Heaven and Earth

            Le Ly is a Vietnamese woman who, as a girl, worked for the Viet Congs (the party that controls the North). This is a very unique perspective and gives the readers like myself an interesting insight into the war. Not only did she suffer under the Republicans, the party in control of South Vietnam, but also later the Viet Congs unjustly accused her of being a traitor. The Viet Congs thought she was a traitor because she was set free three times when she went to prison. The reason she was set free from prison was because she had a family member that work for the Republicans, which helped her get out of prison twice. This book tells of her being dragged into the forest and raped next to the grave that was meant to hold her body by the Viet Congs soldiers named Mau and Loi. Mau and Loi both were killed later during the story. Le Ly was left in shame and forced to leave her much-loved village. She went to Saigon with her mother and secured a position as a nanny. However, she became pregnant with her boss's Anh's child and was forced to leave her new sanctuary when her boss's wife found out. Faced with this new hurdle in her life, Le Ly and her mother were forced to return to Danang where she became a black marketer. Through these experiences she learned to trust Americans. Nonetheless, she did not base this trust on a uniform, but on the character of the Americans. Her experiences throughout the war were regularly filled with terror, pain, suffering, and horror. But in the midst of all the tragedy is a sense of hope and love of family that is stronger than the hate of either side. Flashing back and forth between the war and 1986, when she returns to see her family, her story is the story of the Vietnamese caught between two conflicting sides but often a member of both. The author was trying to describe the horror of the war in her view and life. The book helped me understand the war more so than ever because it contains details on how the Viet Cong's fighters uses they"re fighting tactics.