Grasshoppers and Elephants was the book in which Wilfred Burchett attempted to sum up his more than two decades of reporting the French and American wars against the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. As he describes it in the Introduction, ‘in the book that follows, I have tried to place in perspective the role of the people, not only in that historic offensive [the fall of Saigon] which resulted in the final and total victory of the forces of national liberation, but throughout the decades of struggle and sacrifice which led up to that final offensive and made victory certain. It is the product of numerous first hand observations of that struggle, starting with my first visit to the Liberated Zones of the North at the start of the battle of Dien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954, and ending with two months in the Liberated South in the summer of 1975, with many visits to the North and the Liberated Zones of the South in between.’

With these conflicts largely concluded, the book was written at a point when he had some hope that his beloved Indochina could finally enter an era of peace. But this was not to be. China would shortly turn against Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia would attack their own people. Nations Burchett had fearlessly supported in his writing were soon to be at each other's throats.