'I felt as if I had been dropped into a page of history,' writes Kenneth Murphy in the opening pages of his haunting new book Unquiet Vietnam. Growing up with the war, Murphy, like all Americans of his generation, has certain indelible associations burned into his consciousness about Vietnam.
Iconic images of 'naked children running from flames' and wounded GIs being air-lifted out of war zones are what Vietnam has conjured up for Americans since the 1960s.
There was something about the impenetrable jungles that young Americans fought in, against an enemy that seemed to appear and vanish like an apparition, in a culture that couldn't be more foreign from what those soldiers have known.
Halfway across the world the US subconscious was locked in a Heart of Darkness struggle with itself as much as the phantom enemy.
In writing that recalls Michael Herr's essential war memoir Dispatches, Murphy, who lost his brother in the war, takes us to 'the highland villages where the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam war took place' and sketches scenes of battles and locations that have been the collective nightmare of many Americans for the past four decades.
But rather than finding only ghosts and heartbreak, Murphy's book is also a record of the surprises found by Americans who journey to Vietnam.