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    The Ignorance of Bliss: An American Kid in Saigon
    The Ignorance of Bliss: An American Kid in Saigon
    The Ignorance of Bliss: An American Kid in Saigon
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Ignorance of Bliss: An American Kid in Saigon

    Written by Sandy Hanna

    Narrated by Sarah Mollo-Christensen

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    About this audiobook

    The Ignorance of Bliss tells the true story of ten-year-old Sandy, who moves with her American military family to Saigon, Vietnam, where her father, the Colonel, serves as a military advisor to the South Vietnamese Army.

    In 1960s Saigon, Sandy finds a world of crushing poverty and extraordinary beauty; a world of streets, villas, and brothels, where politics and intrigue reside between plot and counterplot. Blissfully living a life of French decadence, Sandy maneuvers between coups, spies, bombings, corruption, and scandal as she and her thirteen-year-old brother, Tom, run an illicit baby powder and Hershey bar business on the black market and live a life of school, scouts, dance parties, and movies at the underground theater.

    When the Colonel's counterpart, Colonel Le Van Sam, delivers an expose on the current ruling Diem regime, Sandy finds that her constant spying on her father's activities has brought her face to face with the reality of Vietnam and the anti-American sentiment that pervades it. This coming-of age story takes place in a turbulent country striving for nationalism, giving the listener a stunning look into the life of military dependents living abroad and the underlying ignorance that surrounded a little understood time in history.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 19, 2019
    ISBN9781977344502

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    • 3/5
      This story takes place in the early sixties, during the time of the Vietnam war. The protagonist is the daughter of a military family; her father is a colonel in the army, an ordnance officer. He had been in WWII also, and had served general Patton. This is a true story.

      The colonel and his family are sent to Saigon in 1960. They get to live in a French Villa, with servants, and high walls around their home, to keep out the poverty of Saigon. When the kids went out, the geeky blond white kids, were sticking out like sore thumbs.
      "Women and children stuck their heads out of their tiny huts. They looked up from their boiling pots over open fires to view the curiosity that was passing. Blond Caucasian children, except for Bob, who had brown hair, in starched clothing and spotless Keds tennis shoes filed passed [sic] them seemingly without a care in the world. The small Vietnamese children with only shirts on their backs, standing naked from the waist down, pointed and giggled at the sight of us. Old ladies squatting in front of their Hut doorways sat grinning, showing off full sets of either red or black teeth, the result of years of chewing betel nut leaves."

      "We children of military personnel are referred to as BRATs, a title we all wear with pride. The acronym BRAT was created a long time ago and stands for British Regiment Attached Transfer. It is the perfect way to describe our extended Gypsy family. We are the 'attached' dependents who go wherever the military transfers take the colonel.
      'adaptive' would be the best word to describe us BRATS. In a way, we are a tribe unto ourselves. Making friends quickly, we depart our assigned posts without a goodbye or any chance of future encounters. We pick up languages and accents quickly. Material things just aren't important to us. We leave them behind us as we do our lives, our friends, our pets [