i had such high hopes for this book, many of which are based in the fact that though the vietnam war and its mythology hung heavy over the culture of my country during my childhood, most of my knowledge of the war was from either hollywood movies or narratives of resistance back home. i didn't know as much as i wanted to about the historical background that led up to the war, nor about other forms of resistance beyond the (mostly) white, (mostly) middle class perspectives of the protest movement of 1960's america, which were so easy to find in my formative years. i also felt i was missing a lot of historical detail about specific incidents that occurred during the war.

rather, i should say i didn't think i knew as much as i wanted to about the historical background that led up to the war, because it turns out i had gleaned most of the knowledge necessary to understand, i just hadn't constructed it in a fashion easy for me to comprehend. this book helped me do that, especially the first section focusing on the vietnamese up to the war, and also helped fill in a few of the blanks. for that it was appreciated.

the first speed bump i hit was in this section, though. the author fully warns the reader that, due to the complicated nature of his argument, he will use simple language to make it clear. maybe it's because i have to correct so much writing at various levels of English ability that i tend to notice when the structure has been simplified to the point of absurdity. one paragraph on page 19 has the following repetitious structure in each sentence: "This produced ... They were ... They hated ... They wanted ... They saw ... They were ... They were... " With every "They" i grew more annoyed. Maybe i'm nitpicking, but i think it's possible to simplify without losing the small amount of structural complexity necessary to avoid ending up with a repetitive string of facts.

But that was just a mild annoyance. what really got to me about this book were blanket statements about conclusions and vague references to events that should have been filled in in detail. an example of the latter, from page 66:
" ... the Pentagon staged a phony incident in the Gulf of Tonkin between American naval ships and North Vietnamese gunboats. On that basis, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution saying the president could do more or less what he wanted in Indochina."

this is the only reference in the book to the gulf of tonkin. this was a decisive point in the history of the war and i still know nothing about it. except that it was phony. and apparently that it was decisive.

but what really got to me were all these interesting conclusions thrown about with no evidence to back them up. for example, page 139 strongly states that all resistance worldwide in the year 1968, from France to the US to the Czech republic to Pakistan and beyond, "had all started with [the] Tet [offensive], with a world seeing that America, the greatest power on earth, could be defeated."

it's possible, but there is absolutely no evidence presented that Tet, the first televised humiliation of the US during the war, was directly responsible for what was happening in, say, the communist bloc, or in the middle east. he provides ample evidence and analysis of what it did to citizens of the US, but none to support this wider assumption. this discounts local struggles, histories, customs, situations. it's pompous and western-centric to declare such things without some proof, or at least some discussion of where the idea came from.

other such statements include the assertion that martin luther king's speech against the overwhelming number of blacks being used as cannon fodder was directly responsible for the generals pulling black men out of combat (p 129); that "like many other governments, what the khmer rouge leaders feared the most were communists," which is strange, considering that the khmer rouge WERE the communists (p 202); that after the iranian revolution, "many educated young women in the Middle East ... put on a headscarf to show their opposition to all established society" (ALL ESTABLISHED SOCIETY?) (p 223), and that "the U.S. government reacted to their humiliation in Iran with a campaign to whip up anti-Muslim prejudice that lasted for the next twenty years. (p 224)"

that last one is tricky. i personally don't doubt that anti-muslim prejudice was systematic and systemic and planned, but i need some goddamn proof, especially if you are going to link it directly to the iranian revolution and the hostage situation. his only proof is another blanket assertion that american newspaper articles are anti-muslim. this does not prove to me that this prejudice was thought up or even a campaign from the highest levels of government, just that it had a detrimental effect on journalism.

as well, there is a whole section where he talks about the aftermath of vietnam, and how it resulted in the US government avoiding sending ground troops into any foreign conflicts, something called the "vietnam syndrome." he presents five situations where the US resorted to bombing and other forms of weaponry, or did not follow through on possible outcomes, due to the fear of sending actual soldiers into combat. leaving aside the simplified assertion that saddam was not removed after desert storm because of this syndrome, the author does not even reference countless conflicts in the 80s and 90s where troops were sent, or where the reader might be interested in knowing whether or not troops were sent. some come to mind: grenada, honduras, panama, the phillippines, somalia, haiti, east timor, etc, etc.

in fact, the book was written on the eve of the invasion of iraq in 2003, so to speak, so there are some assumptions about what is to come that, though interesting, are completely unnecessary.

