A People's History of Vietnam

Although irritatingly polemical, reliant on superlatives, and full of facile analogies, Innes brings up a sorely overlooked aspect of most retrospective histories of the Vietnam War. Namely, little scholarship exists documenting the war from the Vietnamese perspective. For any perspective, governmental, Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army, there is simply deficient scholarship. But most of all, we lack a people's history of the war.

The mantra in counterinsurgency operations is that the people are the centers of gravity. Win their love, obedience, or minds, and win the war. The modern US Army has pioneered a number of initiatives designed enable better comprehension of the social battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan thru biometric scanners, opinion polls, and Human Terrain Teams. (The latter has been condemned by academic and professional colleagues for aiding and abetting the military, not academea's finest hour.) So, a people's history of Vietnam would provide some very interesting insights into what the war looked like from the people how lived it for generations.

A couple of books have approached the topic, although since they're war memoirs, they're written for Americans by Americans. But books like The Village by Bing West offer a view into the lives of ordinary people living in a country torn by decades of war and the industrial might of global superpowers. If we want to win conflicts, it would certainly behoove us to understand that perspective, to understand what is like to live as an innocent bystander in a village subject to constant infiltration, low-level yet omnipresent violence, and the threat of massive artillery barrages. What will people endure, what will they ignore, what will they obey, what will they respect, and what will they never forgive?