Customer Reviews

War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province

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

 

 

Twenty-eight years has not diminished the value of this brilliant study. Jeffrey Race wrote War Comes to Long An as his doctoral dissertation. Also a former US Army officer, Race served as a district advisor in Vietnam. After leaving the Army, Race returned to Vietnam as an independent researcher. He is fluent in Vietnamese-which opened many doors that would otherwise be shut to an American in rural Vietnam. All of these qualifications enhance Race's creditability. Furthermore, they help explain why War Comes to Long An achieves its stated purpose: to show how the Communist revolutionary movement was able to succeed in the South Vietnamese province of Long An. /// Saigon's fatal flaw was their perception of the revolutionary movement, according to Race. The overthrow of the "local elite" at the village level-not the expulsion of the French-was the most significant accomplishment of the Vietminh during the Resistance (p. 40). Vietminh strategy had fused anti-imperialist and anti-feudal themes, resulting in an economic revolution for the countryside. But Ngo Dinh Diem alienated the peasantry by returning the corrupt village councils that had been exiled with the French. Therefore: "... to say that the government later [after the First Indochina War] 'lost control' is misleading, and any analysis which proposes to answer the question of why the government 'lost control' or why there was an 'erosion of mass support for established institutions' is addressing the wrong question (p. 41)." /// Race acknowledges that there were some gains made by the government-as well as internal conflict within the revolutionary movement. But he devotes the majority of the book to analyzing the Communist exploitation of Saigon's ill-conceived policies. Diem's centralized method of government provides an example. South Vietnam was better characterized as a conglomerate of hamlets than as a nation state. Culture varied throughout the country and was largely shaped by local customs. The majority of the Vietnamese population equated "government" with their local village council. Yet the province chief was the first government administrator with any true decision-making authority. (This is one of the reasons the author chooses the province as the basic unit of his study.) In contrast, the Communist Lao Dong Party established their executive agent (the chi bo) at the village level. /// Land is the single most important factor to the peasant in Long An. In addition to its economic value (particularly in the fertile Mekong Delta region-where Long An is located), land is the focal point of family life and religion in Vietnam. It is where a family buries and worships their ancestors and where each family member expects to be interred. For these reasons, concludes Race, the agroville and strategic hamlet programs-by separating the peasantry from their land-were doomed from the start. Furthermore, Race correctly asserts that the revolutionary movement was more successful in "maneuvering the government to overthrow itself" than simply "overthrowing the government" (p. 159). /// Saigon's land reform policy and its effects on the population of Long An receive careful scrutiny. Race successfully applies an analytical methodology to support his assertion: "it is hard to see how the government's land reform could have fulfilled its stated purpose of turning a dissatisfied peasantry into a satisfied one, even if it had been implemented to the fullest" (p. 60). Meanwhile, the Party exploited the government's ineptitude by garnering support from the population. Land was promised to the peasant that supported the revolution. Thus the countryside became inextricably tied to the Party's cause, concludes the author. /// Race presents his evidence effectively. Oral histories from three former province chiefs are introduced in the first chapter. Their recollections are compared with similar accounts from contemporaneous Long An peasants. The results illuminate Saigon's single-minded mandarin approach to "securing" the countryside. These oral histories also demonstrate the conceptual differences between the government and the Party's approach. The government felt the unrest in the countryside was simply a "security" problem. In reality, the Party-in addition to its use of violence and terrorism-was successfully leading a multidimensional socioeconomic revolution. Likewise, the Communists truly knew what motivated the average Vietnamese. Race succinctly illustrates the logic and simplicity of the Party's strategy: "... the accuracy of the Party's judgment was to be proved over and over again in Long An after 1960, as outpost after outpost surrendered without firing a shot. In the Party's view a man will not risk his life only for the sake of his pay, or because he has been drafted. He will only do so for clearly perceived interests involving himself, his family, or his own idea of country (p. 95)." /// There are shortfalls to this book. It is not an easy read. A typical passage: "Whereas the [1968 rural construction effort in Long An] correctly recognized the need for redistributive measures, the program actually adopted by the Saigon and the American governments ignored the redistributive issues and concentrated instead on 'development' and on certain suppressive and intelligence functions." (p. 249) /// Race's methodology also compounds the problem. He quotes extensively from his sources (interviews and documents). (Race does so ostentatiously because the material remained in Vietnamese.) Although this technique is helpful for the researcher, it detracts from the narrative. Race also favors the analytic approach-with his conclusions frequently resting primarily on numerical data. He even offers a "graphic presentation" of his concepts in one of the appendices. Although these tools are effective, they narrow the scope of the book. Additionally, there is no bibliography and the reader is given little direction for further research. /// In summary, War Comes to Long An is a fine piece of scholarship. The author's observations and conclusions regarding the revolutionary movement in Long An extend far beyond the Mekong Delta. The book is best suited as supplemental reading for the graduate or undergraduate student of Vietnam.

