War Comes to Long an

Legendary Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill once quipped that "all politics is local." And Clausewitz famously wrote that "war is politics by other means." From these observations, one might extract a syllogism that applies quite well to the nature of modern warfare: "all insurgencies are local politics." It is unlikely that you will find Jeffery Race's "War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province" on the shelf in your local bookstore next to "We Were Soldiers Once..And Young" or "The Best and the Brightest" - but it may be one of the most insightful pieces ever written about the Vietnam War. Moreover, it may be the most historically relevant case study to the US refocus on Afghanistan in 2009. The inescapable conclusion from "War Comes to Long An" (although Race does not say so directly) is that the US lost the war even before the first Marine combat units splashed ashore China Beach in March, 1965. Insurgencies are virtually never won by superior firepower. Rather, it is superior policy and a more integrated framework for approaching what is in essence a political and/or social schism that wins the day. Race's core message is that the communist forces fully understood the nature of the conflict in the South while for Saigon and Washington the fundamental social context of the struggle forever remained a "blank area of consciousness." The focus of this book is a single South Vietnamese province (Long An: "Prosperous and Peaceful" ironically enough) in the period "between the wars" (i.e. the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954 ending the post-colonial battle with the French and major US intervention in the mid-1960s). One of the special things about this book is the broad, deep and fresh perspectives that Race relies on. The material for the study is almost exclusively primary source, both direct interviews and official documents. He begins with three chapters of extended exerts from conversations with province officials, anonymous villagers, Viet Cong fighters, defectors, American military advisors and the like. The author makes almost no commentary or assessment on the feedback; he simply lets the actors tell their story from their unique perspective. However, a few themes quickly emerge from this mix of viewpoints. And these themes help explain, in Race's view, why the Party or "revolutionary" forces ultimately prevailed. To begin with, there was a large, yet unrecognized disconnect between the Saigon government officials - often well-educated elites from central Vietnam (Hue, mainly), who took a generally paternalistic view of the relationship between government and the people - and the villagers of the province of Long An whom they served. The primary source materials reveal that the government officials genuinely believed that they were "close to the people" and that the people were content. If the government was so close to the people, as many Saigon-appointed district officials believed, then

The graduate level book on counterinsurgency. Race challenges conventional wisdom on counterinsurgency and forces his readers to think about new ways to deal with insurgents. His insights are innovative and brilliant. Research is top-notch, based on years of work in Vietnam. One of the few books that repeatedly finds a place in my backpack for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twenty-eight years has not diminished the value of this brilliant study. Jeffrey Race wrote War Comes to Long An as his doctoral dissertation. Also a former US Army officer, Race served as a district advisor in Vietnam. After leaving the Army, Race returned to Vietnam as an independent researcher. He is fluent in Vietnamese-which opened many doors that would otherwise be shut to an American in rural Vietnam. All of these qualifications enhance Race's creditability. Furthermore, they help explain why War Comes to Long An achieves its stated purpose: to show how the Communist revolutionary movement was able to succeed in the South Vietnamese province of Long An. /// Saigon's fatal flaw was their perception of the revolutionary movement, according to Race. The overthrow of the "local elite" at the village level-not the expulsion of the French-was the most significant accomplishment of the Vietminh during the Resistance (p. 40). Vietminh strategy had fused anti-imperialist and anti-feudal themes, resulting in an economic revolution for the countryside. But Ngo Dinh Diem alienated the peasantry by returning the corrupt village councils that had been exiled with the French. Therefore: "... to say that the government later [after the First Indochina War] 'lost control' is misleading, and any analysis which proposes to answer the question of why the government 'lost control' or why there was an 'erosion of mass support for established institutions' is addressing the wrong question (p. 41)." /// Race acknowledges that there were some gains made by the government-as well as internal conflict within the revolutionary movement. But he devotes the majority of the book to analyzing the Communist exploitation of Saigon's ill-conceived policies. Diem's centralized method of government provides an example. South Vietnam was better characterized as a conglomerate of hamlets than as a nation state. Culture varied throughout the country and was largely shaped by local customs. The majority of the Vietnamese population equated "government" with their local village council. Yet the province chief was the first government administrator with any true decision-making authority. (This is one of the reasons the author chooses the province as the basic unit of his study.) In contrast, the Communist Lao Dong Party established their executive agent (the chi bo) at the village level. /// Land is the single most important factor to the peasant in Long An. In addition to its economic value (particularly in the fertile Mekong Delta region-where Long An is located), land is the focal point of family life and religion in Vietnam. It is where a family buries and worships their ancestors and where each family member expects to be interred. For these reasons, concludes Race, the agroville and strategic hamlet programs-by separating the peasantry from their land-were doomed from the start. Furthermore, Race correctly asserts that the revolutionary

This book is an excellent, thorough study of the strategic Long An province, located just south of Saigon. Jeffrey Race looks at the activities of both sides in the formative years from 1954-1965. Unlike most books on Vietnam, Race spends little time looking at events after the US troop commitment. Race attempts to be an unbiased observer as he reviews the historical record. Also, by looking at one province, Jeffrey Race presents this major conflict at a human level.Filled with top-notch research and a number of insghtful interviews, this book is a little-known but superb resource for anyone truly interested in the Vietnam War.