This is the second book in the Getting to Know series on divided countries of our time. Like its predecessor, Getting to Know the Two Chinas, it tells twin stories: the lives of people on either side of a boundary that separates territory controlled by the Communists from territory in which the people govern themselves.

In Vietnam, the boundary is the 17th parallel. Below it, in the free South, we visit "strategic hamlets"—villages with stockades around them—built as protection against the raids of the Viet Cong, guerrilla boys in training, armed with bamboo spears, poisoned arrows and hollow bamboo sticks which they use to breathe through when hiding underwater in the irrigation canals of the rice fields.

We visit also the Montagnards, aborigines who are fierce fighters and whose allegiance North and South compete. The Montagnards' New Year's elephant races, the National Children's Festival—complete with dancing dragons, moon cakes and firecrackers—are among the colorful celebrations we join with Ngoc (Jade), Phung (Eagle), Mai (Apricot) and other Vietnamese children. With them we hope that the soldiers and money now being supplied by the U.S.A. may, in future years of "the buffalo" or "the tiger", as their calendar reads, help the Vietnamese restore peace to their land.

From the book