiglia di contadini vietnamiti abitanti nel villaggio di Ky La, e il suo tentativo di sopravvivere alla guerra, alle violenze da parte di entrambe le fazioni, ai sospetti e a una vita durissima per una bella ragazza vietnamita in un paese occupato in cui tutti sembrano volersi approfittare di lei. Bay Ly non è una stupida, ma gli uomini non sono certo teneri con lei. Tuttavia, Bay Ly nel 1970 riesce a fuggire via dal Vietnam e approda a San Diego in California con i suoi due figli.
Sedici anni dopo, fa ritorno in Vietnam per rivedere la sua famiglia - sua madre, in particolare - e ripercorre la sua vita difficilissima, da cui è riuscita a sopravvivere per un caso fortunato, al contrario di tanti altri che non ce l'hanno fatta.
Voi che avete letto questo libro non avete vissuto un’esistenza come la mia. Per grazia del destino o del cielo, non sapete com’è difficile sopravvivere, anche se ora potete averne un’idea. Non piangete per me: io ce l’ho fatta, e ora sto bene. Ma in questo momento milioni di altri infelici, in varie parti del mondo, vecchi e giovani, uomini e donne, al pari di quanto è accaduto a me, vivono per sopravvivere. Nemmeno loro hanno chiesto le guerre che li hanno fagocitati. Chiedono soltanto la pace, la libertà di amare e di vivere pienamente la loro esistenza, nient’altro.

[Kim Tran]

An incredibly inspirational and heartbreaking story how a Vietnamese war victim survived and grew peace in her soul.

This memoir, for a long time, was in my to-read list as a sheer willing to gain a deeper insight into the war my beloved ones had gone through while we young generation had no concept about. Because my language was limited to fully get the writer's flowery words, it took much longer than expected to keep my promise, which is, to finish the book before 30 April, the Reunification Day to most Vietnamese I know, the Black April to some others, and simply no-working day to us millennials. However, following her long journey to peace made me realize the freedom we are really in and how hatred can turn forgiveness or even love.

[Tammy Stathelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is actually the first book I think I have ever read about the Vietnam War. It certainly gives a different perspective than that of an American GI. I have always believed this war was simply about the spread of communism and how we, the American People, had to stop it at all cost. Those were some pretty high costs and I don't think we accomplished much of anything except the loss of life on both the American and Vietnamese sides.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is always the regular people trying to make a living and feed their families and live their own lives who suffer the most in war. They couldn't care less about socialism or capitalism or communism or any other form of government. They just want a good government that supports them and helps them to live their lives in peace.

[Andrew]

Was it Viet Thanh Nguyen who hipped me to this? I'm remembering someone talking about how this is one of the few Vietnam War stories in English told by someone who wasn't part of the pre-1975 elite, but an ordinary peasant who did her best in a rough fucking time, and that as clunky as it was, it had the virtue of being extraordinarily honest.

That's correct. Completely. I've spent enough time in the backwaters of Southeast Asia to -- if not "know" what peasants in this part of the world to think -- at least have a basic grasp on the common worldviews of agricultural societies 'round these parts, and the characters have a certain familiarity. Yes, it is clunky. Yes, the "USA number one!" parts are cringe as fuck (especially when you consider Hayslip's horror at the Vietnamese fight against the Khmer Rouge, something in which history has pretty absolutely vindicated Vietnam). But it's... so goddamn honest. Not as the voice of a writer, but as the voice of a witness.

[Jane Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honest/ raw writing . Written 36 years ago . Filled with beautiful Vietnamese sayings. “ In a field of unfolding flowers, there are buds which are ripening still”
Felt privileged to be travelling in the train to Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh as I read about intricacies of rice farming, of hard work, of ancestors buried on people’s own land while seeing women squatting down working hard in their rice fields in conical hats , thinking of gold buried those many years ago in the countryside to be kept hidden and gravestones/ tombs within the family land through the window.
“ Extraordinary and Gripping… Somehow, with all she has gone through, she has managed to come to a sympathetic understanding of everyone, Americans and Vietnamese. This is the book for those who want to know what the war was really like” - Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the lake.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

“For you see, the face of destiny or luck or god that gives us war also gives us other kinds of pain: the loss of health and youth; the loss of loved ones or of love; the fear that we will end our days alone. Some people suffer in peace the way others suffer in war. The special gift of that suffering, I have learned, is how to be strong while we are weak, how to be brave when we are afraid, how to be wise in the midst of confusion, and how to let go of that which we can no longer hold. In this way, anger can teach forgiveness, hate can teach us love, and war can teach us peace.”

