Two Cities Hanoi and Saigon

An account of Neil Sheehan's trip back to Vietnam in 1989, nearly 15 years after the war's end. Visiting Hanoi for the first time, he talks to the soldiers and politicians who won the war and catalogues the fruits of victory: a continuing American trade embargo, crumbling hotels and government buildings, vestiges of the city's French colonial past, a ragged economy, and omnipresent shabbiness and squalor. In Saigon he is deluged with memories as he tracks down former acquantances and tries to piece together how people who fought for the South have fared under the rule of their former enemies.