"I came to Vietnam as a first lieutenant in the United States Air Force in the summer of 1963 for a 14-month tour of duty. Only a few months after my arrival, the coup events recorded here took place toppling Ngo Dinh Diem's Saigon regime, followed in a few weeks by the assassination of President Kennedy. In this book I will not attempt to give either a public history of the Vietnam War, or a private history of my own time there, but only a little flavor of my life leading up to the coup, and then the original diary notes, more or less verbatim, recording the terrible night of the coup itself, and the morning after." -- Christopher King