BOOK REVIEW Deep into the roots of war War Comes to Long An by Jeffrey Race
Reviewed by Jason Johnson
The United States wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have contributed to a deluge of
literature on insurgency, civil war, and counter-insurgency. Since the
September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, more work has been produced on
counter-insurgency than over the previous 40 years combined.
One book that has stood the test of time is Jeffrey Race's War Comes to Long An:
Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province, which was re-released
this year with new forewords and an analytical conclusion by the author. First
published in 1972, the book remains a seminal read for academics and
policymakers concerned with these ever-evolving inter-related subjects, as well
as for those more specifically interested in the Vietnam War.
Outside the academy the book has long received strong recognition across the
political spectrum. Not only is it a mainstay in the curriculum of all senior
service schools for the US military and leading US universities that train
future diplomats, but even the most scathing critic of modern US foreign
policy, Noam Chomsky, once wrote that it was the "best account of the origins
of the insurgency" in South Vietnam.
The book is based on events in Vietnam's southern Long An province, located
near Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City), during the period between the signing of
the Geneva Accords in 1954 and the escalation of the US's intervention that
took place in 1965. After an initial stint in Vietnam as a lieutenant with the
US military in 1965 and 1966, a 24-year-old Race returned to Vietnam from late
1967 to mid-1968 to conduct research in the area.
In the book's preface, Race explains his inspiration for carrying out
micro-level research was motivated by his belief that at the time there were no
convincing explanations for the rise of the insurgent movement in South
Vietnam. Then there was a widespread belief that its rise resulted simply from
communist influence and infiltration from Hanoi, and was provided extensive
weaponry from foreign communist powers.
High-ranking Vietnamese officials claimed that the opposition National
Liberation Front (NLF), or what the Americans commonly referred to as the
Vietcong, mobilized the peasantry through a vicious program of terrorism and
forced recruitment. Some US academics and officials even believed South
Vietnamese peasants were prone to adopting communist ideology because it
resonated with their more communal, Confucian way of life.
These explanations were often provided by people out-of-touch with the
grassroots' dynamics of the war. Fluent in Vietnamese, Race dug deeper by
sifting through primary documents and interviewing hundreds of people,
including local, provincial and national-level Vietnamese officials, American
government officials, members of the NLF - the military organization of what
Race refers to as a "revolutionary movement" in South Vietnam - and ordinary
residents of Long An.
The result was an innovative and authoritative account that explained how the
revolutionary movement, with relatively meager human and material resources,
was able to outmaneuver a dramatically more powerful government in Saigon
backed by US military might.
Race's research revealed a disjuncture between local-level interpretations and
provincial and national-level takes on the relative success of the NLF.
Non-local interviewees mentioned that corruption, inefficient governance, and a
lack of government aid limited government effectiveness. They also claimed that
peasants were deceived by both infiltrators from Hanoi and the NLF, and viewed
revolutionary fighters as criminals and terrorists.
Race is highly critical of these interpretations, but he did not altogether
dismiss them. He emphasized the important role of northern communist leadership
and the NLF's reliance on selective violence and coercion, noting even that
some important fighters had criminal backgrounds. But the author also
convincingly argued that the NLF's assassinations, threats, and kidnappings
were epiphenomena of a comprehensive program of social change that the
Communist Party and the NLF used to tilt grassroots sympathies in their favor.
The communist leadership's use of "pre-emptive" policies such as land
redistribution, progressive tax reform, and decentralization of political
authority appealed to the majority of peasants. All of Race's informants
involved with the movement, as well as many local-level government officials,
highlighted these policies as reasons for the movement's mass appeal. In sharp
contrast, Vietnamese and American officials were utterly unaware of, or simply
preferred not to recognize, the progressive policies of the communists that
ultimately underpinned their victory.
Race's research argued that the Communist Party's relatively successful efforts
to recruit and motivate people drew from the contingency of such policies. That
is, if one wanted to receive land, one had to support the movement. Similarly,
if a young man wanted to avoid the government's national draft, he would
receive protection from the NLF so long as he was willing to fight on its side
when called.
For Race, the Saigon government's decision to use non-local soldiers was
another crucial policy mistake that served to diminish young men's motivation
to fight for the government. This played directly into the hands of the
revolutionary movement's recruitment efforts, where preference was often given
to those hailing from less privileged backgrounds.
Out of local touch
The over-centralization of government decision-making was one of many policy
flaws that hampered Saigon's efforts to win over the population, the author
argued. Though the government had its own land redistribution policies for the
peasantry, decisions were made at the national level and often on the basis of
inflexible laws. On the other hand, the communists' village-level agent was
given great authority over not only land distribution but also other matters
such as taxation, justice, and military recruitment.
