In his early 20s, he traveled to Southeast Asia as a freelance journalist, in time to witness the last days of America's degrading involvement in Vietnam and the growing civil war there and in Cambodia. The effect on Fenton's early poetry was mixed: he had found History, yes, but Someone Else's History, and it wasn't until the publication of "The Memory of War" nearly a decade later, in 1982, that his experience resolved into a meaningful poetic statement. The machinations of poetic fame-making be damned. Fenton, who had already won major prizes and whetted major literary appetites as a student, continued on in England as a political columnist, and not primarily as a publishing poet. The time in Indochina, however, had given Fenton his characteristic poetic voice.