Vietnam is peaceful and beautiful when Linnea Miller, a Southeast Asian scholar, arrives in Saigon in December of 1961. Working with the United States Aid for International Development, she’s charged with the task of helping the Hmong people change their growing habits from poppies to berries. Linnea finds herself caught between the people she is trying to help and the growing national interests of the country she calls home.

Her excursions and adventures expose her to many situations, such as probes into an opium network that takes her into a pirate lair in the Mekong swamp. As events and relationships escalate, Linnea witnesses the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk and realizes the world she knows is about to change. She has no idea it will include the assassinations of two presidents, not to mention what she discovers about her boss who has become her lover.

In The Tiger and the Hare, author Jane Miller Chai speaks with the authority of one who has lived the events. Passionately written and intimately told, this story opens a rare window into the events preceding United States military involvement in Vietnam, and forms an understanding of the inception of conflict from a personal perspective.