Between 1970 and 1975 Jon Swain, the English journalist portrayed in David Puttnam's The Killing Fields, lived in the lands of the Mekong river; this is his account of those days, and the way in which the tumultuous events of those years affected his perceptions of life and death as Europe never could. He also describes the beauty of the Mekong landscape - the villages along its banks surrounded by mangoes, bananas and coconuts, the exquisite men, the odours of opium - and its other face, that of violence and corruption.