Vietnam at War - Hardcover

Bradley, Mark Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0192803492 ISBN 13: 9780192803498

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

For many Westerners, the Vietnam War summons images of American soldiers patrolling rice paddies, battling an elusive enemy as helicopters circle overhead. But there were, in fact, many Vietnam wars--an anti-colonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and among southern Vietnamese, a revolutionary war of ideas over the vision that should guide Vietnamese society into the postcolonial future, and a postwar war of memory. This book explores the complex ways in which the Vietnamese themselves have made sense of those conflicts.
Drawing upon the author's twenty years of research--much of it made possible by recently opened Vietnamese archives and other sources--Vietnam at War departs sharply from prevailing narratives in the West that have made the Vietnamese almost invisible in the making of their own history. Mark Philip Bradley not only probes the thought and actions of high policy makers in Hanoi and Saigon but also explores how northerners and southerners, men and women, soldiers and civilians, urban elites and rural peasants, and radicals and conservatives came to understand the thirty years of war that enfolded them and how they reckoned with its aftermath. He sets these experiences within a wider global context by examining the place of the United States, France, the Soviet Union, and China in Vietnamese histories of the war.
Today, as Vietnamese civil society becomes increasingly heterodox and the Vietnamese state seeks to develop a market economy while maintaining its commitment to socialism, the meanings of the conflicts that shaped so much of the country's recent history remain deeply contested. Vietnam at War is essential reading for anyone who seeks a clearer understanding of the paradoxes and tensions that underlie the Vietnam experience to this day.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Philip Bradley is Associate Professor of History at The University of Chicago. He is the author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950, which won the Association for Asian Studies Harry Benda Prize, and the co-editor of Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars.

Reviews

Western narratives of the twentieth-century wars in Vietnam, Bradley writes, have “rendered the Vietnamese almost invisible in the making of their own history.” In this corrective study, Bradley skimps on anecdote and characterization, and his short treatise too often reads like a long encyclopedia entry. At its best, though, the book is a kind of review of Vietnamese literature, drawing on the war diary of a conflicted provincial physician, a novel about a paratrooper who is afraid to jump, irreverent peasant verse, playful proverbs (“The moon in China is much rounder than in the USA”), and the nineteen-sixties antiwar songs of the draft-dodging Trinh Công Son.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0192803492
• ISBN 13: 9780192803498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266