Meanwhile, the US military's use of traditional warfare against the movement's
guerilla tactics often proved counter-productive. Large-scale and
indiscriminate violence resulted in a dramatic number of casualties among
revolutionary fighters and civilians, feeding into the sympathetic environment
that revolutionary fighters used to operate freely over wide areas under
supposed government control.
United States and South Vietnamese officials' assessment that modernization and
development - the forerunner of today's "hearts and minds" counter-insurgency
strategies - could undermine support for the revolutionary movement was
ultimately off the mark. Race found that those people unsympathetic to the
government were more than willing to accept its aid, but this did not sway them
away from the movement.
The issue, Race argued, was that government aid programs were incremental, not
distributive. Put otherwise, the government's programs reproduced existing
socio-economic hierarchies, while the revolutionary movement, both in rhetoric
and practice, aimed to dismantle these disparities.
Initially, Race's findings were poorly received by US officials. The Pentagon
ignored many of the factors that Race argued were critical to motivating
peasants in South Vietnam and instead stood by the notion that no guerilla
enemy could withstand its conventional military power. Indeed, most
counter-insurgency literature from that era posited that a numerical
superiority of troops would prevail against any opponent.
The empirical evidence from the Vietnam War showed that those assumptions were
deeply flawed and it is now commonly accepted in mainstream theory of civil war
and insurgency that indiscriminate violence is an ineffective means to win a
war.
Some still argue that the US lost the Vietnam War because of the US
government's decision to gradually withdrawal troops - a decision pundits claim
was pushed by a hostile media and subsequent loss of domestic support. Those
arguments have some merit, but the crux of War Comes to Long An remains
largely unchallenged by experts of the Vietnam War. Many of today's leading
comparativists researching civil wars and insurgencies still look towards
Race's seminal study - and for good reason.
By studying the material, security and symbolic motives influencing individual
interests and actions through in-depth local level research, Race overcame what
award-winning civil war expert Stathis Kalyvas refers to as the "urban bias" of
civil war research, or the tendency of insurgencies to be explained through the
lens of urban intellectuals and practitioners even though most violence takes
place in rural areas.
This bias was particularly problematic in the Vietnam War, as foreigners who
covered the war could not speak Vietnamese and relied heavily on Vietnamese and
American officials for explanations. Race's bottom-up focus also allowed him to
steer clear of the related problem of urban intellectuals' inclination to use
ideology or the overarching cleavage wrought by conflict as an explanation for
individual motivation.
Though members of the NLF were generally ideological communists, Race found
that the vast majority of peasants were not. Nor could a legitimacy crisis or
nationalism provide adequate explanations for understanding the motivations of
grass roots people.
To be sure, NLF recruiters lured peasants on side through appeals that the
South Vietnam government lacked legitimacy because it represented a feudalist
system backed by an imperialist foreign power. Although Race claimed this
narrative served as a useful legitimizing theme, he argued that contingent
policies were far more significant in motivating peasants who supported, or
were at least neutral to, the communists' aspirations.
Despite stinging revisionist arguments that US and South Vietnamese government
officials failed to understand the significance of these insurgent policies,
readers will not find a discourse of condemnation of either government
officials or revolutionary fighters in Race's timeless book. Both were
portrayed as individuals trying to do what they believed was right at a certain
point in time.
Race's concern for objectivity deserves high praise, but it was his empirical
findings in Long An that first turned the heads of academics, policymakers, and
others grappling to understand the Vietnam War. Nearly 40 years later, War Comes
to Long An still holds enormous value to anyone interested in civil
war, insurgency, and counterinsurgency and the US's new generation of wars.
War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province,
Updated and Expanded by Jeffrey Race. University of California Press February
2010. ISBN: 9780520260177. Price: US$26.95, 368 pages.
Jason Johnson is an independent researcher and consultant covering
southernmost Thailand. He is currently based in Pattani province, southern
Thailand, and may be reached at jrj.johnson@gmail.com
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The book is based on events in Vietnam's southern Long An province, located
near Saigon [now Ho Chi Minh City), during the period between the signing of
the Geneva Accords in 1954 and the escalation of the US's intervention that
took place in 1965. After an initial stint in Vietnam as a lieutenant with the
US military in 1965 and 1966, a 24-year-old Race returned to Vietnam from late
1967 to mid-1968 to conduct research in the area. 
