General Introduction

Summary

The third and final volume of The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War examines key domestic, regional, and international developments in the period before and after the war’s end, including its legal, environmental, and memorial legacies. The latter stages of the Vietnam War witnessed its apex as a Cold War crucible. The Sino-Soviet dispute, Sino-American rapprochement, Soviet–American détente, and global counterculturalism served in various ways to elevate the already high profile and importance of the conflict, as did its expansion into Cambodia and Laos. After the “fall” of Saigon to communist-led forces and Vietnam’s formal reunification in 1975–6, Hanoi’s persecution of former enemies, discrimination against ethnic Chinese, and economic mismanagement triggered a massive migratory crisis that redefined international refugee policies. In time, the migration changed the demographic landscape of cities across North America and Europe and continued to impact our world long after the conflict ended.

While the study of any war provokes debate among its scholars, few wars have inspired the level of disagreement that the conflict in Vietnam has generated over the past half century.¹ Indeed, while the history of the fighting that took place in Vietnam has been the subject of voluminous and deeply informed studies, consensus continues to elude the field. When did the fighting begin, why and how did it escalate, and in what manner did the violence end and the legacies emerge? These are some of the fundamental questions that have consumed scholars of the war whose works spin off yet more questions than they offer any definitive answers. Despite its being a rather “young” field, there is already a robust historiography, replete with dueling interpretations and outsized stakes. An “argument without end,” to borrow one title from an influential volume, there appears no let-up in this academic fighting fifty years on.²

Even what the war is called remains contentious. Most commonly referred to as the “Vietnam War” in the United States and its Vietnamese translation Cuộc chiến tranh Việt Nam in South Vietnam at the time, it is officially the “Anti-American Resistance War for National Salvation” in communist studies produced in Vietnam today.³ Perhaps the “Second Indochina War” is the most politically innocuous name, despite its colonial baggage, and this also manages to convey the war’s geographical scope and temporal spacing. Beyond the name of the war, the accompanying references to the nation-states involved and their armies also present a politically charged lexicon.⁴ What one calls the war and the belligerents involved have mattered greatly to scholars, many of whom agonize over the use of one term over another for fear of being misinterpreted or accused of harboring political agendas.

Periodization also presents challenges. When did the Vietnam War begin, on what terms did it conclude, and why? Vietnamese parties had been locked in fierce battle in the twilight of French and Japanese imperial control over Indochina and the waning days of World War II. Some would argue these Vietnamese mid-century struggles were deeply imbricated with the growing Vietnamese civil war of the Global Cold War era. At the same time, others would argue that the Vietnam War began only in 1954, when the United States took over from France as patron of a newly independent, anticommunist state below the 17th parallel. In what some refer to as the interwar years in the latter half of the 1950s when a fragile peace descended over two competing Vietnams engaged in nation- and state-building, hostilities grew. It is instead, then, probably more helpful to think of Vietnamese history from the close of the imperial era to the winter of the Global Cold War as existing in a gray zone, in which the distinctions between war and peace were blurred so much as to become indistinct. How this period in modern Vietnamese history aligned with the concerted shift in US policy toward Asia is key. The founding of the People’s Republic of China and the outbreak of hostilities on the Korean peninsula prompted the United States to adopt a militarized response to contain communist expansion. This intersection between the East–West ideological struggle, the global process of decolonization, and the burgeoning Sino-Soviet split may hold the key to unlocking the origins and roots of the Vietnam War.

Likewise, the multiple endings of the Vietnam War frame the histories of the war’s end and its enduring legacies. Did the war for all intents and purposes conclude in 1972 with the Shanghai Communiqué and the Moscow Summit, signaling the end of Vietnam’s grip over international relations? Or did the 1973 Paris Agreement to End the War and Restore the Peace in Vietnam constitute the actual concluding chapter of the war as US troops exited the region? If this marked the finale of the United States’ Vietnam War, how do we reconcile this ending with the fall of or transfer of power in Phnom Penh, Saigon, and Vientiane in 1975? Finally, can we fathom the notion of a perpetual war for Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in the twentieth century when we discern the roots of the Cambodian genocide and Third Indochina War in the ashes of the Second Indochina War or when we contextualize the ongoing tensions within refugee and overseas communities today? Periodization has long presented scholars with thorny issues that speak to root causes, turning points, and real and imagined ends.

