More than fifteen years ago, Matthew Connelly encouraged us to remove “the Cold War lens” from our perception of the various wars of decolonization occurring throughout the developing world in the latter half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁴ Michael Hunt, Mark Bradley, and David Hunt have all, to varying degrees, done that in their three treatments of the Vietnamese struggle for independence and unification. Michael Hunt's contribution, A Vietnam War Reader: A Documentary History from American and Vietnamese Perspectives, decenters the Cold War by providing a documentary collection that attempts to dispel the predominant American “myth” about the Vietnam War, which holds that it was primarily “about” the experience of America and its soldiers (Michael Hunt [MH], p. xvii). Instead, by juxtaposing the Vietnamese with the American perspective, he demonstrates that Vietnam's wars were about far more than the geopolitical concerns that prompted the American intervention in the first place. For the Vietnamese, Michael Hunt's collection suggests, the near century and a half of time the documents selected cover (1861 to 1997) were marked by resistance to foreign intervention and an effort to establish a politically viable and unified, independent nation.

This reader would be particularly useful to undergraduate students looking for an introduction to the conflict. Michael Hunt offers a relatively equal focus on the Vietnamese and American perspective of Vietnam's long history of conflict that takes into account the views of American and Vietnamese policymakers and soldiers as well as Vietnamese nationalists from the colonial period and American opponents of the war. It is arranged chronologically over the first four chapters, while the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters break with the chronology to deal, respectively, with the war on the ground in Vietnam, opposition to it in the United States, and its social and political legacies in both nations. Rather than suggest what the war was about, Michael Hunt lets the documents tell the story, leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about the meaning of the war. Each chapter is structured to facilitate this. They begin with brief overviews of the period being examined, followed by three or four discussion questions for the reader to consider while reading the documents. The documents themselves are arranged in sections that also contain a brief overview, and each document is accompanied by a brief introductory note to provide the reader with some sense of the context in which the document was created. The final chapter contains some concluding questions over which the reader is invited to reflect on Vietnam's wars as a whole.

The book is at its best in chapters 3 and 4 when it contrasts the American and Vietnamese Communist perspectives on the deteriorating political and military situation in South Vietnam and the opportunities this provided each side to escalate the fighting. In chapter 3, for example, Michael Hunt contrasts deliberations in Washington over how best to stabilize the Saigon government in late 1963 and early 1964 with the debate within the Communist Party leadership in Hanoi on how best to exploit the political turmoil following the coup against Ngô Đình Diệm. In chapter 4, he provides a documentary account of both sides' strategies for escalation between 1964 and 1965 along with accounts of the North Vietnamese “gamble” with the Tet Offensive and the impact it had on the Johnson administration and the course of the war (MH, p. 93). In keeping with recent trends in the scholarship, Michael Hunt uses this opportunity to highlight the international dimensions of the war with regard to the triangular relationship between Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing. These chapters alone make this documentary reader a worthy contribution to the field.

Mark Bradley's Vietnam at War and David Hunt's Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, in contrast, remove the Cold War lens entirely by focusing on the Vietnamese perspective and characterizing the wars as conflicts over differing visions of modernity and national destiny conceptualized at both the domestic and international realms.

Bradley offers a survey of the Vietnamese struggle for independence and national self-determination from the moment of French conquest to the present day. It is the question of national self-determination, or the realization of the “multiple worlds that the Vietnamese articulated and imagined” (Bradley [B], p. 196), that drives the book. Using a variety of sources that include standard accounts of the First and Second Indochina Wars and more novel offerings such as poetry, literature, and film, Bradley contends that what Western scholars have called the Vietnam War was really a “contest of ideas” (B, p. 2) over Vietnam's postcolonial future.

Over five chapters, plus a prelude and coda, Bradley draws upon these myriad sources “to tell the story of Vietnam at war from the perspective of Vietnamese history” (B, p. 2). With the exception of the fourth chapter, the book offers a mostly chronological narrative of Vietnam's various conflicts, paying particular attention to the 1945 to 1975 period. The first chapter brings together the perspectives of Vietnamese reformers, radicals, Communists, and various other nationalist groups in order to explore the various responses to the French colonial project and demonstrate that “many Vietnamese actors saw the elusive post-colonial future through a very different lens from the Vietnamese communists” (B, p. 39). The ensuing chapters consider how the various struggles that would emerge from these competing visions of an independent Vietnam played out during the war with the French, the five or six years of relative peace following the Geneva Accords, the American War, and the international effort to bring the fighting to a conclusion. The one chapter that breaks from the chronology, entitled “Experiencing War,” considers the human costs of the American War in both North and South Vietnamese societies and among the fighters of the National Liberation Front (NLF).

Throughout, Bradley is able to demonstrate that the fighting was animated by “multiple and contested visions of what a new, post-war future might bring” (B, p. 180). With its chronological account and emphasis on the Vietnamese perspectives, this is an excellent textbook for an upper-level undergraduate seminar—one, I must confess, I use when teaching my fourth-year seminar on Vietnam's wars. It is extremely accessible and offers a wonderful overview, which makes it a perfect introduction to the Vietnamese struggle for independence and unification for those with little prior knowledge of the conflict.

