Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province.
Updated and expanded edition, with new forewords by Robert K. Brigham and Jeffrey Record.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xxxiii, 332; photographs, maps, tables, appendices, glossary, index.
Reviewed by Michael J. Montesano.
Few books occupy a more curious place in the history of academic study of Southeast Asia than Jeffrey Race’s War Comes to Long An (WCLA), now re-issued in expanded form by the University of California Press nearly four decades after its initial publication. Since its appearance in 1972, this dense account of communist victory in a single province of the former South Vietnam has never gone out of print. A generation ago, rare was the graduate student at an American university—and rarer still the faculty member—with an interest in Vietnam or in modern Southeast Asia’s history and politics who did not add the book to his or her personal library. Even among scholars with no particular interest in the Vietnam War, the book’s familiar red spine and its cover photograph—showing the bomb-rack of an American plane flying over the flat ricelands of the Mekong Delta, a hamlet burning just after an air-strike far below—figured for many of us as a familiar part of our dissertation advisors’ office décor.
The sheer volume of scholarship on Southeast Asia—and not least on Vietnam—across the disciplines has multiplied many times over since the 1980s, and even since the 1990s. Nevertheless, WCLA retains its place in the Southeast Asian “area studies” canon. It enjoys this status despite (or is it because of?) the fact that its author, while prolific in the years immediately following WCLA’s publication, did not embark on a conventional academic career or write a second book. Indeed, Jeffrey Race has long represented a somewhat mysterious figure to many admirers of his work.
Skeptics trained in Southeast Asian and Vietnamese studies in the last decade or so need only test for themselves the enduring consensus that WCLA is a good and important book. They need only, that is, ask around in order to discover the positive, if often rather vague, regard in which scholars still hold it. They would also do well, however, to quiz those whom they ask about WCLA on what exactly they took away from it. For to return to it in these times, really to sit down and read it from cover, proves in two respects a rather astonishing experience . . .
The remainder of this review is available at here.
An interview with Jeffrey Race, considering the origins and legacies of his book, is available here.
Michael Montesano is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and the book review editor for New Mandala. This review and the accompanying interview are presented in cooperation with the editors of The Journal of Vietnamese Studies and the University of California Press. Special thanks for making this possible are owed to Trang Cao, Tuong Vu, Peter Zinoman, and the University of California Press.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Review of War Comes to Long An Books Empire | Books Empire // Apr 30, 2011 at 12:43 pm
[...] Review of War Comes to Long An [...]
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2 john francis lee // Apr 30, 2011 at 6:35 pm
Thank you very much for making both the review and the interview available.
I had to smile when I read Mike Montesano ask Jeffrey Race :
in reference to his work in explaining how “individual preferences relate to collective action”, to which Jeffrey Race replied :
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3 john francis lee // Apr 30, 2011 at 8:34 pm
An interesting take on the Vietnamese ‘elite’ that seems relevant today with respect to the ‘elite’ in Thailand. Changing the place names and tenses :
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4 Shawn McHale // May 4, 2011 at 1:23 pm
This is a fabulous review and interview. Most academics write mediocre book reviews, and the reader is left to wonder: why didn’t the reviewer grapple with the ideas that animated the author? This review addresses the ideas.
But I would argue that the digression onto Popkin and the Popkin-Scott debate takes away from the review. In truth, the Popkin-Scott “debate” it is not really a debate. A debate should involve two or more scholars joining combat over a common problem and its interpretation. Scott and Popkin look at different areas, different data, come to different conclusions. Popkin actually uses some Vietnamese sources, so score one for him there. Scott does not. Scott is more persuasive in the end, as Popkin’s argument seems so simplistic. In the end, I tend to think that both authors talked about radically different places over different times, so why do people think this is a debate?
Back to Race. One thing in the accompanying interview that doesn’t quite ring true is how Race came up with concepts. From the interview, it seems as if the author, cut off from academia, had ideas like “‘contingent incentives” come to him in the field. Well, obviously, the notion of incentives was not new to him or social science. “Contingent incentives” is indeed a cool idea, though I would argue that if you think through the notion of “incentives,” they have to be contingent to work!
More importantly, though, the interview probably does not convey how much “social science” was in communist documents. I have read Viet Minh documents that are VERY pragmatic. Far from trying to impose a communist worldview willy-nilly on peasants, the communists tried to figure out HOW to get peasants to their side. They also figured out how the right calculus of terror/ violence combined with attraction would work. They were masterful at realizing that the aim of their movement was not necessarily to win or even make friends. It was to neutralize potential enemies, and deny their opponents governance of the countryside. in the long run, the erosion of state power in the countryside would help them win.
It is interesting, when you read in captured documents, to see how the communists planned (for example) to relate to the Cao Dai. Some Cao Dai hated them, but they figured out ways to make areas of common interest. They knew that these Cao Dai may still dislike them, but if they didn’t oppose the communists strongly, that’s progress.
Now, this all happened after serious trial and error. Lots of error. For example, in 1945-47, the Viet Minh used too much killing in the south, and realized pot 1950 that killing would have to be more selective to succeed. THEY LEARNED. And, I think, they applied this knowledge successfully much of the time. By “success,” I do not mean to make a normative statement of approval.
Now, I don’t remember seeing terms like “power ratios” in communist documents. But they were clearly masters of what we now call asymmetrical warfare. They said to themselves: well, how can we maximize our advantages while minimizing our disadvantages? This led them AWAY from purely military approaches, so favored in the early years of the First Indochina War, to more reasonable ones. But I am convinced: yes, they did think in terms of calculating how to succeed. In this, they were very rational choice! But they also realized that choice was not all. Coercion, intimidation, threats all had a role too, and if used well, would be a key to success.
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