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★ During the golden period, internationalist perspectives inspired the Vietnamese to think that their revolutionary dream was more than a parochial fancy and gave them warrant to imagine the future in a global, a utopian, register. “As a rule,” an informant recalled, before introducing new policies “the village secretary always spoke of the international and home political situation so as to make the villagers become more enthusiastic about paying taxes to help the Front to feed the soldiers and to buy armaments.” Cadres assured them that “the 13 socialist states in the world all supported the liberation war in South Vietnam” and that they constituted “an evergrowing force while the imperialists have retreated everywhere.” They told stories about the USSR, “its modern weapons circling the earth, and its satellites.” Authors of a revolution and victorious in World War II, the Soviets had succeeded in building a modern society. Activists also saw the People’s Republic of China as a redoubtable ally. “The Front propagandizes that China is a great nation, a strong nation with atomic weapons,” and that the Chinese were capable of destroying “the strongest imperialist country which was the United States.” Marching in step with a worldwide coalition, the Liberation Front was bound to win over a retreating enemy.1 In movement discourse the United States appeared as a hateful but also an oddly disembodied enemy. Cadres preached “that the Americans were blood-thirsty aggressors” and that Washington policymakers were “the ring leaders of all the imperialists in this world.” While the French were “the old-style colonialists,” the Americans were “the new-style colonialists. Even though these two types of colonialists are different in some respects, they are basically the same. The French had economic and political control, while the Americans only have economic control. But through their control over the economy the Americans control everything.” Although the people haven’t yet “witnessedtheAmericansdoinganythingwrong,andinreality,anti-American slogans weren’t as appealing as anti-Diem slogans,” remarked the Instigator, the Front “cleverly associated the Americans with Diem’s misdeeds such as chapter nine the american other chapter nine 154 forced labor for the construction of Agrovilles, and arbitrary arrests of former resistance cadres.” As a result, “even though they haven’t come across any Americans yet,” the villagers “have a preconceived opinion about them and regard the Americans as even more cruel than the French.”2 In 1965 this shadowy adversary suddenly invaded Vietnam. News quickly spread that U.S. troops had arrived in central Vietnam and American planes were attacking the DRV, while in My Tho massive firepower was aimed against the liberated zones. As people talked among themselves and seized on scraps of information from newspapers and radio broadcasts and from the grapevine , their morale faltered. Company-level officers in the 261st Battalion, who “used to be so confident that no one could touch the North,” now gathered over cups of tea and noted that the Americans “are bombing our granaries. If Russia and China don’t do anything to stop the Americans, the North will be destroyed. When this happens, the only thing left for the liberation troops to do is to turn in their weapons to the puppet government and surrender.” Company-level positions in the PLAF were not for the faint of heart, but even these battle-tested soldiers were frightened by U.S. escalation. The increasingly acrimonious Sino-Soviet split, which suggested that the USSR and China were more focused on denigrating each other than on countering the United States, only heightened a sense of isolation among local militants.3 This chapter focuses on the crisis in meaning that ensued. Before 1965 only a few people in My Tho had encountered U.S. personnel, but after that date foreign intervention came with a greatly added weight. Bombs and shells fell everywhere, tanks flattened orchards and plowed up rice fields, troops sacked houses and shot villagers. Rural dwellers were further disoriented by the realization that they were being forced to live in a different way, congruent with a “modernization” ideal of external origin. Fighting to adjust and to survive, the Vietnamese came face-to-face with the American Other. from special war to total war In retrospect the Vietnamese Communist Party characterized 1965 as a “hinge year,” but in the moment local militants did not see things so clearly. For them the year was marked by a mix of hope and dread and by a growing sense that they were no longer...

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