so i was annoyed and angered before i got to the assertion that "many of the protesters in Seattle were the children of parents who protested in the 1960s. It was only natural to pick up where their parents left off." as a member of that generation whose parents supposedly protested in the 1960s, i and many people i know were nihilistic about protest, about our voices, about the very idea of survival. what the fuck's the point if we're all going to die in a nuclear fireball and it doesn't fucking do anything, anyway? this feeling was always reinforced with, and somewhat contradicted by, the undercurrent of thought imposed upon us that nothing we did was ever going to be as meaningful or special or perfect as "our parents' protest." we grew up thinking we could die at any minute. the struggle to get past that and to see a world we wanted to create was very much our own.

this may just be my own baggage that i am bringing to this, but i think it demonstrates a deep simplification of many difficult subjects, indicative of why this book is such a disappointment. there is some interesting history and he makes a few good points, but so much seems to be pulled out of the air, or only based on other people's work. for example, while discussing a peasant protest in 1992, he states "this is an extreme example and we do not know what happened next." (p 215). why the fuck not? because the essay you quoted doesn't mention what happened next? go find out, goddammit.

the discussion of what the war means for the present and the future is the most problematic aspect, as he is trying to discuss 30 years of history in many different countries in a very short span of time. perhaps it would have been best to keep the focus on the war itself. in fact, the most thrilling part for me was to learn about the rebellion in the armed forces, how there were underground publications on the army bases, how soldiers refused to fight and even murdered officers who tried to push them into combat. the discussion of the "vets being spit on by protesters" myth was particularly interesting, wrapped, as it is, in the discussion of how perceptions of what happened were created after the fact. the systematic creation of blame that was placed on soldiers for the failure of the war is particularly heartbreaking, and compelling. this sort of information is necessary, i think, to the discussion of a people's history of this war, even though it comes after the war ended. the WTO and anti-capitalist protest is not necessary to this discussion and fractures the focus, even though the point he is trying to make is that there are lessons to be learned in all of these aspects of history. yes, there are, but perhaps that should be taken up in another book.

there was enough new information to warrant two stars, but this book made me annoyed and angry and i had to force myself to finish it.

and it doesn't even have a goddamn map of vietnam. ( )

The author is part of the International Socialist Organization, and so his whitewash of Leninist Russia in the first chapter is totally ahistorical. He does not give the Vietnamese Communist Party the same kidglove treatment, however; the criticism is deserved and fair.

The book's strong points lie in the description of everyday life for a Viet Cong guerilla, and the resistance to the war within the United States. Shockingly, the author gives credit to anarchists in the US where it is due (in the creation of coffee shops, in "salting" the military to organize, and in fomenting mutiny), something ISO folks rarely do. ( )

This book has a lot of potential, just sorely misses an editor. Both for basic structure, as well as overarching build. The last chapter was interesting, but seemed incredibly out of place, and an opportunity for the author to blatantly post his views.

The lack of editing and scores of opinions make this book less credible, and that's a shame, because these are things that need to be talked about. ( )

Another one of my short reviews....This book needed an editor more than any book I've ever read. Absolutely loaded with mistakes from scanning, typesetting, or the editor just being unfamiliar with the language of the book, the result is still the same. At first laughable, then utterly annoying, until finally I just read and was able to figure out most of the mistakes in order to continue reading. I will not be buying another book from this publisher.
Having said that, the next topic is the style, or lack thereof, of the author. I feel fairly certain I could construct more interesting prose when I was in the 8th grade than this author will ever hope to do. Abominable, a charlatan masquerading as an author, or is it a revolutionary only interested in changing the world, but not necessarily for the better?
Finally, the arguments. Some were quite good. Many, especially in the final chapter, were a bit otherworldly. A book purporting to be a history of the Vietnam War spent little time in the details, and much too much time in theory. I do believe much of what he spouts has more than a germ of truth, but it would be difficult to swallow his story based on much of his logic.
The shotgun approach to the book certainly won't do much either to convince anyone that the author is overly astute in his observations. There was always another point to be made, yet little time for reflection. Many of the thoughts of the author need to be said, preferably by someone who has a better command of the English language, is less involved idealistically, and has the support of a marginal, at least, publishing house. ( )

The war in Iraq and September 11th probably will be the defining event of the youth of the United States today when we look back in a few decades, in much the same way the war in Vietnam defined a generation of youth in the 1960s and 1970s. In a war that ended place a decade before most of those youth were born, what lessons can we take back? How exactly did the Vietnamese win? What were the social movements in the US that arose out of this conflict? Why are the myths of the American-Vietnamese War?

