Customer Reviews

Brother Enemy: The War After the War

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most westerners know about the Vietnam War and, thanks to the movie The Killing Fields, the story of the Khmer Rouge. But very few of us have much of a clue what happened in Indochina between these events and the region's reopening to the west in the 90s.

Brother Enemy is a rich, compelling chronicle of the struggles that shaped the entire region, but primarily Cambodia and Vietnam, during that "in between time." It's a wonderful read because it manages to both detail the politics that shaped events while communicating how those events impacted real people. Nayan Chanda does this by weaving the experiences of individuals, including utterly common folk living day to day lives, into the larger story of regional power politics. It makes for great reading and a book that is both moving and informative. And, it's a great, page turner too.

Highly recommended.

While on a trip visiting Cambodia's Angkor wonder, I picked up this book out of curiosity from the Central Market in PhnomPenh. It is an amazing piece of historical reporting, thoroughly researched and extremely readable. The author puts together the pieces of the puzzle to explain the wars between Vietnam-Cambodia and Vietnam-China, after the American retreat in 1975. The rise and fall of the notorious, murderous Khmer Rouge, the flamboyant Prince Sihanouk, the struggles of the Vietnamese, Chinese power plays, all of this weaved into a thrilling book of history. This book opens my mind to realpolitik: diplomacy, military power, geopolitics, race, and nationalism. Simply a great journalistic achievement which tells the truth with extraordinary balance and fascinating details.

In this book, Chanda details the events leading up and during to the Third Indochina War. Chanda provides intimate detail of the diplomatic maneuverings, petty egos of key players, and the kind of minutiae only Communist bureaucrats could love. For example, he writes that at one point in the late 1970s, Vietnam's relations with China and Russia were determined by how long Vietnamese officials spent at each country's embassy during parties. Reading this book shows the hidden diplomacy of Communist powers and how little we understood. In addition to the wonderful addition to our understanding of Indochina, the book also allows those of us who came of age after the Cold War to understand this era of international politics and how much has changes in the past 30 years.

One note: this is not a book for beginners. Chanda assumes the reader knows the basic history of the U.S.-Indochina War and does not provide background on Vietnam's history until chapter 3. This book would make a good companion to the much more famous (but ultimately less interesting) Stanley Karnow book on the history of the Vietnam War.

A fascinating account of the war after the war in Indo China.
Chanda gives us a wonderful review of the participants on the Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodian, and American sides. When South Vietnam and Cambodia fell to the Communists in 1975, Americans in general and the government in particular closed the book on this awful period in American history. The Vietnamese were gulled into thinking that after their violations of the ceasefire, they were entitled to billions of dollars for rebuilding their shattered economy. Instead they got nothing and selected the Soviets as sponsers. This presented a problem to the Chinese who went to the Khymer Rouge as their proxy. As a result, war followed the war. Cambodia was shattered by first American bombing, then the Khymer Rouge terror and finally the war with Vietnam. Both the Chinese and Vietnamese wanted the Americans to come back and serve a role.
Nayan Chanda does an excellent and even handed job of presenting the views of all the participants. This is a wonderful book to read if you are interested in geopolitics. At 500 some odd pages, this book will take some time to read.

This is the classic study of the chaotic relations in Indochina from the end of the American wars there in 1975 through the escalating hostility between China and Vietnam and Vietnam and Khmer Rouge Cambodia. It ends in 1985, in the middle of the Cambodian stalemate.
The presentation is vivid and the research is solid.

If you are interested in South East Asia, then get this book. Fascinating and revealing account of international involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia. Getting a little old now (could do with an update) but still highly recommended.