In 1945 Triet Le's father and brother were kidnapped in a village near Hanoi. Four months passed before Le, then 17, learned that they had been buried alive. The reason for their ghastly deaths: they had opposed Vietnam's incipient communist movement.
The son followed the course his father had set. Le learned French and English, read voraciously in three languages and wrote passionate denunciations of communism. He joined the South Vietnamese army, then worked for the U.S. embassy in Saigon. In the last, worst years of the Vietnam War, he wrote a column for the newspaper Hoa Binh.
Le fled Vietnam...