The trick to understanding a lot of history is that a lot of what was taught us growing up was simply wrong and just a particular point of view. "A People's History of the Vietnam War", by Jonathan Neale, does a fantastic job of presenting an excellent history that skips over the usual hoop-la about certain elite leaders of the war, and instead concentrates on a more systematic analysis of the war that took so many millions of lives. He sees the world in terms of class and therefore argues that the American ruling class got into Vietnam as a continuation of their policies aiming at domination of the globe. They needed to save South Vietnam, which was about a brutal a dictatorship as there gets, in order to shore up their support of other dictators throughout the world.

At the same time, he doesn't commit the same blunder that many other left-wing historians make in supporting elite cadre of the Communist Party either. He correctly identifies that the majority of the party leadership were the sons and daughters of the ruling landlord class, and though they wanted a better world and sought to destroy the class of their ancestors, they also made sure that they, the CP, stayed on as rulers. They did lead a mass mobilization of peasants which liberated their land and carried out a revolution, and life was much better under the CP than it was under the French, but at the same time as Vietnam liberalizes its economy, it is the Party which mainly benefits from it.

Neale makes a pretty convincing argument that three main factors led to the defeat of the United States military in Vietnam by the Vietnamese forces. 1) The main one was the peasants revolt, led by the Communists and guerillas, in which hundreds of thousands of fighters gave their lives to bring a new future to their country. Millions of peasants died in bombings, slaughters, and executions, but they never gave up. When the Viet Cong (the South Vietnamese guerrilla group) was nearly annihilated following the Tet offensive and Operation Phoenix by US special forces, North Vietnamese units filled the void and gave everything until the truce of 1973 five years later. By the time of that truce, the guerrillas of the south and soldiers of the north were completely exhausted.

The second factor for why the US could not win the war (which it could have done given a few more hundred thousand dead soldiers, a few more million dead civilians, and a few more years of death and war) was because of the US Peace movement. This is where Neale does a masterful job of shattering myths. He points out that the Peace movement is remembered mainly as being fought on campuses by middle-class students and that white workers usually were pro-war. This is simply not true. In fact, a greater percentage of middle-class Americans supported the war, and the great majority of working-class Americans were against the war, mainly because it was they who were dying in the war and returning home maimed and psychologically damaged because of the atrocities they were forced to commit. In this atmosphere of civil rights struggles, black and white workers were at the forefront of joint struggles against the war. In fact, Neale argues that a big limit of the student anti-war organizers was that they did not reach out to working class people as much because they had built-in assumptions about racist white working class people being pro-war. In fact, because of the large scale of the anti-war movement, it became hard to mobilize the country's military resources without facing political defeats at home.

There's a great passage here about President Johnson listening to a Pentagon whiz kid in 1966, two years before the war became hugely unpopular, saying the carpet-bombing Hanoi and several key North Vietnamese ports would end the war early, and argues that after feeding numbers into a computer,the Pentagon knows that the atoms bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers. Johnson responds:

"I have one more problem for your computer- will you feed into it how long it would take five hundred thousand angry Americans to climb the White House wall out there and lynch their President if he does something like that?"

The third factor argued by Neale which lead to the victory of the Vietnamese resistance was the GI revolt. By the end of the war, soldiers refusing to fight, fragging their officers who led them into dangerous missions or other stuff like racism towards black soldiers, and everyday acts of resistance by a huge chunk of the GIs in Vietnam led to an impossible task of the generals pushing forward when they were not even sure they could trust their own soldiers. On nearly every military base in the world, there was a radical underground soldiers newspaper which wrote articles about their dangerous superiors and anti-war material in general. Towards the end of the war, President Nixon switched to almost exclusively air war by carpet bombing North Vietnam and the countryside's of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, supporters of the Communists.

Neale does a great job explaining the huge effect on post-war Vietnam and United States. The United States proceeded to isolate Vietnam with its alliance with China and the Khymer Rouge in Cambodia. China even invaded Vietnam because of it's occupation of Cambodia after after the Khymer Rouge proceeded to destroy what was left of Cambodia after the massive firebombing of 1973 by the US air force. Gradually, the state rolled back the communal lands that the peasants had won in the war from the landlord class, until the point where today Vietnam is becoming a massive sweatshop in conjunction with large multinational corporations. In the United States, the ruling class learned not to commit to a long ground war, and instead embarks on a big counter-offensive against the gains of marginalized people (People of color, women, gay movements, working people) beginning in the 1980s. They learned the lessons of not letting a large amount of soldiers commit to ground operations, else that breeds massive dissent. The book was written right before the invasion of Iraq in early 2003, and aptly predicted a long ground war in Iraq.

Anyway, this was a great read and very well done. I can't recommend it enough.