Then the Americans came

by Martha Hess

In the course of several trips to Vietnam, Martha Hess encountered Vietnamese survivors of the war years. She determined to record their experiences for history. Then the Americans Came is the first book about the war told by Vietnamese, in their own words, who live in their homeland today. Hess interviewed over one hundred people in the course of two recent visits to Vietnam; she stayed there a total of three and a half months. The result is a stirring document of the ravages and senselessness of an all-out war that was directed against the civilian population. Millions of Vietnamese died in the thirty-year-long struggle for independence from the French and the Americans - this in a country with a population of about 35 million at the end of the war. Then the Americans Came contains more than forty black-and-white photographs, taken both by Hess and members of the Vietnamese Photographers Association, and includes a number of pictures taken during the war by Hanoi-based photojournalis