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

the most excruciating tale I have ever read about war. When Heaven and Earth Changed Places is Le Ly Hayslip's experience growing up in Vietnam's countryside just before the Second Indochina War (Vietnam War) began. as if growing up during war characterized by guerrilla warfare wasn't enough, Le Ly's village rests on the border between South and North Vietnam. thus, Le Ly's village as well her little mind are in a constant tug-o-war between Republican and Viet Cong soldiers. Le Ly was beaten multiple times by Republican and Viet Cong soldiers, captured and interrogated multiple times by Republican soldiers, was raped multiple times, faced numerous instances of sexual harassment, was worshiped and then later banished by the Viet Cong, lost her father to suicide, saw people dismembered and killed, lost her older brother to a land mine, faced starvation, disease and extreme poverty and had her own child all before she was 20 years old. the list of inhumane things Le Ly experiences before she leaves Vietnam in the later 1970s goes on, unfortunately. perhaps the central message of Le Ly's memoir is that war is so ugly, it slowly numbs those stuck inside the war making them unflinching in the face of war itself. Le Ly becomes immune to what would normally be horrendous things - little boys being thrown down a well along with a live grenade, for example - and uses her energy to survive, as her father instructs. Le Ly is lead by these instructions from the Vietnamese countryside to Saigon where she takes various servant, club hostess, and merchant jobs. despite being either beaten or abandoned by various American soldiers, Le Ly eventually finds her way out of Vietnam though not without pleasing the corrupt systems that interweave themselves throughout Saigon.

there were several things I liked about this book, in particular. first, the book is not anti-American. rather, the book is written for ALL people who suffered from the Second Indochina War. second, Le Ly's tale recounts the Buddhist traditions that constitute village life in Vietnam. Le Ly offers clear descriptions of various Buddhist wedding and funeral practices as well as other Buddhist superstitions that are quite different from the western worldview. finally, the book switches between Le Ly recounting her life growing up in war-infested Vietnam and Le Ly returning to Vietnam for a visit in the early 1980s. the book ends with Le Ly founding the East Meets West Foundation, an organization that donates to rural towns in Southeast Asia in hopes of providing basic healthcare needs and so on.

[John Ratliffe · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all know that war is horrible, but it takes a book like this to make us realize just how horrible it is. This is war as experienced by a little girl, and later as a young woman, starting in an obscure farming village outside of Danang. The conflict seesaws through the village day-to-day from one side and then the other starting with the French--the village called them Moroccans, through the Republicans--government soldiers out of Saigon, and through the ubiquitous Viet-Cong to the Americans. Each side used its own unique brand of cruelty and murder to get the upper hand over land and control of people. Of course, the power of the modern American war machines were able to do the most physical damage by far. We also get a good look at why most of the village people were adherents of the VC and why their faith in the Viet-Cong eventually led to victory over the corrupt Saigon puppet government.

Through it all we are reminded repeatedly of the timeless mendacity and corruption of governments in the struggle for domination of peoples and territory. The habit of politicians and generals to lie to the people is bad enough on an average day, but in wartime the use of misinformation is wildly and indiscriminately accelerated. You leave this book with a new understanding of why this war was such an culture-destroying event in both the United States and in Viet-Nam.

The author does a marvelous job leading us through the complex Vietnamese peasant culture and Buddhist customs, by itself a fascinating tapestry, and she immerses us in the incredible difficulties of survival of people who are caught in this conflict with no battlelines. Her personal perseverance and tenacity kept her alive until she managed to marry an American and make her way to the United States.

This book is graphic and disturbing, and though it drags a bit in spots, it is well-worth the reading effort, as it fills in the serious gaps in our understanding of that awful watershed event, The War in Vietnam. Please accept this recommendation from one who has been there.

[William Armstrong · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF

This book really should have been fascinating. But something about the writing made it tedious and it failed to grab my attention.

About half way through I realized what it was that I didn’t like about the writing. All of the stories she told about life during the war sounded made up. They sounded like something an undergrad in a creative writing course came up with. I had this thought after reading a passage that was basically this: “we flew to Da Nang and my mother was talking with a wealthy woman on the flight. The woman invited us to her house once we reached Da Nang. When we got there I went for a walk around the neighborhood. Some ruffians attacked me. Suddenly an American helicopter appeared and scared them off. I never looked at helicopters the same way again.”

Eye. Roll.

I don’t mean to say I doubt the author and her experiences. It is just the way the story is told, so much of it has the feel of being made up.

Intertwining the story of coming back to visit her family and village just didn’t work for me. It made the story of her time during the war feel very choppy and repetitive. Something horrible happened, I got through it. We moved. To the 80s: I felt nervous, then I felt anxious, then I felt nervous again. Insert uninteresting detail. I get nervous. Back to the war: The Viet Cong came back. Something bad happened. We moved. Repeat.

[Michael Andersen-Andrade · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are no winners or losers in war, just victims and survivors. Le Ly Hayslip brings the agony and hardship of the Vietnam War to life. I read this book in and around Da Nang, where much of the book takes place. Her book brought those streets and villages alive and populated them with the ghosts of her family and her people. Vietnam was forever altered by the war. While all sides contributed to the suffering, it is clear that the United States had no business in Vietnam and its rationalizations for being there were based on lies. Le Ly Hayslip's story of courage, determination and forgiveness is a powerful contribution to the healing process for everyone associated with that tragic war.

[Carmen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything we knew commanded us to fight. Our ancestors called us to war. Our myths and legends called us to war. Our parents' teachings called us to war. Uncle Ho's cadre called us to war. Even President Diem had called us to fight for the very thing we now believed he was betraying -an independent Vietnam. Should an obedient child be less than an ox and refused to do her duty?
And so the war began and became an insatiable dragon that roared around Ky La. By the time I turned thirteen, that dragon has swallowed me up.