“The battle of Saigon” is a must-read for Vietnamese Americans of younger generations who can hardly read Vietnamese and have negligible historical understanding of why and how they or their parents happened to be in this country. Ngo The Vinh, the book’s author, was a chief physician of a Special Force regiment of the South Vietnamese army, the duty of which was to stop the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops into the south through “the Hochiminh trail”. Their fierce battles were mostly in the mountains and woods bordering the country. Vinh witnessed the merciless deaths of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers and many more of the other side in search-and-destroy battles to hunt each other in these sinister areas. He also could learn how the poverty-stricken Vietnamese people in these distant mountainous areas could survive miraculously the daily threats of the murderous war. But the author’s greatest obsession was that the real and decisive battle of the war, ironically and stupidly, was “the battle of Saigon”, where the military-controlled government irresponsibly failed in its duty to lead the nation in war time, the politicians of both sides (enemy-manipulated “left” as well as sycophant “right”) ignorantly together destroyed the fragile system, religious leaders played into the hands of non-religious communists in the north, and the intellectuals were completely of no use as the “light” to the desperate people... As we have sorrowfully seen, it’s this battle which decided who won the war – after President Nixon pulled out U.S. troops in the course of “peace without honor”.