books

A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail
The Road to Freedom

To buy go to Orchid Books or Amazon Books

Virginia Morris and Clive Hills were the first Westerners to traverse the length of the Ho Chi Minh Trail since the end of the Vietnam War. This included walking 700km in Laos across one of the worlds most heavily bombed mountain ranges. They traced the footsteps of the hundreds of thousands who designed, built, used and fought along it.

The Trail was a decisive factor in the defeat of American forces in the Vietnam War. At the peak of its 16 years' operation, the Trail ran through North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Despite an estimated 4 million tons of US bombs, efforts to stop the transport of essential goods to the North Vietnamese Army over the Trail failed, and by the end of the war over a million tons of supplies had been transported and 2 million troops had traversed the Trail.

Reviews for A History of the Ho Chi Minh Trail: The Road to Freedom

As the first westerners to travel the trail, the author and her husband have laid bare some of its greatest secrets.
General Sir John Reith KCB CBE, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Colonel Commandant, The Parachute Regiment. See full forword.

Your book was awesome and fascinating, spellbinding and I wish I had had the guts to spend the same amount of time as you did doing such a tome.
Tim Page, Award-winning photojournalist and Vietnam War photographer

All books on Vietnam should have maps like The Road to Freedom.
General Vo Nguyen Giap, Supreme Commander of North Vietnam's Army

I wish I had had this information in 1969.
An American Special Forces veteran who operated along the Trail

The Road to Freedom is a remarkable achievement, a meticulous inquiry into one of warfare's most compelling stories, how the North Vietnamese Army kept the Ho Chi Minh trail operating in the face of everything the Americans could throw at them.
Mark Urban, Diplomatic editor, Newsnight BBC

Giao Lien:
Voices of the Vietcong Female Spies

In the 1920's Ho Chi Minh trained his first spy, this was the start of an intelligence service establish to fight French colonial rule in Vietnam. Come the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 this network had infiltrated all areas of American operations which led to their defeat.

This ground breaking book reveals some of Hanoi's best kept secrets of this period complemented with detailed maps and unpublished archive photos of these events.

Colours inside me:
The Woman who lost her Culture

Virginia has always been fascinated by developing nations, looking at culture and how development aid should be tailored to suit the individual.

In 1998 she went to Laos with the purpose of finding out what did the people who are ‘developed’ by us want and how any changes impact on their culture. She interviewed countless aid agencies, political figures and all areas of Lao society on the subject of culture. During her time in Laos she worked one year for the United Nations Development Program in the capital city but to find out more she then lived in remote areas for a year to ask the people who still lived away from development what they wanted. It was during this time that Virginia looked into the environmental impact of development on a country, something that she looked at previously during her PhD when she went to Vietnam as well as her work in timber in the UK and Sweden. She later became a partner for Max Fordham llp who are leaders in sustainability and environmental engineering.

Today she continues her research work on the subject and has been elected the Chairman of the United Nations Association