Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans by Xiaobing Li (review)

Xiaobing Li’s Voices from the Vietnam War is an oral-history collection of 22 personal stories of U.S., Vietnamese, Chinese, Soviet, and South Korean soldiers and officers who served in the Vietnam Wars, covering the period from 1946, when the French-Indochina War started, to 1975, when the North Vietnamese took over the whole of Vietnam. In their own words, the veterans recount their war experiences in Vietnam as well as details about their family lives before and after the war. Li’s book testifies to the well-established notion that oral history, despite certain methodological problems, can be a very productive tool of historical inquiry. Those 22 stories allow the reader to approach the Vietnam War from the bottom up, as most of Li’s interviewees were rank-and-file soldiers and midlevel officers during the war. The stories humanize and contextualize the wars in Vietnam, as they are told from different perspectives. Overall, Li’s interviews add new dimensions to our understanding of the impact and scope of the war, and his book is a valuable contribution to the Vietnam War historiography.

The most obvious strength of Li’s book is its scope. Li, a professor of Cold War and military history who served in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the 1970s, spent seven years gathering hundreds of oral histories from Vietnam War survivors. He interviewed not only U.S. and South Vietnamese veterans, but also Chinese, North Vietnamese, and Soviet participants. The voices from the other side of the Iron Curtain are particularly interesting because the stories of the Communist veterans were unavailable until this book’s publication. The 22 stories Li chooses to present thus speak to the internationalized nature of the Vietnam wars. Moreover, Li endeavors to maintain a careful balance among the 22 accounts. The book is divided into five parts. The first three parts include stories told by veterans from both Cold War camps, ranging from foot soldiers to officers and from artillery experts to a Soviet foreign intelligence officer. The remaining two parts consist of stories from those who served in the war as doctors, nurses, and logistical personnel, thus expanding the book’s scope beyond mere battlefield combat and looking into the complicated infrastructures of the war.

The selection enables Li to achieve his major goal of “[moving] away from the conventional combat-centered war history and instead [looking] into the relatively neglected subject of men and women’s lives beyond the battleground” (p. 10). By “[putting] each veteran in the context of the society, culture, and politics,” Li tries to show that “each society has its own way to transform its civilians into soldiers” (p. 10). For example, the stories reveal that patriotism and ideology were not the only factors that sent people into the war. Other factors, such as a lack of choice, family and cultural heritage, and the desire to use the war to advance one’s career, were also important. Tran Thanh, for instance, joined the North Vietnamese Army largely out of pride of being a “Black Thai” warrior. Zhao Shunfen decided to serve in the Chinese army because that would get him out of his impoverished native village. Although Terry Lynn May recognized that service in Vietnam was essential for any officer considering the army as a career, Judy Crausbay Hamilton, the only female informant in the book, was happy to serve in Vietnam as a nurse and to be the wounded soldiers’ “mother, sister, girlfriend, or whatever they needed to see when they woke up” (p. 163). Collectively, Li’s stories reveal the multifaceted nature of the war in Vietnam and how it affected people’s lives both on the battlefield and beyond.

Another major goal of Li’s book is to use those individual stories to shed light on the larger historical context of the Vietnam wars. For example, all of the...