War Baby

War Baby

<i> 'I just figured what with guns going off and things blowing up, there'd be plenty of deep truths and penetrating insights.'</i>P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell <br /><br />Saigon 1969. From the moment Hugh Webb arrives at the Hashish Hilton, as a green freelance reporter, he knows he has found his true vocation. In Sean Ryan, combat photographer, legend and lover, he finds his lifelong mentor, friend - and nemesis.<br />It's Ryan that gets him through his first months in a war zone, Through the jungles and paddy fields and long black nights huddled in bunkers in the Highlands he teaches him how to stay alive.<br /><br /><div>But then Sean Ryan does something that Webb can never forgive - he seduces a Vietnamese novice, gets her pregnant - and then leaves behind when Saigon falls. He didn't care that Ryan never meant for it to happen - the fact was, it did. <br /><br /><i>'War is the ambulance chaser's wet dream ... the visions of misery and suffering can also provide a convenient reference point for putting aside one's own damaged emotions.'</i>- Paul Harris, freelance photo-journalist <br /><br />By the time Webb ends up in the eighties' Number Four War in El Salvador he's an accredited journalist living in five star hotels. But this time the government - whoever the hell they are - doesn't want him there. When his photographer loses his nerve, his newspaper sends him a new photographer - the last man he ever wanted to see again.<br />Sean Ryan.<br /></div><div>Captured by FMLN guerrillas, they see the war from the rebel side this time. But the truce between Ryan and Webb is never going to last long - especially when there's a woman involved. He later risks his life getting Ryan out - but that doesn't mean anything is forgiven or forgotten. <br /><br />But the past is never done - and finally Webb crosses the line, he finally makes one of his stories personal, in the shape of a teenage Vietnamese refugee. But who is she , really? <br />As she grows it becomes clear that Webb's finding her is no co-incidence. And when Webb is finally lured out of retirement all the questions of the past are finally laid to rest in the freezing mountains of Bosnia.<br /><br /><i>'It is not the bullet with my name on that worries me. It's the one that says: "To whom it may concern.'"<br />resident of Belfast </i></div><div></div>