The author was born in Paris, France, in 1933; his father in Thanh Hoa, North Viet Nam, in 1909; his mother in London, England, in 1914. He was educated in England and worked for four decades with American and European firms in the Asia-Pacific region in the fields of defense contracting and defense sales. He retired in 1999 in the Philippines to become a novelist and is due to be published this year.

From 1955 to 1972, he worked for a US defense contractor in the Republic of South Viet Nam, covering the country from the DMZ to the Ca Mau peninsula. By dint of application, he became fluent in his father's native language, Vietnamese. Outgoing by nature, he was able to relate to people, from peasant refugees whose village had been bombed, to VC prisoners in leg irons in provincial jails, to military Corps Commanders and the highest-ranking civil servants in the Ngo Dinh Diem, Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu administrations. Later, drawing on extensive Vietnamese and French research data available at the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient in France and from oral histories passed on to him by older relatives on his father's side of the family, he was able to re-create in his mind the period when Viet Nam was French Indochina (1883-1954). To this he added his own first-hand knowledge of the second Viet Nam war (1955-1975) plus the fruits of his many visits to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since 1987 and wrote three novels.  

*