The Vietnamese War

Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930-1975

David Elliott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317453949
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economía
• Subtopic: Historia económica

A monumental work of research and analysis, this is a history of the Vietnam War in a single province of the Mekong Delta over the period 1930-1975. More precisely, it is a study of the Vietnamese dimension of the "Vietnam War, " focusing on the revolutionary movement that became popularly known as the "Viet Cong." There are several distinctive features to this study: (1) it provides an explanation for the paradox of why the revolutionary movement was so successful during the war, but unable to meet the challenges of postwar developments; (2) it challenges the dominant theme of contemporary political analysis which assumes that people are "rational" actors responding to events with careful calculations of self-interest; (3) it closely examines province-level documentation that casts light on a number of important historical controversies about the war. No other history of the Vietnam War has drawn on such a depth of documentation, especially firsthand accounts that allow the Vietnamese participants to spea directly to us.

1

The Vietnamese War

Introduction

This is a study of the origins and development of the war in Vietnam in a single province of the Mekong Delta during the period from 1930 to 1975. More precisely, it is a study of the Vietnamese dimension of the war, focusing on the revolutionary movement that became popularly known as the “Viet Cong.” Historian Robert McMahon has observed that the writing on the war is “overwhelmingly produced by Americans, asking American-oriented questions and seeking answers in documents produced by other Americans:” George Herring, who has written one of the standard histories of the Vietnam War, chided a colleague for writing yet another American-centric history of the war in which “the more deeply America becomes involved, the more the Vietnamese recede into the background, becoming shadowy figures whose actions remain obscure.” Commenting on a newly published history of the war, he adds that this book, “[like] most American writing on Vietnam,… does not fully bridge the chasm of ignorance that separated us from our Vietnamese allies and enemies at the time. Our inability as a nation to make this cultural leap is of more than academic importance. There is little indication in recent political debates on possible American intervention in the world that we have learned an essential lesson of Vietnam: the need to understand and respect the history, cultural, and local dynamics of places where we contemplate involvement.”¹ Historian Ronald Spector takes yet another work on the Vietnam War to task for its “ethnocentrism, the same assumption of American omnipotence, for which McMaster pillories the leaders of that era. It largely leaves out of the account the ideas, plans and actions of the Vietnamese.”² In short, Americans will never learn the elusive “lessons of Vietnam” by looking only in the mirror.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that the end-of-century wave of postrevisionist books on the Vietnam War, each claiming that either the war could (or should) have been “won” by America and its South Vietnamese ally “if only …,” or that it was a necessary and justified intervention by the United States even if in historical retrospect it was bound to fail, are all overwhelmingly based on American sources and perspectives.³ To the extent that the Vietnamese realities of the period are taken into consideration, they are typically filtered through the views of Americans with their own agendas and limited understanding of the environment in which those realities operated. Even postwar memoirs written by American participants present a picture of the country that is all too often distorted by remembered personal trauma. A recent book by an American officer who served in the Mekong Delta portrays this region in stark and negative terms as a Southeast Asian “Heart of Darkness”: “The reader can almost smell the dank Mekong River, the fear, the rotting flesh. Mud, blood and vegetation swirl on the page, and author Nathaniel Tripp pounds home the sights and sounds.”⁴ While these images are part of the reality of Vietnam, the full picture is much larger and much more complex. It is, however, the dominance of these personal and therefore limited impressions in American writings that explain why Vietnam has come to represent a national American trauma rather than a real place with real people. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on her June 1997 trip to Vietnam, “The time has come to think of Vietnam as a country, not as a war.”⁵ For that reason, this book is titled The Vietnamese War, an effort to provide a more complete understanding of one of the defining events of the twentieth century.

