[In the following review, Leepson comments that while Seeing Vietnam is an interesting travel narrative about Vietnam in the 1990s, the sections of the book discussing the Vietnam War lack valuable information.]

Susan Brownmiller is best known for her strongly argued feminist writings, including the bestselling Against Our Will, but her Seeing Vietnam barely touches on feminist issues. Instead, it's a combination travel guide, personal rumination and historical and sociological look at the nation of Vietnam and the American war that raged there in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like many other members of the Vietnam generation, Brownmiller was affected directly by that war. From 1965–1968 she screened and edited dispatches from the war zone for ABC News. “I slogged through [videotapes of] routine search-and-destroy operations and inconclusive firefights, pieced together murky footage of falling black bombs, raging smoke and fire, whirring medevac Hueys, wounded GIs on stretchers, captured enemy in black pajamas, burning monks, screaming children fleeing across fields, women keening their dead,” Brownmiller writes.

Working so intimately with images of the war at its bloody height soured Brownmiller on Vietnam. When she quit her ABC job, she stopped paying close attention to the war. After the 1968 Tet Offensive, she says, the war “receded from my frontal lobes.”

Brownmiller's interest in Vietnam was rekindled a few years ago. “I wanted,” she says, “to see the country in peacetime, its problems and progress.” So she arranged “the trip of a lifetime,” as she puts it—a journey to Vietnam with photographer Maggie Steber. The purpose of the trip: to “explore the country from a tourist's point of view” and produce an article for a travel magazine.

Brownmiller and Steber embarked on “a private, customized tour for two from Hanoi to the Mekong Delta,” with stops in Danang, Hue, the Mekong Delta and Saigon (which only dedicated government officials call Ho Chi Minh City, its post-1975 official name). The women were under the watchful eyes of government-issued guides but managed to make a few unescorted forays.

Brownmiller's report on life in Vietnam jibes with those of other recent American visitors. The nation is desperately poor. The government is relaxing many, but not all, of its authoritarian policies. The people seem very friendly toward Americans and speak bitterly about Russians. Businesses from Asia and Europe are moving rapidly into Vietnam with the government's blessings.

The northern city of Hanoi “charms a visitor,” Brownmiller says, with its “tree-lined boulevards and gemlike lakes set in leafy green parks” and its “stucco row houses and ochre villas with blue louver shutters and iron filigree gates.” Saigon, though, is an overcrowded, cacophonous commercial center with lots of great restaurants.

“Saigon is not beautiful,” Brownmiller reports. “The imperial lines of boulevards laid out by the French are obscured by a hodgepodge of latter-day constructions destined for the wrecker's ball but gussied up for the present with Christmas tree lights, neon marquees, billboards that trumpet Sanyo, Panasonic, Sharp.”

Brownmiller devotes much of her breezily written book to these and other touristic concerns: hotel accommodations, restaurant meals, transportation logistics, historic attractions. In these sections she often succeeds in evocatively conveying the details of her Vietnam tour. The narrative suffers, though, when she interrupts the personal guided tour with what appear to be hurriedly researched mini-lessons on Vietnamese history and the American war.

These “capsule” discussions, as Brownmiller refers to them, are filled with generalizations and unattributed facts and figures. Although she lists a dozen or so sources in her acknowledgement section, the historical discussions contain too many errors of omission and several misstatements.

To cite one example, Brownmiller writes that President Lyndon Johnson waged “full-scale war” in Vietnam. But Johnson's primary goal was the opposite: to wage a limited war. Indeed, some critics of Johnson's policies argue that his main failing in Vietnam was his “conscious decision not to mobilize the American people [and] invoke the national will,” as Col. Harry Summers wrote in his book On Strategy.

Seeing Vietnam, therefore, is not the book to go for a well-researched analysis of the American war. But the book does provide an interesting, and at times insightful, look at the land and people of Vietnam.