'I just figured what with guns going off and things blowing up, there'd be plenty of deep truths and penetrating insights.'P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell
Saigon 1969. From the moment Hugh Webb arrives at the Hashish Hilton, as a green freelance reporter, he knows he has found his true vocation. In Sean Ryan, combat photographer, legend and lover, he finds his lifelong mentor, friend - and nemesis.
It's Ryan that gets him through his first months in a war zone, Through the jungles and paddy fields and long black nights huddled in bunkers in the Highlands he teaches him how to stay alive.
But then Sean Ryan does something that Webb can never forgive - he seduces a Vietnamese novice, gets her pregnant - and then leaves behind when Saigon falls. He didn't care that Ryan never meant for it to happen - the fact was, it did.
'War is the ambulance chaser's wet dream ... the visions of misery and suffering can also provide a convenient reference point for putting aside one's own damaged emotions.'- Paul Harris, freelance photo-journalist
By the time Webb ends up in the eighties' Number Four War in El Salvador he's an accredited journalist living in five star hotels. But this time the government - whoever the hell they are - doesn't want him there. When his photographer loses his nerve, his newspaper sends him a new photographer - the last man he ever wanted to see again.
Sean Ryan.
Captured by FMLN guerrillas, they see the war from the rebel side this time. But the truce between Ryan and Webb is never going to last long - especially when there's a woman involved. He later risks his life getting Ryan out - but that doesn't mean anything is forgiven or forgotten.
But the past is never done - and finally Webb crosses the line, he finally makes one of his stories personal, in the shape of a teenage Vietnamese refugee. But who is she , really?
As she grows it becomes clear that Webb's finding her is no co-incidence. And when Webb is finally lured out of retirement all the questions of the past are finally laid to rest in the freezing mountains of Bosnia.
'It is not the bullet with my name on that worries me. It's the one that says: "To whom it may concern.'"
resident of Belfast
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