From: "Frank Conlon" <conlon@U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2011 1:46 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: REVIEW H-Net Review Publication: 'The Vietnam War from
Below'
> H-ASIA
> February 22, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig pub. H-HistGeog) by Andreas Hilger of Xiaobing Li,
> _Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian
> Veterans_
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> ************************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Xiaobing Li. Voices from the Vietnam War: Stories from American,
> Asian, and Russian Veterans. Lexington University Press of
> Kentucky, 2010. 296 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8131-2592-3.
>
> Reviewed by Andreas Hilger
> Published on H-HistGeog (February, 2011)
> Commissioned by Eva M. Stolberg
>
> The Vietnam War from Below
>
> For a long time, oral history has been an established and widely
> accepted tool of historical research. Although there are specific
> methodical problems, the possible yield is obvious: a scrupulous
> analysis of eyewitness accounts may permit a detailed reconstruction
> of facts or chains of events. They may open new perspectives on
> historical interrelations on different levels. They tend to question
> traditional, selective interpretations, and they allow for a close
> reading of motivations and aims of historical actors. At the same
> time, corresponding memoirs or interviews appear as a constitutive
> contribution to the process of negotiating, challenging, or
> confirming public--national--memories and interpretations of the
> past. In view of these multifaceted possibilities, the presentation
> of reports from different national points of view promises important
> insights into somehow neglected aspects of central international
> developments of the twentieth century. Xiaobing Li's synopsis
> contains twenty-two interviews with American, Russian, Vietnamese,
> Korean, and Chinese participants of the Vietnam wars (starting in
> 1946 with the French Indochina War and ending in the Communist
> takeover in 1975). The author furnishes the interviews with brief
> statistical and contextual data. His work highlights the importance
> of such comparative narratives and contributes to a deeper
> understanding of war and remembrance in different, changing
> societies. Originally, the author had interviewed fifty-three
> Americans, about ninety "Communist veterans," and seventy-two former
> South Vietnamese soldiers. The published selection reflects the
> original imbalance, which points to the more secret and more
> restricted approach of the former Communist misalliance to the
> Vietnam War as well as to its political and social consequences.
>
> Apart from multilateral perspectives, the volume brings together
> experiences from various battlegrounds and, above all, from different
> military structures, namely, from the medical services and the huge
> logistical machinery. Within this framework, Li uses the vivid
> descriptions of former participants for several purposes. Here, his
> general conclusions regarding the international and political
> informative value of the narratives partially tend to overstretch the
> material: the interconnection between American escalation and the
> worsened relations between Beijing and Moscow was more complex than
> the accounts assume. Besides, Li's insistence on questions of team
> spirit and fighting morale of Communist and non-Communist troops
> alike or on operational assessments from time to time overshadows his
> second main focus: one of the author's aims is to look into the
> "subject of men and women's lives beyond the battleground" and to
> show "that each society has its own way to transform its civilians
> into soldiers" (p. 10).
>
> In this context, the particular previous knowledge of the soldiers,
> their images of their enemies, and their postwar assessments and
> rationalizations of the war period are of special interest.
> Furthermore, the collected memories extend the author's question
> regarding the transformation of civilians into soldiers: they inform
> us about mixed, uncertain, or changing loyalties of soldiers on both
> sides. In addition, they remind us of yawning gaps between, above
> all, American and Vietnamese prewar experiences and general
> preconditions. As Li rightly observes, Vietnamese citizens had to
> live through a new Thirty Years' War, which became a part of their
> lives and family histories. This constellation would augment
> Vietnamese motivations and perceptions with additional complex and
> strong reasons. So, for Sergeant Tran Thanh, general military values
> were integral parts of his self-image as a member of the "Black Thai"
> minority (p. 41). He not only understood the bloody conflicts in
> political terms, but also remembered a certain ethnic dimension in
> the relations between North and South Vietnamese--these ethnic
> undercurrents could strengthen or contradict political frontiers. For
> others, the reunification of Vietnam under Communist rule appeared to
> be the only chance to unite their own families. The recollections
> suggest that the North Vietnamese authorities often were able to
> reconcile such individual motivations with the general political
> line. Propaganda, indeed, constituted one instrument of winning the
> allegiance of the people, but the possible impact of repressive
> influences is ignored by the North Vietnam veterans. However, their
> South Vietnam counterparts did not develop a similar degree of
> patriotic fighting spirit. Li's informants present a complex
> explanation for this shortcoming. In general, they underline the
> counterproductive effects of a dominant American presence in the war
> against the North. Thus, they argue, South Vietnamese soldiers did
> consider the war to be an American enterprise: "We were fighting the
> American war in Vietnam" (p. 26). Connected with this point of view
> was the feeling of alienation between a modernized army and a
> traditional society. This reasoning is thought provoking, but to a
> certain degree may depend on twisted postwar developments. Among
> seventy-two southern veterans interviewed, sixty-one live in the
> United States.
>
> Russian and Chinese accounts underline the problems of the officially
> celebrated Communist international solidarity. Obviously, several
> Soviet soldiers and experts, in their relations with Vietnamese
> comrades, resembled the patronizing attitude of the emissaries of the
> American superpower on the other side of the frontline. Others, again
> like their American colleagues, might have been confronted with
> unexpected distrust or dislike by their Vietnamese comrades in arms.
> Besides, military exigencies notwithstanding, Soviet as well as
> Chinese "voluntaries" continued the Sino-Soviet struggle on
> Vietnamese soil. The Soviet KGB diverted its resources in North
> Vietnam to spy on China, and the Chinese air raid defences did not
> share their insights into possible weakness of American or southern
> aircraft with the Soviet command. On the individual level, Li's
> Russian and Chinese respondents do not reveal an extraordinary sense
> of socialist internationalism. Instead, their narrations reflect a
> more traditional military or national sense of duty, combined with
> sober personal calculations, which led them into the Vietnam War. The
> same individual factors pervade American accounts. According to these
> reports, the young U.S. forces in Vietnam were also imbued with
> distressingly naive ideas about warfare under Vietnamese conditions.
> In fact, American, Russian, Chinese, and Vietnamese soldiers
> represented different worlds and cultures, which aggravated their
> antagonistic ideas and undermined political alliances. The
> internationalization of the Vietnam War prolonged the fighting and
> multiplied the suffering. Despite the mentioned shortcomings, Li's
> book is a powerful reminder that it was individuals with their own
> schemes of life and with their own dreams and hopes who did the
> fighting for a complex mixture of reasons.
>
> Citation: Andreas Hilger. Review of Li, Xiaobing, _Voices from the
> Vietnam War: Stories from American, Asian, and Russian Veterans_.
> H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. February, 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32440
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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