In his new memoir The Last Helicopter: Two Lives in Indochina, long-time Hong Kong-based journalist Jim Laurie recalls the final days of war in Vietnam and Cambodia, and the attempted rescue of Soc Sinan, a woman whom he loved.
Helicoptered out of Phnom Penh days before the collapse of the US-backed Khmer Republic in 1975, Laurie reached Vietnam just in time to see the fall of Saigon – all the while vowing to return to Cambodia to save Sinan from one of the Khmer Rouge’s now infamous work camps.
Drawn from recorded interviews with Sinan and the author’s own contemporaneous writings, the book tells a story of lives and contrasting cultures that intersect in remarkable and unexpected ways, and of people bound together for a time, by war, pain, and the inability to forget.