Finally, Vietnam's Southern Revolution is a social history of the first half of the Second Indochina War in Mỹ Tho (Định Tường) Province. Mining a collection of interviews of NLF defectors and prisoners of war conducted by the Rand Corporation between 1965 and 1968, David Hunt traces the shifting contours of the war at the ground level. This analysis attempts to undermine the dominant assumptions about the relationship between the Vietnamese Communist Party and the peasants in their effort to unseat the South Vietnamese government. Rather than consider the revolution to be a top-down effort orchestrated by the southern and northern party leadership, David Hunt contends that the revolution in South Vietnam was as much—if not more so—a product of spontaneous local resistance to the social, cultural, political, and economic makeup of southern society in 1959 and 1960 that cadres of the NLF and Hanoi government attempted to marshal for their larger, respective goals of national liberation and unification. While acknowledging the existence of a “vertical axis” of command and control running from the party leadership at the top down to the village, David Hunt attempts to understand this relationship in terms of the horizontal axis made manifest in “common understandings and collective action at the base.” In this light, the orders and policy directives that came down from above were often “recast” based on the “observations and judgments” of the anonymous actors at the local level (David Hunt [DH], p. 5). It was this intersection of the two axes at the grassroots, according to David Hunt, that made the southern revolution and allowed it to resonate with certain elements of the peasantry. Central to his argument is the concept of “revolutionary modernism,” the efforts of the southern peasantry to resist the efforts of the Saigon government and its American backers to impose their version of “modernization” upon them, and instead chart their own way forward based on their own experiences (DH, pp. 8–9). As David Hunt demonstrates, this interrogation of “what it means to be modern” was what sustained the southern revolution until 1968, when the last of the Rand interviews was conducted (DH, p. 9).

Following an introductory chapter, David Hunt opens his narrative against the backdrop of the social upheaval at work in southern Vietnam following the war with the French as a restless and “itinerant” peasantry “took to the road in hopes of escaping from the poverty and frustrations of rural life” to seek a future where they could “control their own destiny” (DH, pp. 8–9). Over the subsequent ten chapters, David Hunt pays particular attention to the “everyday” observations of the Rand informants to trace the shifting fortunes of the revolution during the near decade from the start of the peasant revolt against the government of Ngô Đình Diệm in late 1959 to the Tet Offensive (DH, p. 10).

Like the other two contributions discussed here, David Hunt's Vietnam's Southern Revolution is a welcome addition to the literature. It assumes the reader already has some understanding of the war, which makes it well-suited to an upper-level undergraduate class or graduate seminar on the war and particularly useful for experts in the field.

While Michael Hunt's reader is very good at juxtaposing the views of various Vietnamese and American stakeholders, it does the least of these books to further our reinterpretation of Vietnam's conflicts. Highly laudable in its efforts to broaden the reader's understanding of the Vietnam War to consider the perspective of the Vietnamese on equal terms with the Americans, as well as its intention to leave the interpretation of the meaning of the war up to the reader, it poses very few questions that have not been asked before. For example, in the concluding section, Michael Hunt raises questions about “the inevitability” of conflict between the Americans and the Vietnamese, which side is to “blame” for the fighting, and to what degree “misconceptions” between the belligerents about motives were responsible for the war (MH, p. 207). Though valid questions, they have all been asked before. Consequently, the reader is less likely reframe his or her understanding of the Vietnamese struggle for independence and reunification beyond the existing critique of the American experience—it was an unnecessary war, fought halfway around the world for reasons wildly out of synch with local realities. This does little to allow the reader to evaluate the deeper meaning of the war for the ordinary Vietnamese people.

The great strengths of Mark Bradley's and David Hunt's books are their efforts to showcase the fact that Vietnam was not simply a country at war, but it was comprised of various segments of society—northern/southern, rural/urban, young/old, male/female—which were at war. The individuals that comprised these segments of society had to contend with the violence and dislocation of the fighting along with the other challenges posed to their daily lives by their standing in society. It was the intersection of these various forces that defined the war, the possibilities for the future of Vietnam, and their place in it. Bradley makes excellent use of films, poetry, and novels, as well as discussion of visual arts and music, to highlight the myriad perspectives of the meaning of the conflict to various members of Vietnamese society not traditionally considered in most histories of Vietnam's wars. David Hunt uses the accounts of various anonymous interview subjects that recur throughout his narrative—such as “the Ethnographer,” “the Midwife,” “the Commander,” “the Instigator,” and “the Feminist”—to demonstrate how the various periods of the conflict shaped their allegiances to one side or the other and their abilities to control their own destinies amidst the chaos of war.

What the accounts of Mark Bradley and David Hunt reveal is the tenuous nature of the existing dominant narrative that the Northern victory resulted from a unified, even sacred, war carried out by the NLF and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. What these books, along with other, more recent works, such as Lien-Hang T. Nguyen's Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012) and Pierre Asselin's Hanoi's Road to the Vietnam War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), demonstrate is that the opposition to both the South Vietnamese government and the American military presence was hardly unified. Disagreement over the pace, scale, and even meaning of the wars was highly contested between the NLF and the Hanoi government as well as their cadres, recruits, and the bystanders caught up in the maelstrom of the fighting. These authors suggest that contestations over modernity and a vision of postwar Vietnam were, from the point of view of many Vietnamese people, what motivated participation in the wars.