Robert Gordon Menzies—that great Australian icon of British Colonialism—in his last years ironically presided over a nation that was gradually slipping out of the Imperial grasp of mother England and transferring its allegiances to America. Largely under the influence of films and television, it had begun to seem natural to regard anything as old fashioned unless it was American, and their music and slang was becoming predominant. Jeans, sneakers, rock-and-rock, TV, movies, hamburgers—even Australian cars gradually took on an American shape, which remarkably they had resisted previously despite the local manufacturers being owned by Ford and General Motors.
    And Menzies himself, in a dizzy moment of disorientation, must have fallen under a similar spell. When it became apparent that a colonial bounder, no matter how loyal and prestigious, would never be admitted to the peerage, Menzies took an interesting revenge. He declared openly that Australian’s future lay with the United States, not England, and proved the point by offering to help out with the little problem the US was having at the time in a place called South Vietnam.

 “Was it true about Ho Chi Minh’s road down from China to Saigon?” MacWhite asked.
“Damned right its true. I saw it. It’s not a big road, and its cut so the overhang of the trees conceals it from the air. But its big enough so a couple of thousand Communists can trot a lot of supplies down it. The native that showed it to me said that during the fight for Dien Bien Phu that damned road was solid with two lines of Communists… one trotting back for more supplies, the other coming down delivering supplies. That’s what surprised the hell out of the French up there.”
“Why didn’t anyone tell the French?”
“They hate ‘em, mister. Even the anti-Communists hate the French.”
    Ten years later, they hated the Americans instead, and us. And the Ho Chi Minh Trail remained open and continued unchecked until the end of the war. I had no trouble recognising the Sarkhan of The Ugly American by Lederer and Burdick as being Vietnam, even if it wasn’t. I read it at the time when I had little understanding of the politics that would place me in the middle of a war and it was only later that this book provided the basis of my views.
    Published in 1958, it chronicled the US mismanagement of the region with fine detail that fiction alone can achieve. This book told me everything I needed to know at the time I read it, but somehow I failed to comprehend that entirely. It became important to me only in hindsight when I was trying to understand what the hell had happened to me.