River of Time

Drawing on his experience as a journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Ethiopia, Swain reflects on his deep attachment to Indo-China: the fall of Saigon and then Phnom Penh, the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, and Cambodia’s transformation. He also writes about the Vietnamese boat people, the lives of war correspondents—nerve-frayed, jaded, or even addicted to conflict—and his three months of captivity at the hands of Ethiopian guerrillas. The book is rich in nostalgia and vivid in its descriptions, and it lingers in the mind.

Readers may not always agree with Swain, or with how he approaches certain topics, but they will likely appreciate both the quality of his writing and his candor in recounting deeply personal experiences. At times, it feels as though he wrote this primarily for himself—to capture and preserve a world already slipping into the past—which only adds to its appeal.

Excerpt from the epilogue of Jon Swain’s River of Time:

I was in Indo-China for only five years. But I know that in my heart I will be there all my life. I will always lament its romantic past and sentimentalise the grand adventure of death we lived through in the midst of such ravishing beauty. Perhaps I am deceived by unworldly dreams. Perhaps I weave too many illusions about the past. But I don’t believe it was just a romantic fantasy. After years of travel, I have encountered nowhere like Indo-China, and I am not alone in this. Whole generations of westerners who went out there as soldiers, doctors, planters or journalists like myself, to document the sorrow, the tragedy and the stories of its wars, lost their hearts to these lands of the Mekong. They are places that take over a man’s soul. The pain of memory endures alongside this nostalgia. Some memories remained buried in a body bag so deep within me that it was years before I let them out.