The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975 (review)

Many Vietnam specialists believe that to comprehend fully the Vietnam War one needs first to understand it at the provincial level. David Elliott's imposing study of Dinh Tuong province, to use its name between 1954 and 1975, epitomizes this view. His book calls to mind earlier studies of Vietnamese provinces during the American period of the war. Jeffrey Race in War Comes to Long An and Eric Bergerud in Dynamics of Defeat, which examined Hau Nghia, studied the struggle between the Viet Cong and the Saigon government at the provincial level. Like Elliott, Bergerud and Race sought to explain why the communists succeeded and successive Saigon regimes failed. It is no coincidence that the provinces that Bergerud, Elliott, and Race selected to examine (Hau Nghia, Dinh Tuong, and Long An respectively) were contiguous and had strong, well-established National Liberation Front party organizations.

Elliott's work is on a much larger scale than Race's or Bergerud's and covers a longer period of time in much more detail. Elliott provides a perspective on Vietnamese issues and history unfamiliar to many American readers. His focus, revolution and social change in rural society, is broader than the military struggle and pacification program. He has produced a detailed history of the struggle by nationalist and communist groups against the French, the Americans, and various Saigon regimes in a single province.

Elliott's work had a long period of gestation and is based on intimate knowledge of the province. The author served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam between 1963 and 1965, after completing a year of Vietnamese language training. His initial work in Dinh Tuong began later in the 1960s as an analyst for the Rand Corporation. Much of Elliott's book is based on interviews with Viet Cong prisoners and defectors that Vietnamese interviewers working with Elliott for the Rand Corporation conducted between 1965 and 1974. The interviewers sought to comprehend the high level of morale and motivation of the communists. Skillfully exploiting this material has allowed Elliott to examine the conflict, even the period of American combat, from the perspective of the Vietnamese.

Elliott makes no claim that Dinh Tuong is representative of other provinces, but cogently argues that the history of the conflict will remain incomplete until the issues at the province level are better understood. He also contends (p. xxii) that the outcome of the struggle was decided in the countryside and at the local level—a point not all may accept. Hanoi could have hardly succeeded without the diplomatic, military, and political efforts external to South Vietnam that raised the cost of the war to levels unpalatable for most Americans. The revolutionaries were as determined and uncompromising at the Paris talks, for example, as they were in the provinces. Both campaigns were necessary for victory.

A work devoting nearly fifteen hundred pages to a single Vietnamese province is not intended for the general reader, but should prove invaluable to those seriously interested in the war in the countryside. The wealth of detail and analysis in The Vietnamese War sets the bar high for future studies and represents a major contribution to our knowledge of the war.