The author uses released Rand interviews with 'Viet Cong' defectors and prisoners of war and past work involving the province of M? Tho to create a more up-to-date social framework for the Vietnam War at the village level.

Written for undergradaute courses on postwar American foreign policy, Southeast Asian history, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, international relations, decolonization, and third world communism, this introduction uses the wealth of recent research to place the Vietnam war within the contexts of European colonization, American Cold War strategy and Vietnam's own political history

This book, first published in 1989, examines the creation and implementation of Communist policy in Vietnam during the crucial period between the 1954 Geneva Conference and the establishment of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam in December 1960. This study challenges long-held views about the origins and nature of the Viet Cong. It carefully examines the various stages in the struggle for ‘national liberation’ during this period, reviews the consequences of the failure of purely political means to achieve reunification and then focuses on the struggle between the Diem regime and the Communists.

By tracing the evolving worldview of Vietnamese communists over 80 years as they led Vietnam through wars, social revolution, and peaceful development, this book shows the depth and resilience of their commitment to the communist utopia in their foreign policy. Unearthing new material from Vietnamese archives and publications, this book challenges the conventional scholarship and the popular image of the Vietnamese revolution and the Vietnam War as being driven solely by patriotic inspirations. The revolution not only saw successes in defeating foreign intervention, but also failures in bringing peace and development to Vietnam. This was, and is, the real tragedy of Vietnam. Spanning the entire history of the Vietnamese revolution and its aftermath, this book examines its leaders' early rise to power, the tumult of three decades of war with France, the US, and China, and the stubborn legacies left behind which remain in Vietnam today.

On the eve of the war against the South Vietnamese regime in 1964, the communist party strove to carve out a new productivist and political elite from the towns and villages of the country. According to a categorization of patriotic exemplarity devised by Ho Chi Minh, "avant-garde workers," "exemplary soldiers" and "new heroes" would fill the ranks of a "new model society," one in which political virtue would serve as the principle to mobilize the masses. This study presents and analyzes the process by which "new heroes" were invented. It first develops a picture of what constituted heroes in Vietnamese tradition and history, and then shows how the new model, effectively a Sino-Soviet import, was imposed, only to be slowly distorted by its own cultural rationale and by specific objectives. Far from being a transitory phenomenon, this model has contributed for more than half a century to the reconstruction of the national imagination and the development of a new collective, patriotic and communist memory in Vietnam. «This fascinating account is like no other study in French or English. Based on primary sources from Archives No. III in Hanoi and scores of interviews, it is a fascinating read.» -Christopher Goscha, Professor of International Relations, Universite du Quebec a Montreal