Book: Behind the Lines-Hanoi December 23-January 7

"It was Saturday, a week before Christmas, and I walked down Fifth Avenue, pushing through the bright-faced throngs, the girls in their long boots of Courrèges white and Wyeth brown, the boys, tousle-haired, fresh, pink, moving with long loose strides, the crowds excited by the glitter in the windows, the pleasant clamor in the streets and the dazzle of the lights in the fading afternoon. I walked south through the crowd, feeling part of it and not part of it, for this was a Christmas that I would not share. In forty-eight hours I would be boarding a plane on a long journey that would take me to Hanoi and to a world of war that lay almost outside the margin of my perception, a world where the germinal issues of our day were being delineated in shapes and forms such as even Goya had not imagined, a world of primitive drama, new experience, new adventure and blinding conflict." - From Behind the Lines-Hanoi