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War Comes to Long An is prototype district study in the counter-insurgency literature; a cognizant and powerful case study of the loss of a key district in the Vietnam War over fifteen years. Long An province stretched from the border with Cambodia to the outskirts of Saigon. In hundreds of hours of interviews with government figures and Vietcong defectors, and thousands of pages of primary source analysis, Race describes how the revolutionary movement of the Vietcong out-strategized and overpowered the urban elites of the Saigon government.
Race describes the Vietnam War as a social struggle between Saigon and the revolutionary movement for the loyalty of various components of Vietnamese society. The key 'terrain' in this agrarian nation was the village, the level of governance that ordinary people encountered most often, and the key issues were land redistribution and promotion within society.
Land reform is, and always has been the key issue in Vietnamese society. The land system that the Saigon regime inherited was tilted towards large landlords and plantations, with landless farmers serving as an easily exploitable labor pool for French commercial interests. Prior to 1954, Long An had been a liberated district, with the Viet Minh allocating land to the tillers. After the Geneva Treaty, the landlords and government returned and demanded nine years of back rent and taxes! Way to start off on the right foot, guys. The fitfully implemented land reform law only kicked in for plots over 100 hectares and required peasants to pay for land transferred to them. The forced dislocations of the agroville and strategic hamlet programs were the final insults to anyone who considered themselves an apolitical farmer. By contrast, the revolutionary movement separated Vietnamese society into five classes: landless laborer, renter, self-sufficient farmer, rich farmer, and landlord, and organized the first four against the last, with an effective land redistribution scheme.
Promotion and prestige are key elements to any human being. The revolutionary movement promoted within the echelon. A person would sign up as a village guerrilla, and effective people would rise to the district, province, region, and finally central levels. By contrast, the most effective pro-Saigon Village Councillor would remain at the village level indefinitely. Officials at the District and above level were dispatched from Saigon, from the educated classes, and they did not understand the needs of farmers. Village-level communists had a great deal of discretion and power. Village level officials in the government had almost none.
As such, the revolutionary movement was able to mobilize far greater numbers of people, and get supplies, intelligence, and loyalty. A relatively sparing use of violence, 80 assassinations in 1960, was enough to complete cripple the government, while lavish use of artillery, airpower, and foreign troops, with the commensurate loss of thousands of civilians lives, could not break the revolutionary movement. The security strategy of the government, which involved isolating the population from the revolution, could not succeed with any reasonable level of troops. The revolutionary movement was nearly completely decimated in 1959 and in 1968, and managed to return to some semblance of strength both times.
I have two quibbles with War Comes to Long An: First, this is very much a dissertation and it sometimes descends into turgid 60s organizational sociology, to the detriment of actually making a point. Second, for all its clear diagnosis of the failures of the Saigon government, their immense cognitive blind spot which meant that the more efficient and active they were, the more they recruited for the revolution, Race offers no diagnosis of how a guerrilla movement might be defeated. There has to be some power to being a legitimate government, with courts and police and all that, as well as the ability to call on nearly limitless American aid, but it seems the best thing to do is hide in the jungle eating rice and conducting revolutionary self-criticism sessions.
Race describes the Vietnam War as a social struggle between Saigon and the revolutionary movement for the loyalty of various components of Vietnamese society. The key 'terrain' in this agrarian nation was the village, the level of governance that ordinary people encountered most often, and the key issues were land redistribution and promotion within society.
Land reform is, and always has been the key issue in Vietnamese society. The land system that the Saigon regime inherited was tilted towards large landlords and plantations, with landless farmers serving as an easily exploitable labor pool for French commercial interests. Prior to 1954, Long An had been a liberated district, with the Viet Minh allocating land to the tillers. After the Geneva Treaty, the landlords and government returned and demanded nine years of back rent and taxes! Way to start off on the right foot, guys. The fitfully implemented land reform law only kicked in for plots over 100 hectares and required peasants to pay for land transferred to them. The forced dislocations of the agroville and strategic hamlet programs were the final insults to anyone who considered themselves an apolitical farmer. By contrast, the revolutionary movement separated Vietnamese society into five classes: landless laborer, renter, self-sufficient farmer, rich farmer, and landlord, and organized the first four against the last, with an effective land redistribution scheme.
Promotion and prestige are key elements to any human being. The revolutionary movement promoted within the echelon. A person would sign up as a village guerrilla, and effective people would rise to the district, province, region, and finally central levels. By contrast, the most effective pro-Saigon Village Councillor would remain at the village level indefinitely. Officials at the District and above level were dispatched from Saigon, from the educated classes, and they did not understand the needs of farmers. Village-level communists had a great deal of discretion and power. Village level officials in the government had almost none.
As such, the revolutionary movement was able to mobilize far greater numbers of people, and get supplies, intelligence, and loyalty. A relatively sparing use of violence, 80 assassinations in 1960, was enough to complete cripple the government, while lavish use of artillery, airpower, and foreign troops, with the commensurate loss of thousands of civilians lives, could not break the revolutionary movement. The security strategy of the government, which involved isolating the population from the revolution, could not succeed with any reasonable level of troops. The revolutionary movement was nearly completely decimated in 1959 and in 1968, and managed to return to some semblance of strength both times.
I have two quibbles with War Comes to Long An: First, this is very much a dissertation and it sometimes descends into turgid 60s organizational sociology, to the detriment of actually making a point. Second, for all its clear diagnosis of the failures of the Saigon government, their immense cognitive blind spot which meant that the more efficient and active they were, the more they recruited for the revolution, Race offers no diagnosis of how a guerrilla movement might be defeated. There has to be some power to being a legitimate government, with courts and police and all that, as well as the ability to call on nearly limitless American aid, but it seems the best thing to do is hide in the jungle eating rice and conducting revolutionary self-criticism sessions.