The present work, though written by an American, is an attempt to elicit Vietnamese voices to explain what happened during the Vietnam War and why. The object of study is the revolutionary movement in My Tho province (as it was called by the French colonial government as well as the revolutionaries), known during the 1954–75 period as Dinh Tuong province (as the Saigon government called it) and now as Tien Giang province, in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Its population during most of the period under consideration was over 500,000. The province is located 45 miles south of Saigon and is bordered by the Mekong River to the south, the vast swamp to the north called the Plain of Reeds (which served as a major revolutionary base area), and the South China Sea to the east. Because the principal land and water routes from the Mekong Delta to Saigon run through My Tho, it is considered the key province in the delta and the gateway to Saigon.

Analytic Themes

There are four distinctive features of this study. First, it presents a thesis that explains a paradox: why was the revolutionary movement so successful during the war, but far less effective in overcoming the challenges of postwar development? This thesis is supported by a detailed analysis of the effect of the revolution on Vietnam’s rural social structure. The evidence suggests that the revolution was a victim of its own success. Its land reforms set in motion a fundamental transformation of South Vietnam’s rural society, but at the same time the revolutionary agenda led to a prolonged and disruptive war, which itself became the main engine of social change and took it in a different direction than the Communist Party had originally planned. Subsidized American consumer goods and equipment flooded the countryside. Peasant communities were dislocated, and the depopulation of the countryside led to even more sweeping change in rural class structure than anything the Party could have engineered. The unintended result was the emergence of a rural middle class that included nearly 70 percent of the rural population in the Mekong Delta and, after the war, proved stubbornly resistant to collectivization. Eventually, this brought socialist transformation in South Vietnam to a halt and created a crisis that spread to North Vietnam. It ultimately forced the entire country to abandon collective agriculture and many other features of state socialism and adopt a sweeping program of market reforms.

In some ways it could be said that in winning the war, the Communist Party lost its revolution, and this book tries to explain the roots of this dilemma. This study also attempts to analyze why even this fundamental transformation of the socioeconomic base of rural society in South Vietnam did not change the outcome of the war. If the United States could take any satisfaction from the postwar travails of the communist revolution in Vietnam, the delayed impact of this war-induced change came far too late to salvage American political and strategic interests in Vietnam. Moreover, this transformation was not the result of deliberate U.S. or South Vietnamese policies, but of the war itself; thus, Vietnam’s postwar difficulties cannot be taken as a vindication of the political and social policies of the opponents of revolution during the war.

A second feature of this study is its conclusions about political behavior, based on a study of the motivations and actions of both the committed revolutionaries and the peripheral supporters of the movement. It challenges the dominant school of contemporary political analysis—which, not coincidentally, is itself dominated largely by the study of American politics by Americans—and which assumes that people are “rational actors” responding to fluctuating incentives with careful calculations of self-interest and of costs and benefits. Although this rational-choice approach has considerable explanatory power, its individual-centered theory of politics often makes it difficult to account for the way in which a larger framework—a social movement or a community—shapes individual behavior. In addition to analyzing the complex and often contradictory pulls of ideals and self-interest, the present study examines the much misunderstood role of compulsion in revolutionary mobilization. Compulsion is not well integrated into the dominant paradigms of political behavior. This study graphically illustrates the terror and intimidation that were prominent features of the revolutionary movement, but the documentation also clearly shows that although these were effective tactics at critical junctures of the conflict, they were not the main factors in mobilizing widespread popular support. The text discusses how force was a supplement to but not a substitute for incentives and moral suasion. When the revolutionary movement encountered problems, compulsion alone did not provide a solution. The role of coercion in politics cannot therefore be ignored, but should be viewed as one factor among many that affect political behavior.

