Granta 15

Ten years ago, James Fenton went to Saigon, having made up his mind that, no matter what happened, he was not going to miss what he had travelled 10,000 miles to see: a Communist victory. And so he remained, long after the US troops and most members of the western press had been evacuated. He remained for, and even participated in, the looting of the US Embassy. And when the first North Vietnamese tank entered the city, lost, unable to make its way through Saigon's maze of streets, James Fenton jumped on the back, an unlikely navigator, directing the tank commander to the Presidential Palace. And still Fenton remained, until three months later, without food or money or clothes, wandering around a city transformed, he finally made his way back home.Witty, bizarre, and verging on the lunatic - who in his right mind would hop on the back of an invading army's tank? - James Fenton's account of the fall of Saigon is an extraordinary and historically important record of the collapse of a city at war.