Comment on Triumph Forsaken

November/December 2007 Historically Speaking 33 those claiming to speak on behalf of "all Vietnamese ." Modern Vietnamese political culture was much more than the linear track denned by the Communist Party that serves as a convenient prologue for many books about the war. Vietnamese nationalists in the 20th century advocated different responses to French colonialism. Some favored revolution while others preferred various kinds of reform. The Republic of Vietnam established at Saigon in the 1950s offered an opportunity for Vietnamese advocating change within the existing regime. Moyar takes these Vietnamese seriously, as they deserve to be taken, and he does not dismiss them as some form of Vietnamese inferior to the followers of Ho Chi Minh, unworthy of being attributed a role in the history of their country. In this regard, Moyar builds on recent work about Ngo Dinh Diem by other scholars to reevaluate this much maligned man in a more positive light.1 Moyar discerns Ngo Dinh Diem's achievement in establishing a strong anticommunist government despite the well-known accusations of his enemies and detractors, both Vietnamese and American. Moyar's detailed accounts of military encounters give a measure of credibility and respect to this government and its army that is relatively rare in writing about the war. For example, in his account of the much-cited Batde of Ap Bac in early 1963, he argues thatJohn Paul Vann retailed what became the popular version of that battle to obscure his own errors of judgment by denigrating the Vietnamese he was supposedly advising. Like nearly everyone else who has written about the war, Moyar is not an expert on Vietnamese history . With a briskness that is disturbing to specialists (though no more disturbing than what is usually displayed in such books), he peels away some of the clichés that have provided the "traditional" Vietnamese frame for most studies of the war. He may simply be replacing some clichés with other clichés, but a salutary result is that he draws attention to a simple but often forgotten fact: in addition to whatever else it was, this was a Vietnamese war, between Vietnamese with different dreams for their country's future. It was not simply an aberration of the Cold War, but another chapter in a history of differences of opinion among Vietnamese. The Americans, the Chinese, and the Russians came and went for their own reasons, but from start to finish it was a war among Vietnamese for Vietnamese reasons. Keith W. Taylor is aprofessor of Vietnamese studies at Cornell University's department of Asian studies. He is co-editor, with Olga Dror, of'Views of Seventeenth -Century Vietnam: Christoforo Borri on Cochinchina and Samuel Baron on Tonkin (SoutheastAsia Program Publications at Cornell University, 2006). Century Vietnam: Christoforo Borri on Cochinchina andSamuelBaron on Tonkin (Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2006). 2 L. Cadierc, "Le Mur de Dong-Hoi," Bulletin de l'Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient 6 (1906): 87-254. 3 During the quarter-century since writing The Birth of Vietnam (University of California Press, 1983), a study of this period, my evaluation of the importance of contact between the ancestors of Chinese and Vietnamese for the formation of what we now consider as Vietnamese culture has significantly increased. For example, see my "A Southern Remembrance of Cao Bien," in Philippe Papin andJohn Kleinen, eds., LiberAmicorum: Mélanges offerts au ProfesseurPhan Huy Le (Nha Xuat Ban Thanh Nien, 1999), 241-258. ' K. W Taylor, "Vietnamese Confucian Narratives," in Benjamin A. Elman etal., eds., Rethinking Confucianism (UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2002), especially 360-68. s Hue-Tarn Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1992); Shawn Frederick McHaIe, Pring andPower: Confucianism, Communism, andBuddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (University of Hawai'i Press, 2004). 'John T. McAlister,Jr. and Paul Mus, The Vietnamese and Their Revolution (Harper & Row, 1970); Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake (Little, Brown, 1 972). ' For example, on the nearly 100,000 Vietnamese who served in France during World War I, see Kimloan Thi Vu Hill, "A WestwardJourney , An Enlightened Path: Vietnamese Linh Tho, 1915-1930," (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 2001). * Philip...