THE ROAD TO FREEDOM: A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail

THE ROAD TO FREEDOM: A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By Virginia Morris with Clive Hitts. Bangkok: Orchid Press. 2006. xix, 180 pp. (Photos, maps.) US$29.95, cloth. ISBN 974-524-076-1.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a network of routes by which men and munitions were sent, during the Decond Indochina War, from North Vietnam to the battlefields of South Vietnam and eventually also to Cambodia. These routes ran through the Truong Son Mountains, on both sides of the border between Vietnam and southeastern Laos. Virginia Morris' book cuts back and forth, sometimes disconcertingly, between the history of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and accounts of a series of journeys that she and photographer Clive Hills recently made along the routes that once formed the trail. Calling the Ho Chi Minh Trail "The Road to Freedom" implies a political judgment about the Second Indochina...