The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War (CHVW) seeks neither to reconcile these past arguments, enflame ongoing disputes, or trigger new debates over periodization. Instead, our starting point is that nothing presented in the following pages attempts to present any semblance of consensus in the field. Rather, we celebrate the diversity and difference on full display over these three volumes as they attest to the indisputable importance of this seminal conflict in global history. For a war that never rose to the level of a world war and remained more or less within the borders of most of mainland Southeast Asia, the impact of the conflict on the course of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, American, and world history cannot be overstated. Indeed, it was the United States’ longest war of the twentieth century, with more tonnage of bombs dropped over Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia than anywhere else in the entire history of modern warfare.⁵ This made these small countries of Southeast Asia the most dangerous place to reside for much of the Cold War.⁶

What can be called the first generation of scholarship, including “first-cut” studies that benefited from the unorthodox release of official US documentation known collectively as the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971, was highly critical of US policy toward Vietnam and the origins of American military intervention.⁷ Casting the war as an immoral and unnecessary conflict, these award-winning books reveal in real time the tragedy that results when American hubris, exemplified by wrong-headed US presidents, comes up against the forces of Vietnamese nationalism, particularly under communist leadership. The end of the war in 1975 and erasure of Saigon from the proverbial map served to affirm their arguments, prompting more journalists, public intellectuals, and ultimately academic historians to join the fray.⁸ In short, Washington’s ignominy and Hanoi’s victory underscored the inevitability of Vietnamese history over the bankruptcy of American exceptionalism.

If the first generation, including early studies published as the war raged, put forward an orthodoxy that was highly critical of American military intervention, the second generation began to appear by the 1980s as the United States suffered from what some politicians and pundits called the “Vietnam syndrome.” While the orthodoxy continued to gain traction in the same decade, the new national mood also resulted in studies putting forward revisionist interpretations that were less critical or defended US foreign policy toward Vietnam and American military strategy deployed during the war.⁹

While they agreed on little, orthodox and revisionist scholars did share one characteristic in common: their singular focus on the United States at war. The evolution of post–1945 US foreign policy toward Vietnam, military strategy and soldiers’ experiences, the effect of the war on domestic politics, culture, and society, as well as the meaning and legacies of the conflict in the United States after 1975, dominate the Anglophone scholarship on the Vietnam War. According to one historian’s recent estimate that tens of thousands of books have been published on the conflict, it is certain that the overwhelming majority of these studies focus on the American perspective.¹⁰ Much of that has to do with the vast historical documentation on the US side of the conflict, including what can be found in government archives, presidential libraries, oral history projects, and rich cultural repositories. In other words, the Americentrism of Vietnam War scholarship is rooted in the archival and preservation practices of the losing side.

While the Vietnam War was a seminal event in US history and historiography, the same cannot be said for the war in modern Vietnamese history and historiography. That Vietnam is not a war, but a country with its own history, politics, society, and culture worthy of study, is indisputable. But it was precisely the impulse to distinguish the country from the war that led most area studies scholars to avoid research on the 1945–75 period of Vietnamese history, leaving the study of the war era to their Americanist colleagues.¹¹ At the same time, Vietnamese-language publications from Vietnam as well as from within the global diaspora tended toward propaganda and hagiography for the victors on one side and to finger-pointing and lamentations for the defeated on the other. Without engagement by area studies scholars or historians of the US war effort in Vietnam, the Vietnamese-language scholarship from either side comprised sealed-off historiographical worlds of their own.¹²

