Distant Stars (i) and Free Fire Zone (v)

From the Foreign Languages Publishing House at Ha Noi and First Casualty Press at Coventry

Blue and orange. I have looked at that cover again and again getting close to 50 years and the penny just dropped. Agent Orange and Agent Blue. Dioxin to destroy cover by interfering with plant growth. Arsenic to kill rice and poison the paddy it grows in.

You could sort the agents in blue on the front and back covers by headgear. At least 5 women maybe 3 men carrying earth in their pairs of baskets on a yoke. From a new paddy field to build a dike? Filling in a bomb crater?

If that is a free fire zone I don’t know who took the picture. None of our guys, United States of America or Republic of Viet Nam (RVN), should have been there because everyone in a free fire zone is a target of opportunity. Any Allied force was obliged to fire on sight.

So there are you are shooting your book cover, a helicopter comes over the tree line and that would be that. Maybe the photo came instead from Ha Noi, showing farmers and soldiers together rebuilding after an air strike on their Democratic Republic of Viet Nam. Most free fire zones were rather within the boundaries of our ally,

the one the United States Army occupied, where armor rolled over the fields by day and cannon fire arrived blind night after night. I am quibbling at the provenance of the art. It makes a strong cover, with saturated color printing of a clean, meaningful design on glossy thick stock.

That cost money. Whose? Nearly all the authors and editors of its book were enlisted men recently separated with no salable skills allied with a movement of dissent that had just won, to end the United States invasion of the Republic of Viet Nam and the air wars over Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam, and Laos.

The publisher was an ad hoc charity of the movement. So that cover is a document of a free, prospering, society. The book on the right comes from a sovereign state in total command of resources. It too is a document of victory, announcing the date of reunification, 1976. On the table of contents inside it says proudly,

“PRINTED IN HANOI - SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIET NAM,” the new name of the nation. Yup. Like all the others printed there that year, and the 10 to come to 1986, this book is already yellow now in 2022 and will be crumbs soon enough. It is a document of a society mobilized for survival.

Beyond that, the two books share unusual features. No authors or editors on the cover, and so no mention of their other books. No price. No prizes. No blurbs. No related titles from the same publisher. They stand for themselves. They represent revolution.

Victory.