What Are You Currently Reading? 2012

[Mike in Hilo]

David Elliott, The Vietnamese War. Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930-1975. Concise Edition. I had previously read excerpts, but finally bought the book, albeit in abridged form.

This is a must read for serious students of the Vietnam War. Elliott's main sources are the widely cited and compelling Rand interviews of communist defectors and POWs, captured documents, and some minor additions from the less credible official Province History. the result is the insiders' chronicle of the evolution of the revolutionary movement in one Deltaic province, Dinh Tuong.

The insights are noteworthy: The near destruction of Revolutionary combat forces and cadre by 1969-'70 is attributed to the massive acceleration of kinetic activity that resulted not only in devastating attrition, but the literal, physical depopulation of the rural base of the revolution as peasants fled for their lives to escape allied (mainly US) bombing and shelling, and headed for the safer GVN held areas. COIN in the sense of "draining the swamp," but little else of the substance of, say, FM 3-24. The same massive dislocations of the war, such as the changes in settlement patterns/radical urbanization, also rendered obsolete the old feudal relationships that purportedly provided the grievances on which the Revolution had originally fed, destroying the landlord class as such and taking the old grievance of land tenure essentially off the table; and creating opportunities that led to the formation of a new, peasant bourgeoisie plurality. In the final offensive, Elliott notes, the transit of Revolutionary forces was made more difficult by a populace no longer disposed to be helpful. But Elliott touches upon another, more prosaic explanation for this shift in loyalty. Universal GVN male conscription (not authorized until the aftermath of the Tet offensive), at a time when decimation of the communist units had removed the alternative, resulted in the overnight conversion of the bulk of rural families into ARVN and RF/PF dependents.

The Revolutionary base areas were never eradicated, though, and were ultimately re-infiltrated by NVA personnel for both main and local forces. But a real eyeopener was the incredible--even allowing for some exaggeration-- rebound in cadre strength, the (presumably local) Party members operating in Dinh Tuong to 7000 at war's end in 1975. And these had been drawn from a shrunken base. The Party compensated for erosion in popular support by limiting recruitment largely to the poorest peasant class, because these were less likely to forsake, under pressure or blandishment, the status and power that Party membership bestowed. A commitment less widespread, yet deeper, as Elliott put it.

A caveat: As the Rand interviewees' commitment had been sufficiently firm to merit Party membership, narratives may demonstrate a degree of self-justificatory adherence to the Party line. Example: North-South ethnic friction, a potential challenge to Party dogma on Southern impetus for reunification, is touched upon but dismissed as insignificant. Yet traditional, Southern disdain toward Northerners was a very real issue within the general population, likely contributing to the distaste with which Southerners viewed the Diem regime (and subsequent neo-Diemist governments) and its representatives; and no doubt feeding the backlash against NVA as well. (Elliott is not alone in sidestepping the ethnic issue. Since installing Diem, the US had found it impossible to appeal, without ridicule, to Southern ethnicity as a rallying point against Northern aggression, in the face of disproportionate representation of Northerners in the GVN civil service and officer corps.)

The book invites comparison with other highly laudable single province studies, Race's War Comes to Long An and Bergerud's Dynamics of Defeat. Neither provides comparable analysis of the dissolution of the old social order and consequent removal of the old grievances and shifting of loyalties. In this respect, Elliott's work is the more lucid in its conclusions.