The Independent Vietnamese

Vietnam's Lost Revolution employs archival material from Vietnam to examine the First Republic of Vietnam's Civic Action program, designed to recast the newly independent state as a modern, anticommunist nation. This book engages with topics like nationalism, post-colonialism, and development in its examination of events that led to the Vietnam War.

Kien’s job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. He knows the area well – this was where, in the dry season of 1969, his battalion was obliterated by American napalm and helicopter gunfire. Kien was one of only ten survivors. This book is his attempt to understand the eleven years of his life he gave to a senseless war. Based on true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, this novel is revered as the ‘All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’.

Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the "American War" is remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today -- in official and unofficial histories and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes visual representations found in monuments and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours, and related sites of "trauma tourism." In these transnational spaces, American and Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims, and philanthropists.

This book tells the story of how America's national leadership failed the nation and produced the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history to that time. It is foremost, however, the story of a great man who tried to halt his nation's drift into what became an American tragedy. It is also a story that has never before been told. As the war escalated, a variety of critics emerged to challenge the war policy and thus my book is about the national debate in which University of Chicago Professor Hans J. Morgenthau emerged as the chief opponent of the war. Morgenthau argued relentlessly in teach-ins around the country, in public debates and in hundreds of articles that Vietnam was never a threat to America's security and that the war should never have been fought. In the history of the national debate on Vietnam, it is Morgenthau who is the hero of the anti-war movement and the centerpiece of my study. Morgenthau had written the basic text on foreign policy, Politics Among Nations, and had established the field of international relations as an independent discipline of study. His arguments against the war derive from these earliest writings and are elaborated in this book, the principles of which remain valid today. The war ended in 1975 as North Vietnamese troops marched into Saigon after over 58,000 American servicemen and millions of Vietnamese had died in the fighting. The war could have been averted, Morgenthau was ignored, American policy-makers misunderstood the nature of the civil conflict in Vietnam. As Morgenthau told an interviewer in July, 1965, "What I have said recently I have been saying for years, without anybody paying any attention."

Some will be shocked to find out that the United States and Ho Chi Minh, our nemesis for much of the Vietnam War, were once allies. Indeed, during the last year of World War II, American spies in Indochina found themselves working closely with Ho Chi Minh and other anti-colonial factions-compelled by circumstances to fight together against the Japanese. Dixee Bartholomew-Feis reveals how this relationship emerged and operated and how it impacted Vietnam's struggle for independence. The men of General William Donovan's newly-formed Office of Strategic Services closely collaborated with communist groups in both Europe and Asia against the Axis enemies. In Vietnam, this meant that OSS officers worked with Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh, whose ultimate aim was to rid the region of all imperialist powers, not just the Japanese. Ho, for his part, did whatever he could to encourage the OSS's negative view of the French, who were desperate to regain their colony. Revealing details not previously known about their covert operations, Bartholomew-Feis chronicles the exploits of these allies as they developed their network of informants, sabotaged the Japanese occupation's infrastructure, conducted guerrilla operations, and searched for downed American fliers and Allied POWs. Although the OSS did not bring Ho Chi Minh to power, Bartholomew-Feis shows that its apparent support for the Viet Minh played a significant symbolic role in helping them fill the power vacuum left in the wake of Japan's surrender. Her study also hints that, had America continued to champion the anti-colonials and their quest for independence, rather than caving in to the French, we might have been spared our long and very lethal war in Vietnam. Based partly on interviews with surviving OSS agents who served in Vietnam, Bartholomew-Feis's engaging narrative and compelling insights speak to the yearnings of an oppressed people-and remind us that history does indeed make strange bedfellows.