The Vietnam War as a Vietnamese War: Agency and Society in the Study of the Second Indochina War

Once upon a time, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Vietnam War (1959–1975) was studied mainly as an episode in American history. Anglophone authors in the United States and elsewhere wrote extensively about the war during its closing stages and during the first years of the postwar era. This early scholarship on the war included a great deal of pathbreaking research that shed new light on important factual questions; it also sparked impassioned debates over how to interpret the war’s origins, course, and consequences. For all of its originality and vibrancy, however, this scholarship focused overwhelmingly on American sources and the American dimensions of the war—that is, on issues having to do with American actions and American motives. Vietnamese and other non-American actors typically played only marginal roles in these accounts; few studies of the war published during these years made use of Vietnamese or other non-American sources.1 The decidedly America-centric quality of most Vietnam War scholarship in this period was most clearly apparent in the perennial debate between so-called “orthodox” scholars and their “revisionist” counterparts. The questions at stake in this debate were important ones: What were the root causes of the war? Why and how did the United States become involved in Vietnam after 1950? What explains the escalation of the war over the course of the 1960s? Who was responsible for the “loss” of South Vietnam? Nevertheless, both “orthodox” and “revisionist” scholars alike