From the frontline memoirs of Vietnam Combat War Correspondent - Jim Bennett
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"An American reporter gets caught behind enemy lines during the fall of Saigon while securing the safety of his colleagues down the harrowing Mekong Delta".
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In a post 1969 Robert F. Kennedy era, Los Angeles based, thirty-nine-year-old, KNBC political beat reporter Jim Bennett is summoned center–stage to America’s devastating, ill-advised Indochinese conflict in Vietnam. Immediately pitched into the peril and heart of its most blistering battles, Bennett becomes the network’s most aggressive and comprehensive Vietnam War correspondents of his time.
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Digging deep into the misfortunes of the Indochinese Holocaust, Bennet and his colleagues freely roam the countryside with U.S. troops deep inside North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Exasperated by the Military’s calculated misdirection, yet paralyzed by his own dire and deep longing for home, Bennett is overtaken by the horrors of war and those ill-advised miscalculations by the U.S. Administration. He becomes nearly an unrecognizable figure. Alcohol, along with his insatiable addiction to report the truth from the front lines, lines him squarely between the crosshairs of the U.S. Military’s demand for secrecy.
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Delivering bloody, frontline battles into unsuspecting American living rooms, Bennett’s reports land in America’s homes with lethal clarity. The pressure on him gathers from U.S. Military advisors to keep him far away from the administration’s secret, phantom bombing campaign inside the borders of Cambodia and Laos.
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Along with his international cadre and the stunning New York Daily News photojournalist Sarah Webb Barrel, the team now find themselves deep behind enemy territory in the heart of Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge approach the capital from its countryside.
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With the fall of Saigon near, allied and enemy associations become blurred. Cambodia’s lethal Highway One, is now Bennett’s only escape. Having made his only mistake by covering the collapsing country, getting home, could be his last. Deep within the jungle and with no U.S. Military support, Bennett and his cadre officially arrive within Pol Pot’s killing fields. With no other way out, the journalists press forward arriving at a ferry port in Neak Loeung narrowly escaping Viet Cong advances.
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Arriving back to South Vietnam, Bennett then witnesses the crumbling descent of Saigon and files his last report of the city’s fall.
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“No roll call of the dead in Vietnam will ever be complete until it concludes with the names of the dozens of journalists who died covering the entire Indochinese holocaust. Their names don’t appear on any memorial. They probably never will. But for all my colleagues who have died in the service of this profession. “I can only say they were no less heroic, no less patriotic, nor any less concerned in reporting the war, than those who fought it.”