IT was 40 years after leaving the burning battlefields of Vietnam when journalism professor Beverly Keever retired to write a book about her experiences as a war correspondent during that southeast Asian conflagration.

"I think I knew that I might want to write this book when I left Vietnam," said the teacher and mentor of generations of journalism students, including Chinese reporters on study programs.

"So I shipped all my reporting materials, bound volumes of carbon-paper copies of articles and packets of documents and maps that I had collected. I stored these for 40 years until I had time to use them when I retired," she said.

Keever is being interviewed from her home in Hawaii overlooking the majestic Diamond Head and the azure Pacific Ocean. She is known to many waves of young Chinese journalists who have taken her classes at the University of Hawaii where she taught at the flagship campus for 29 years. Her career has bridged the profession and the professorate and she has received awards from Columbia and Nebraska schools of journalism.

The story of her years in 'Nam has recently been published under the title "Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting" by University of Nebraska Press.

"It's one thing for historians to comb through archives to write their thick volumes, but one of the distinctive features of my book is that I amassed and preserved my own ground-level archive for such a long time," she said. "I amassed this archive amidst the hectic pace of covering a shooting war and bizarre political upheaval."

A reader as a child of Pearl Buck's celebrated book about China, "The Good Earth," Keever studied Chinese culture and history at University of Nebraska before eventually arriving in Vietnam as one of the few, if not only, female reporters operating there at the time.

JFK was in the White House when Keever set foot on Vietnam soil in 1962 and President Nixon was in power when she left in 1969, Lyndon Baines Johnson having come and gone as architect of escalation of the war.

"I had a nest egg of savings from my New York paychecks and had made a pact with two girl friends that we would see Asia together," Keever said. But ultimately the girls couldn't join her, so Keever took off by herself as a freelance reporter.

"I got to Vietnam, thanks to China. Since my grade-school days, I had wanted to see China to see how people lived in other countries, although it was then closed to Americans," she said.

"I ended up staying seven years in Vietnam, freelancing for Newsweek, the New York Herald Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, London Daily and Sunday Express and any other publications."

By the time Keever left she had served continuously in Vietnam for longer than any other Western correspondent.

"Those seven years gave me an institutional memory that few other Americans had," she said. "Unlike many foreign correspondents in Vietnam in the early days, I had the problem of keeping a pay check coming in. In this sense the book sheds light on the obstacles facing a young journalist, especially a woman.

"The eye-opening time for me was roaming around the country as a freelancer without worrying about deadlines of breaking news. I interviewed families farming lush rice paddies in the Mekong Delta and that ribbon of fertile soil skimming northward from Saigon along the South China Sea. I was able to helicopter to remote jungle areas where a fort was being built reminiscent of those of the Old Wild West in American films."

It was also an emotionally taxing time for the young woman war correspondent.

"Still etched in my mind after 50 years is the body of a dead baby bloated in the heat like a plasticized doll. Physically, too, I succumbed to infectious hepatitis caused by consuming contaminated food or water.

"My lifestyle often seemed surreal. I recall spending one day reporting in the dusty countryside and returning to Saigon for an exquisite French dinner at a Vietnamese officials' mansion."

Keever was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for her coverage in the Christian Science Monitor of the besieged outpost of Khe Sanh.

Why did Keever take so long to write the book after leaving the war zone?

"Basically, I had to make sure I had the time, and in order to do so I had to retire in mid-2008 from my university responsibilities. I wanted the book to come out before the 2012 presidential election, when Iraq and Afghanistan were still headliners and it might inform readers. But book publishing operates on different deadlines than news media and so it is just now coming out."

As for the title Death Zones and Darling Spies, Keever believes she might have been the first reporter to use the term "death zones" in her despatches.

"I interviewed Major Tran Van Minh, the province chief in 1962 when I covered the government's first big operation to pacify villages that were considered to be controlled by the pro-Communist Viet Cong," she recalled.

"The major told me the government had ordered villagers to leave their homes before a deadline announced from loudspeakers carried by low-flying aircraft. Those refusing to leave were considered Viet Cong and 'would be shot on sight.' Then US and government forces would treat the 40-square mile area as a 'death zone' and destroy it by bombing."

The "darling spies" are the two Vietnamese associates who worked with Keever during her reporting days, both spindly figures and older than her. "Decades after leaving Vietnam, I learned that one of them had been an ace spy for Hanoi and the other had been working for the Central Intelligence Agency," she said.

The term "darling spies" cropped up on a page of excerpts of China's late Chairman Mao Zedong's writing on guerrilla warfare that one of these associates had typed out. "But he mis-typed Mao, who wrote 'daring spies,' not 'darling spies'," Keever recalled.

Keever briefly achieved her aim of visiting China in 1961, seeing it from the bridge of a passenger-carrying Polish freighter that docked in Shanghai.

"The first time I saw China I couldn't set foot on it. Without a US visa, I was not allowed to disembark but I wrote an article about the grim waterfront and aged skyline that I could see from the ship."

Her second visit was for two weeks in 1987 on a training program for Chinese journalists. "I was lucky enough to be able to teach young Chinese journalists and that program is still flourishing."