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- ISBN: 1-894692-12-8
- $22.95
- 160pp
- Memoir/International Relations/Women’s Studies
- 2005
- Colour illustrations
“I can never hear a helicopter whir without thinking of Vietnam. They were everywhere, all the time.” – The Devil’s Snare
1968, and 500,000 American troops are in Vietnam. From behind the diplomatic curtain, Canadian Janice Tait has penned The Devil’s Snare, a compelling memoir of a year in Saigon. Tait turns a keen eye on a city collapsing under an encroaching war – garbage lines the streets, refugees live in tents next to diplomatic villas, children of American GI’s and Vietnamese mothers crowd orphanages. Homelessness is at a crisis level, Coke cans are pounded flat to provide construction materials for shelter.
The Devil’s Snare recreates a time when American foreign policy was mired in a failed attempt to dominate and control a sub-continent through a costly overseas war – a time with clear echoes to our own. As the wife of a Canadian diplomat serving with the International Commission for Supervision and Control, Tait recounts the intricacies of the daily life in a wartime city and ultimately paints a clear version of the larger picture.
Tait sees a different Saigon teaching English to students about to depart for America. Her travels to Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and Hanoi, include a harrowing flight over darkened countryside in an unpressurized cabin, and being surprised at gunpoint by insurgent Khmer Rouge. Fate lays a gentle hand to secure their release.
This behind-the-scenes look at Canadian activity in Vietnam during the war is also the intimate story of an educated woman working to save her marriage as she begins to embrace the liberations offered by the women’s movement of the time.