Legendary Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once quipped that "all politics is local." And Clausewitz famously wrote that "war is politics by other means." From these observations, one might extract a syllogism that applies quite well to the nature of modern warfare: "all insurgencies are local politics."

It is unlikely that you will find Jeffery Race's "War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province" on the shelf in your local bookstore next to "We Were Soldiers Once..And Young" or "The Best and the Brightest" - but it may be one of the most insightful pieces ever written about the Vietnam War. Moreover, it may be the most historically relevant case study to the US refocus on Afghanistan in 2009. The inescapable conclusion from "War Comes to Long An" (although Race does not say so directly) is that the US lost the war even before the first Marine combat units splashed ashore China Beach in March, 1965. Insurgencies are virtually never won by superior firepower. Rather, it is superior policy and a more integrated framework for approaching what is in essence a political and/or social schism that wins the day. Race's core message is that the communist forces fully understood the nature of the conflict in the South while for Saigon and Washington the fundamental social context of the struggle forever remained a "blank area of consciousness."

The focus of this book is a single South Vietnamese province (Long An: "Prosperous and Peaceful" ironically enough) in the period "between the wars" (i.e. the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954 ending the post-colonial battle with the French and major US intervention in the mid-1960s). One of the special things about this book is the broad, deep and fresh perspectives that Race relies on. The material for the study is almost exclusively primary source, both direct interviews and official documents. He begins with three chapters of extended exerts from conversations with province officials, anonymous villagers, Viet Cong fighters, defectors, American military advisors and the like. The author makes almost no commentary or assessment on the feedback; he simply lets the actors tell their story from their unique perspective. However, a few themes quickly emerge from this mix of viewpoints. And these themes help explain, in Race's view, why the Party or "revolutionary" forces ultimately prevailed.

To begin with, there was a large, yet unrecognized disconnect between the Saigon government officials - often well-educated elites from central Vietnam (Hue, mainly), who took a generally paternalistic view of the relationship between government and the people - and the villagers of the province of Long An whom they served. The primary source materials reveal that the government officials genuinely believed that they were "close to the people" and that the people were content. If the government was so close to the people, as many Saigon-appointed district officials believed, then why did the revolution continue to grow? In the words of one Long An province chief, Bui van Ba, in 1968: "That is something that I have never been able to figure out."

Race argues that post-colonial Vietnam was ripe for social revolution. He employs the metaphor of a man with poor eye-sight. He may have been resigned to a life of squinting and discomfort when he knew no other way. But after he has had eye-glasses and has experienced the world around him in its full clarity and vibrancy he will never go back to the old way again. Race says that the period during the French war when peasants farmed the land of absentee landlords without paying rent and for the first time took some role of authority in their local communities was such a period.

