Love and Survival in a Cambodia at War
It is hard to place The Last Helicopter in a category. It is a thrilling eye-witness report of the last chaotic days of Phnom Penh and Saigon in 1975; it is a poignant love story of a young American reporter and an exceptional Khmer woman; and it is a rumination on America and the Third Indochina War. Veteran radio and television reporter Jim Laurie knows how to tell a story (disclosure: he is a former colleague of mine in Vietnam), but his account includes a touching story by an unusual posthumous co-author.
Fresh out of college on his first reporting job in war-torn Cambodia, Laurie found Soc Sinan, his first love. Losing touch with her during the chaotic evacuation, he spent the following four years in dread and guilt. His search for Sinan carried on as he traveled the region outside hermetically sealed Cambodia, and the nail-biting account of his attempt to take her out of the country after rediscovering her makes for a Hollywood script. The unpublished manuscript about her life under the Khmer Rouge written by Sinan excerpted in the book adds a mesmerizing quality. Reading the book feels like listening to a duet — urgent reporting complemented by languid but sinister days in a Khmer Rouge village.
Even without his personal drama, though, Laurie’s honest, straight-from-the-heart prose about the war and its ramifications is a valuable testament to the tragic war that touched millions of lives. The Last Helicopter comes closest to accurately conveying how adrenalin-pumping and draining it was to be a reporter in Indochina.