Ethnic Cleansers

Stephen Smith

• Four Hours in My Lai: A War Crime and its Aftermath by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim
  Viking, 430 pp, £17.99, May 1992, ISBN 0 670 83233 2
• Tiger Balm: Travels in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia by Lucretia Stewart
  Chatto, 261 pp, £10.99, June 1992, ISBN 0 7011 3892 0

Born too late – and that was the least of it – to be James Fenton, I cannot claim to have spent the fall of Saigon hitchhiking to President Nguyen Van Thieu’s palace aboard a Northern Vietnamese tank. By the time I reached the city, more than a decade after the President’s government was toppled, I was also a little late to experience the thrill that the poet and war correspondent had felt in living through its death throes. Nevertheless, I called on the former United States Embassy fondly hoping to pick my way through poignant debris like portraits of Presidents behind crazed glass, and the bust of a bald eagle gleaming dully from a nest of old communiqués. The miserable photographs I had seen of the Embassy failed to do the place justice. The real thing was much worse, windowless and swaddled in concrete. It reminded me of a vast cold storage vault at Nine Elms, South London. Because I turned up on a Sunday, I was able to convince a guard called Tuan that I might promenade the grounds with him. A bonfire was smoking, and chicken pecked the dirt beside a cycle-rack.