By a quarter of a century after the war’s end, winds of change were blowing through Vietnam Studies as they did for the historical discipline within the United States and Global Cold War scholarship. Starting around 2000, historians of modern Vietnam began new explorations of the war and thus inaugurated a third generation of scholarship on the conflict. In the decade following the 1986 launch of the Đổi mới (Renovation) policy in Vietnam, scholars with expertise in Vietnamese and other languages took greater advantage of archival openings, the easing of travel restrictions, and the transnational upsurge of historical interest on Vietnamese perspectives on the war. Just like their US historiographical counterparts, Vietnam Studies specialists have moved from a focus on political, military, and diplomatic affairs toward explorations of the war at the ground level and the conflict’s impact on Vietnamese culture, art, and postwar society. At the same time as this “Vietnamization of Vietnam War studies,” the end of the Cold War and the opening of archives in former communist countries coincided with the international and transnational turn in the discipline.¹³ Studies of the Vietnam War at the regional and global levels explored bilateral relations between the belligerent states and their respective allies, the roles that third-party nations played in war-making and in the peace process, and the impact of the Vietnam War on revolutionary struggles elsewhere in the Third World as well as on social protest movements around the globe.

The three volumes of the CHVW, which bring together seventy-five leading experts on the war from around the world, cover the long history of the Vietnam War from its origins in the late colonial era to its present day legacies. As leading historians who employ a range of diverse methodologies and approaches, the contributors as a whole explore the war from multiple perspectives and on different scales. From decision-making in the corridors of power, to everyday life at war on the battlefronts and homefronts, to the global cultural legacies of the war on a global level, the CHVW presents the most exhaustive and authoritative treatment of the conflict.

Volume I addresses the origins of the Vietnam War by locating the roots of the conflict starting in the late colonial era and ending with the pivotal events of 1963. The civil conflicts that wracked Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos before the US intervention and escalation of the 1960s emerged during an earlier era when Indochina was under French and later Japanese rule. Hot on the heels of World War II, the conflict known variously as the “Indochina War” or the “First Indochina War” culminated in the end of French colonial rule but failed to resolve key questions about postcolonial sovereignty. Although the Geneva Accords of 1954 ushered in a fragile peace, the contributors analyze how feuding Vietnams, divided at the 17th parallel, had parallel state- and nation-building agendas set in an increasingly divisive geopolitical climate as the Cold War arrived in full force in Southeast Asia.

If the United States appears as just one of several important players in Volume I, its role is markedly different in Volume II, which covers the Americanization of the Vietnamese War during 1963–8. Although this volume focuses on a relatively short time frame, the chapters are ambitious in their exploration of wide-ranging spheres or zones of war, including the battlefronts and military operations, homefronts and societies in conflict, and the international dimensions of the Vietnam War that shook the foundations of the global order to its core in the 1960s. Together, these chapters give a sense of the all-encompassing and engrossing nature of the Vietnam War at every level on which it was fought.

The local, regional, and global impacts of the Vietnam War resonate strongly in Volume III, which tracks the long road to the end of the Vietnam War and continues all the way to its enduring legacies. The official expansion of the air and ground wars to Cambodia and Laos set against the backdrop of an increasingly complex international stage, with Sino–American rapprochement and US–Soviet détente, comprises the tortured (multiple) endings of the conflict. It is no surprise, then, that the prolongation of the peace process set against the definitive transfer of power to communist hands in Indochina did not bode well for the postwar era, in which peace once again eluded the region. While the proximate cause of the Third Indochina War lies in the ending of the Vietnam War, the latter’s manifold legacies live on to the present day. Whether in societies torn asunder, land that contains the environmental and ecological residue of the fighting, or individual memories and public consciousness, it is clear the Vietnam War lives on.

Over the course of preparing these three volumes, we have lost some of the original contributors but their scholarship lives on to shape the field; and we have seen younger scholars progress through their early careers to produce seminal first books and landmark articles. This project is dedicated to the memory of the former and the potential of the latter. That we may not agree on every aspect of the Vietnam War is clear, but its history nevertheless unites us as scholars to chronicle the full weight of the past in order to move forward.