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★ chapter one a social history of the vietnam war Regime changes, military campaigns, and big-power politics hold center stage in the literature on the Vietnam War. Accounts begin with the August Revolution of 1945, which brought the Viet Minh and the Communist Party to power and led to the formation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and then to the First Indochina War, pitting the Viet Minh against French colonialism. The conflict became a battleground in the cold war, with the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and the DRV on one side and the United States and France on the other. In 1954 the French were forced to withdraw, and partition followed, with the Communist Party ascendant in the North, while the Republic of South Vietnam, also known as the Government of Vietnam (GVN), took charge in the southern half of the country. The concerted uprising of 1959–60 led to the formation of the National Liberation Front (the NLF, the “Viet Cong”), which, with the aid of the DRV, then battled the GVN and the United States in the Second Indochina War. The 1968 Tet Offensive constituted a turning point in the fighting, and the end came in 1975 with the overthrow of the Saigon government, the departure of the Americans, and, a year later, reunification of the country.1 What I have attempted here is a different kind of history, with the emphasis on everyday realities at village level, as documented in a remarkable source, assembled by the Rand Corporation. Having been commissioned by the U.S. Department of Defense to study “Viet Cong motivation and morale,” Rand interviewed thousands of defectors and prisoners who had been associated with the NLF. Of particular interest is one subset of the collection, the “DT series,” based on 285 interviews conducted from 1965 to 1968 in the Mekong Delta province of My Tho. Bordering on a guerrilla base area in the Plain of Reeds and inhabited by a population with a history of activism, the province played a key role in the struggle against the French, the Saigon government, and the United States.2 The forty-two prisoners in the DT series were regarded as criminals by the GVN, and many had been tortured by soldiers or police before Rand chapter one 2 staffers had a chance to interview them. Knowing that their lives were in danger, they were hardly in a position to speak freely. The other 243 informants were defectors who had turned themselves in to one of South Vietnam ’s “Chieu Hoi” Centers. Chieu hoi, which means “call back” in Vietnamese , was translated as “open arms” by the Americans, who hoped that defectors were “rallying” to the government cause. These subjects, who in many instances had served the NLF for a number of years, were under pressure to demonstrate the sincerity of their conversion to the government cause. In the power-laden interview setting, they too had to watch their words. In spite of these constraints, the poor, largely uneducated country people questioned by Rand presented a rich commentary on village life in My Tho. The interviews are filled with vivid, often clashing reports, as informants struggle to remember and explain turbulent events. They offer crafty feints and disarming confessions, insights of startling penetration and catechisms echoing one or another party line, expressions of fear and hatred, guilt and sorrow, defiance and bewilderment, and also, in more than a few instances, longing for abundance and harmony in a world to be won. The My Tho testimonies amount to an exceptional projection of history from below; they retrieve from obscurity the vicissitudes of everyday life unfolding alongside the events that are highlighted in the dominant narrative. Interviews were conducted from May 1965 to January 1968 and are especially rich on the period that began with the opening salvos of the Second Indochina War. They serve as a point of departure for a study of the war at ground level from the concerted uprising to the Tet Offensive.3 the party and the peasants Assumptions about the Communist Party and the Vietnamese peasantry stand in the way of such a project. Political parties leave a paper trail and are therefore easy to research, while peasants generate few documents and are difficult to research. Parties devote resources to broadcasting their achievements, whereas agrarian populations find limited opportunities to speak for themselves. Parties have leaders whose names and views are known, while plebeian...

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