David Hunt . Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2008. Pp. x, 272. Cloth $80.00, paper $28.95.

Abstract

During the Vietnam War, the U.S. Department of Defense commissioned the RAND Corporation to interview political prisoners of the South Vietnamese government (GVN), defectors from the North Vietnamese army, and defectors from the National Liberation Front (NLF). Between 1964 and 1968, over 2,000 Vietnamese were interviewed. David Hunt has worked on the the “DT Series,” which consists of interviews of 285 people from the Mekong delta province of Dinh Tuong. As he sets out to uncover the daily realities of village life during the Vietnam War, Hunt rejects the impression that peasants simply reproduced the rhetoric of political elites. He is attentive, instead, to the intellectual autonomy of rural Vietnamese. Hunt presents his research in a broadly chronological manner, with the material on the Tet Offensive of 1968 in the last chapter, but the book is structured by themes rather than events. For example, in chapter two, “An Itinerant Peasantry,” Hunt chronicles how frequently rural Vietnamese traveled back and forth between the hamlets and villages of Dinh Tuong and the provincial capital of My Tho. Some even went regularly to Saigon. This itinerancy, Hunt argues, played a critical role in the revolution because it allowed rural Vietnamese, including fruit sellers, brick layers, lace makers, carpenters, and others, to appreciate their collective strength. In chapter ten, “The Fate of the Liberated Zone,” Hunt describes the tension between veterans of the Resistance War, who were accustomed to clear boundaries between Viet Minh areas and those controlled by the French, and the new generation of village activists forced to contend with more complicated conditions. “Rather than living in separate domains,” Hunt observes, “GVN and NLF adherents shared the same space and lived so closely intertwined that they were generally able to see and hear each other” (p. 174). In other chapters he examines the peasant revolt of 1959–1960, contested unities, generational conflicts, feminism, the escalation of violence, and the flight of rural Vietnamese from the countryside to urban settings.