River of Time

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jon Swain left Britain as a teenager, driven by his ambition to travel to far-away places, explore life on the borders of death, and escape from the straitjacket of a conventional and orderly English existence. After a brief stint with the French Foreign Legion he became a journalist in Paris, but soon ended up in Vietnam and Cambodia. So began an adventure and a love affair with the countries of former French Indo-China, to which he has been faithful ever since. Motivated by a sense of close involvement with the Cambodian people, he went back into Phnom Penh on the last plane just before the fall of the city to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. Swain was captured and would have been executed had his life not been saved by Dith Pran, the New York Times interpreter, a story told by the critically acclaimed film The Killing Fields. Even to this day Swain feels that perhaps he should not be alive. The vigorous demands of a war correspondent and Swain's commitment to a pillaged country ran rampant over his personal life. A love affair with a French-Vietnamese girl ended in disillusion and disaster, leaving him with an overwhelming sense of personal failure. This memoir is one man's attempt to make peace with a tumultuous past, to come to terms with his memories of fear, pain, and death, and to say good-bye to the Indo-China he loved.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

A British foreign correspondent's often stirring chronicle of his life and times covering the war in Indochina during the years 197075.

Swain, an award-winning Sunday Times of London reporter, looks back at the most memorable moments of his life: his assignments in Phnom Penh and Saigon during the last five years of the American war in Indochina. He does so with a no-frills memoir that also contains, among other things, his trips back to Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1980s, and his three-month kidnapping by revolutionaries in Ethiopia in the late 1970s. The heart of the book, though, is Swain's white-hot recreation of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. Acting on "an irresistible impulse," Swain scrambled aboard the last flight into Phnom Penh from Bangkok on April 12, 1975. Along with several other journalists, he witnessed the first weeks of the infamous Killing Fields, the holocaust waged by the Khmer Rouge against the Cambodian people. Swain's account of the insane forced evacuation of the entire population of refugee-swelled Phnom Penh is not for the faint of heart. He sets out in often gruesome detail what he calls "the greatest caravan of human misery" he saw "in five years of war." Swain includes an account of his personal brush with death, after he and the American journalist Sidney Schanberg and the latter's Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran, were detained by guerillas and threatened with execution. Swain's version of that incident, and of Dith Pran's subsequent surrender to the Khmer Rouge, jibes with what Schanberg wrote in "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" (on which the movie The Killing Fields was based). Swain, Schanberg, and Pran lived through their Cambodian nightmare. But Swain also tells the stories of many others who perished along with hundreds of thousands of their fellow Cambodians.

An accomplished memoir that will be remembered for its evocation of the horrors of the Cambodian Killing Fields.