The study also clearly shows the centrality of values and ideals to most revolutionaries, and the responsiveness of even ordinary people to moral appeals. At the same time, it shows the validity of some aspects of the “rational actor” approach which are helpful in explaining the behavior of the emerging rural middle class. At times, political behavior of the revolutionaries and peasants in My Tho is best analyzed in collective terms, but at other times analysis at the level of the individual is more productive. James Scott’s The Moral Basis of Political Economy and Samuel Popkin’s The Rational Peasant are the most influential formulations of the contending schools of thought on the relative utility of taking community and values (Scott) as the starting point, as opposed to considering rationally calculating individuals (Popkin).⁶ The My Tho case suggests that Scott is somewhat more helpful in understanding the early stages of the revolution, and Popkin more pertinent toward the end.⁷

A third feature of this study is the close examination of province-level documentation that casts light on a number of important historical controversies about the Vietnam war or offers a new perspective on the turning points of this conflict. In many cases, the province-level documentation provides crucial pieces of the puzzle that general Party histories of the war gloss over. Memoirs and interviews give an unusually detailed view of the struggle within the leadership of the southern branch of Vietnam’s Communist Party in the 1940s and especially during the pivotal revolution of August 1945. This evidence shows that the Party’s control of the Resistance movement in the South during the war against the French was less complete than most general accounts imply, but that the Viet Minh’s governance style was quite dictatorial despite its great political popularity and broad nationalist appeal. Little mention has been made in most histories of the temporary success of French pacification in the Mekong Delta in the early 1950s, because most French and Vietnamese studies focus on what was happening in North Vietnam at the time. The reasons for the collapse of French pacification in the South in 1953–54 and the hope this precedent gave the revolutionaries during a similar low point in 1970–71 are important to our understanding of the struggle. Memoirs of My Tho province cadres and province Party histories shed important new light on the dispute over resuming armed struggle in 1956–59. The reasons why, within the space of a year, the Diem regime lost its near-total grip on the countryside in 1960 are brought out in more detail than in previous studies and are vividly illustrated by eyewitness and participant accounts. The role of terror, which has been downplayed in some sympathetic accounts of the revolution, was indispensable to the uprising during one relatively brief stage, and this study carefully documents this role while at the same time placing it in a larger perspective of highly successful, longer-term mass political mobilization. The complex impact of the Party’s land reform in the South has been almost totally ignored or misunderstood, as has the topic of the popular associations that were the instruments of revolutionary governance at the grass-roots level. Most writings on the actual mechanics of guerrilla warfare in Vietnam are superficial and often erroneous, and the detailed reconstruction in this study of the military dimension of the revolution by its own cadres is a useful corrective. A number of turning points in revolutionary strategy, especially some still mysterious aspects of the Tet Offensive, and the debates between Hanoi and the southern guerrilla leaders over strategy in the late stages of the war, can be more fully understood by examining documents and memoirs relating to the way general strategies were perceived and implemented in the Mekong Delta and Dinh Tuong province in particular.

The fourth feature of the book is the sheer volume of unique and comprehensive documentation on which it is based. No other study of the Vietnam war has drawn on such extensive documentation, especially firsthand accounts in which the Vietnamese participants in the events described speak directly to us. Much of the analysis is based on interviews with prisoners and defectors from the revolutionary movement. These were conducted largely during two periods, 1965–68 and 1971–74. There were 288 interviews in the first set, averaging around 35 typewritten pages of verbatim transcript after translation. The second set, from 1971 to 1973, includes 103 interviews totaling about 2,200 pages, or an average of about 20 pages per interview. (Statistics for the second set are harder to calculate, since not all interviews were typewritten). The interview data thus amounts to nearly 12,000 pages of transcribed material. In addition, the study utilized documents from provincial revolutionary units captured during military operations. These comprised several thousand pages, of varying degrees of analytic usefulness. The study drew upon tens of thousands of documents captured by U.S. and South Vietnamese military forces and summarized by U.S. military intelligence translators. Many of these pertain to Dinh Tuong or the Mekong Delta. Finally, this book utilizes a large number of revolutionary accounts and memoirs that have rarely been employed in studies of the Vietnam war, especially local Party and military histories and memoirs of revolutionary leaders at the region and province level.

