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 movement was more successful in "maneuvering the government to overthrow itself" than simply "overthrowing the government" (p. 159). /// Saigon's land reform policy and its effects on the population of Long An receive careful scrutiny. Race successfully applies an analytical methodology to support his assertion: "it is hard to see how the government's land reform could have fulfilled its stated purpose of turning a dissatisfied peasantry into a satisfied one, even if it had been implemented to the fullest" (p. 60). Meanwhile, the Party exploited the government's ineptitude by garnering support from the population. Land was promised to the peasant that supported the revolution. Thus the countryside became inextricably tied to the Party's cause, concludes the author. /// Race presents his evidence effectively. Oral histories from three former province chiefs are introduced in the first chapter. Their recollections are compared with similar accounts from contemporaneous Long An peasants. The results illuminate Saigon's single-minded mandarin approach to "securing" the countryside. These oral histories also demonstrate the conceptual differences between the government and the Party's approach. The government felt the unrest in the countryside was simply a "security" problem. In reality, the Party-in addition to its use of violence and terrorism-was successfully leading a multidimensional socioeconomic revolution. Likewise, the Communists truly knew what motivated the average Vietnamese. Race succinctly illustrates the logic and simplicity of the Party's strategy: "... the accuracy of the Party's judgment was to be proved over and over again in Long An after 1960, as outpost after outpost surrendered without firing a shot. In the Party's view a man will not risk his life only for the sake of his pay, or because he has been drafted. He will only do so for clearly perceived interests involving himself, his family, or his own idea of country (p. 95)." /// There are shortfalls to this book. It is not an easy read. A typical passage: "Whereas the [1968 rural construction effort in Long An] correctly recognized the need for redistributive measures, the program actually adopted by the Saigon and the American governments ignored the redistributive issues and concentrated instead on 'development' and on certain suppressive and intelligence functions." (p. 249) /// Race's methodology also compounds the problem. He quotes extensively from his sources (interviews and documents). (Race does so ostentatiously because the material remained in Vietnamese.) Although this technique is helpful for the researcher, it detracts from the narrative. Race also favors the analytic approach-with his conclusions frequently resting primarily on numerical data. He even offers a "graphic presentation" of his concepts in one of the appendices. Although these tools are effective, they narrow the scope of the book. Additionally, there is no bibliography and the reader is given little direction for further research. /// In summary, War Comes to Long An is a fine piece of scholarship. The author's observations and conclusions regarding the revolutionary movement in Long An extend far beyond the Mekong Delta. The book is best suited as supplemental reading for the graduate or undergraduate student of Vietnam.