The communists were able to exploit this fissure while the Saigon government officials and their American backers never even recognized that it existed. The Party developed a National Front (ostensibly non-communist) that operated from a simple, crisp narrative with broad appeal, and included an associated action plan that relied on a set of "contingency incentives" (i.e. ongoing benefits required ongoing VC local control): 1) want to keep your land, which the VC had worked to redistribute fairly and without alienating the landed peasants? Then fight the imperialists and feudalist band; 2) Want to fight the imperialist-feudalist band? Then pay your VC-imposed taxes and send your sons to fight with the VC. This program could only be successful if the Party had a firm grip on the lowest echelon of administrative control, the village council (ban hoi), and that body was granted the authority to make decisions that directly effected local life. In the words of one former Vietminh cadre: "You have the central government, then the province, district, and village. But the lowest of the four is the level that lies with the people. If the village level is weak, then I guarantee you, no matter how strong the central government is, it won't be able to do a thing." Race also claims that the communists downplayed the importance of armed force in establishing control. "We must rely on a seething mass political struggle movement, progressing from lower to higher forms...Armed activities only fulfill a supporting role for the political struggle movement." (March 1960 communist letter from the Regional Committee to the village level operation)

Saigon took the precisely opposite approach, vesting nearly all physical and bureaucratic power at the top of the pyramid. The aid programs the government did offer, such as new schools or roads, were not contingent on continuous government control of the area. Moreover, "the Saigon and the American governments ignored the redistributive issues and concentrated instead on 'development' and on certain suppressive and intelligence functions." Race argues that these development programs were certainly humanitarian but were "comprehended simply as a highly organized public-welfare or public-works effort" that were "irrelevant to the fundamental issues involved" in the conflict, namely the social reorganization of the entire nation at the village level.

The government forces in the south completely misunderstood both their success and failure, Race writes. For instance, there was a widespread belief that Saigon had been too passive in rooting out the communist organization in the south after the Geneva Accords in 1954, when in fact the VC were on the verge of liquidation by 1959. Secondarily, the leadership in Long An felt that there major shortcomings were insufficient military strength and the inability to use terror tactics like the VC ("Thus legality is our strength but also our weakness - our weakness because the people do not fear us."). In reality, Race says, the government forces always maintained overwhelming conventional military superiority over the communist insurgency and often behaved more brutally and impudently with the local population than the supposedly terroristic VC. Thus, the government forces erroneously saw themselves as getting buried under avalanche of foreign (i.e. North Vietnamese) manpower that co-opted the generally happy locals by the use of force and intimidation. According to Long An province chief (1957-1961) Mai Ngoc Douc: "I completely deny the view that the communists are strong here because they gotten the support of the people...the people are simply forced to follow the communists because of the threat of terror." Race stresses that the government never grasped that they faced a "coherent social process" of revolution. "The lesson of Long An is that what was attacked was a particular form of social organization, and only consequentially the government itself."

This failure to appreciate the true nature of the conflict led to the development of entirely inappropriate metrics, best exemplified by the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES). Race notes that the whole HES metric system was based on two critical factors that the anti-communist forces consistently misunderstood: security and development. For security the objective was the suppression of opposition not the absence of opposition, which Race argues would have been a more accurate and relevant measure. For development the author maintains that the conflict in the south was always about the redistribution of social power and values, not the incremental improvement of the poverty condition of the mass peasantry.

In closing, this a thought-provoking and sobering study - and one that should be read with care by contemporary policymakers and military officers.

This book is an excellent, thorough study of the strategic Long An province, located just south of Saigon. Jeffrey Race looks at the activities of both sides in the formative years from 1954-1965. Unlike most books on Vietnam, Race spends little time looking at events after the US troop commitment. Race attempts to be an unbiased observer as he reviews the historical record. Also, by looking at one province, Jeffrey Race presents this major conflict at a human level.

Filled with top-notch research and a number of insghtful interviews, this book is a little-known but superb resource for anyone truly interested in the Vietnam War.

The graduate level book on counterinsurgency. Race challenges conventional wisdom on counterinsurgency and forces his readers to think about new ways to deal with insurgents. His insights are innovative and brilliant. Research is top-notch, based on years of work in Vietnam. One of the few books that repeatedly finds a place in my backpack for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Race's book describes why the peasant population of a strategic province near Saigon revolted against the South Vietnamese government. He explains by means of interviews and analysis of Communist and non-Communist documents and intelligence data how the National Liberation Front was able to build a base of support for its war against the South Vietnamese government. He also reveals why various counter-insurgency efforts against the NLF failed so badly. The book is full of anecdotal, quantitative, and documentary support, but suffers somewhat from a dry, academic style of analysis. Nonetheless it is one of the true classics on this subject.