Availability and Use of Data

Two major deficiencies of the available data on the revolution in Dinh Tuong province from 1945 to 1975 underline the caution with which analytic conclusions must be drawn. The first deficiency is the lack of systematic contemporaneous input from participants in the revolutionary movement who were not cither prisoners or defectors. The constraints of the environment in which the interviews were conducted are obvious. Fortunately, toward the end of the writing of this work, a wealth of official histories and biographies of leading members of the My Tho revolutionary movement became available. These reflect the higher-level perspective missing from the interviews, as well as the unconstrained presentation of the revolutionary point of view, albeit in retrospect. Second, both the terms under which much of the interviews were conducted (for the Rand Corporation under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Defense) and the political obstacles involved in doing research on the most sensitive areas of Vietnamese political life rendered systematic inquiry into the policies and actions of the Saigon government (the Government of the Republic of Vietnam or GVN), impossible, though the interviews include numerous evaluations of the personnel and actions of the GVN by those who had served in the revolution. I hope the reader will be persuaded that these limitations do not invalidate the findings derived from the extraordinarily rich data that were available, and that there are ways of compensating for these problems.

The post-1968 interview data are unique. At a time when most studies of the revolutionary movement which accompanied the early period of U.S. direct combat involvement in Vietnam had been terminated, the Dinh Tuong study was continued in the 1971–73 period and provides valuable documentation of an area and a situational context that was considered largely irrelevant by many U.S. officials. For one thing, the true test of the strength and cohesion of an organization or social movement is its response to adversity, and the post-Tet period certainly provided that for the revolutionary side. Even more important is what an examination of the war in the post-Tet period can tell us about the relationship of the Mekong Delta to other areas of Vietnam, especially North Vietnam, which combined to produce a revolutionary victory. In addition, much of the local postwar Vietnamese autobiographical material and research on the war at the village and provincial level has not been available or consulted in prior studies written outside Vietnam.

for the reader, the strengths of this book may prove a mixed blessing. The book is very long, even in its abridged paperback version, and requires close attention to a level of detail that may at times seem excessive. But the payoff is truly in the details. First, they provide a rich mix of voices that illustrates the complexity and individuality of the Vietnamese participants in the conflict. Second, they show the great diversity in the way revolutionary policies were perceived and carried out at the village level, which should demonstrate conclusively that the revolutionary movement was not monolithic. The ultimate aim of this book is to show the human face of a movement that is pictured by Americans largely in abstract and stereotyped terms, and to illustrate its diversity. These details will also help us understand the evolution from one stage of the conflict to another—how the situation changed and the reasons for the changes.

Implications for “Postrevisionist” Studies of the War

The meaning of the Vietnam War still remains highly contested despite the decades that have elapsed since the end of that conflict. President George H.W. Bush mistakenly concluded that America’s apparently decisive victory in the first Gulf War had “kicked the Vietnam Syndrome” once and for all.⁸ But the Clinton-era debates over America’s global purpose by the late 1990s had revived attempts to reconsider and even rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, to erase the cautionary sting of defeat and clear the way for a more expansive use of military force. Some argued that if the Vietnam War was not a victory, it could have been and should have been—or actually was a success (though we did not recognize it at the time). When “Iraqification” surfaced as a means of achieving victory in the Second Gulf War in President George W Bush’s second term, some of the postrevisionist accounts were cited as evidence that the earlier historical parallel, Victnamization, was not a failure and that the US had belatedly found the right commander (General Abrams) and the right strategy (“clear and hold” rather than “search and destroy”) but, unfortunately, only after political support for the war had evaporated. The evidence cited in this book docs not support this analysis. Only the “clear” element of “clear and hold was a success, and this lead to a significant depopulation and devastation of the countryside—not a model of “pacification” that would win “hearts and minds.”⁹ The two most serious challenges to the revolution were the loss of population and the erosion of the class base of the movement as the war transformed Vietnamese society. Neither of these factors was the result of carefully crafted counterinsurgency tactics. Both were products of the disruptive impact of the war itself.

Many of the postrevisionist studies which claim that the revolutionaries could have been defeated “if only…” might do well to consider several points that emerge from this study. The first is that while the opponents of revolution often were able to find answers to revolutionary tactics later on in the conflict, the inescapable historical fact is that the war unfolded in real time, and these innovations were nev...