A former American POW must embrace his enemies in Vietnam to negotiate flyover rights for Pan Am airlines in 1978, only to discover he’s an American pawn on a bigger geopolitical chessboard that involves China. Based on a true, untold story.

SYNOPSIS:

A former American POW must embrace his enemies in Vietnam to negotiate flyover rights for Pan Am airlines, only to discover that he’s an American pawn on a bigger geopolitical chess board: opening trade with China in 1979.

NICK JONES, 30-year-old, ex-military Ace pilot, POW-turned-lawyer and legal fixer for Pan Am Airlines who ventures to Vietnam which is the last place he ever wants to go. Teamed with ELISE FAIRCHILD, 30s, a Senior VP at Pan Am, Nick discovers on route to Asia that she’s a CIA cutout with covert agendas for the State Department.

The negotiation for flyover rights with Hanoi escalates as both sides battle their own greedy, self-interested overlords, even more than each other. The Vietnamese want flyover payments, a war apology from the Americans and a free Boeing 707. Elise reveals the bigger State Department mission: to get China to open their markets to the US by offering the impression of rapprochement between the US and Hanoi governments.

Nick and Elise end up at the Rick’s Café of Hanoi with a motley crew of international arms dealers haggling over military gear left behind by the Americans and who are also bargaining for South Korean POWs who never got repatriated. An arms dealing Israeli MOSSAD agent in Hanoi helps Nick and Elise buy a Boeing 707 airplane required by the Vietnamese in the Pan Am flyover negotiation that can be delivered to Vietnam, illegally, somehow below the radar of strict American laws prohibiting trade with enemy countries like Vietnam. True story.

But when Nick and Elise return to the US to secure funding for the million dollar Boeing airplane, the State Department has changed their tune and refuses to help. Eventually they blackmail Elise’s boss for sexual harassment to procure the money from Boeing, who also stand to gain from opening trade with China.

The rooting interest for Nick’s journey is his healing. His flashbacks intensify as he gets closer to Vietnam, revealing his central fear that he gave away critical intell while being tortured. By the end of the story, he’s found his peace by way of a new friendship with a former enemy, his negotiating adversary, General Trung.

The Nick-Trung relationship is key to the story because it’s in this relationship that Nick shifts from being an ignorant Graham Greene QUIET AMERICAN to the empathic global citizen. Nick surprises us all by skimming funds off the Boeing 707 purchase and giving them to Trung for his efforts to clean up UXOs in Vietnam – bombs that Nick himself dropped.

Nick starts off as a competitive guy who needs to win. He tries to beat the Vietnamese until he realizes the power of embracing his former enemies. Eventually he and Elise are at a White House party with President Carter and Deng Xiaoping to commemorate the opening of China while plotting their next covert mission.