A military journalist shines a light on the unsung heroism and contributions of enlisted combat reporters in the Vietnam War in these revealing interviews. Vietnam Bao Chi brings together interviews with thirty-five combat correspondents who reported on the Vietnam War. These brave men and women wrote the stories, captured the images, and filmed the television coverage of their fellow servicepeople on battlefields from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ and from the Tet Offensive in 1968 to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Here you will meet Marine Dale Dye, who would go on to play an integral role in the making of the film Platoon; Green Beret Jim Morris, whose books, including War Story, recount the combat operations of Special Forces units in the Central Highlands; John Del Vecchio, whose classic work of fiction, The 13th Valley, mirrors his own existence as a combat correspondent with the 101st Airborne Division; and US Navy Frogman Chip Maury, renowned for his free-fall and underwater photography in Vietnam. Yablonka’s extensive experience as a military journalist brought him into contact with many of these combat correspondents, giving him a unique insight into their professions and lives. This book honors these brave chroniclers in uniform who brought the Vietnam War home to us. “[This] valuable collection of profiles . . . shines light on the all-but-forgotten role of American military báo chí (press in Vietnamese)." —Publishers Weekly

Brings together interviews with 35 combat correpsondents who wrote the stories, captured the images and filmed the television coverage of the Vietnam War.

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Vietnam is a comprehensive resource exploring social, political, economic, and cultural aspects of Vietnam, one of contemporary Asia’s most dynamic but least understood countries. Following an introduction that highlights major changes that have unfolded in Vietnam over the past three decades, the volume is organized into four thematic parts: Politics and Society Economy and Society Social Life and Institutions Cultures in Motion Part I addresses key aspects of Vietnam’s politics, from the role of the Communist Party of Vietnam in shaping the country’s institutional evolution, to continuity and change in patterns of socio-political organization, political expression, state repression, diplomatic relations, and human rights. Part II assesses the transformation of Vietnam’s economy, addressing patterns of economic growth, investment and trade, the role of the state in the economy, and other economic aspects of social life. Parts III and IV examine developments across a variety of social and cultural fields through chapters on themes including welfare, inequality, social policy, urbanization, the environment and society, gender, ethnicity, the family, cuisine, art, mass media, and the politics of remembrance. Featuring 38 essays by leading Vietnam scholars from around the world, this book provides a cutting-edge analysis of Vietnam’s transformation and changing engagement with the world. It is an invaluable interdisciplinary reference work that will be of interest to students and academics of Southeast Asian studies, as well as policymakers, analysts, and anyone wishing to learn more about contemporary Vietnam.

Despite the historical importance of the Vietnam War, we know very little about what the Vietnamese people thought and felt prior to the conflict. Americans have tended to treat Vietnam as an extension of their own hopes and fears, successes and failures, rather than addressing the Vietnamese record. In this volume, David Marr offers the first serious intellectual history of Vietnam, focusing on the period just prior to full-scale revolutionary upheaval and protracted military conflict. He argues that changes in political and social consciousness between 1920 and 1945 were a necessary precondition to the mass mobilization and people's war strategies employed subsequently against the French and the Americans. Thus he rejects the prevailing notion that Vietnamese success was primarily due to communist techniques of organization. However, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial goes beyond simply accounting for anyone's victory or defeat to an informed description of intellectual currents in general. Replying for his information on a previously ignored corpus of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and leaflets, the author isolates eight issues of central concern to twentieth-century Vietnamese. The new intelligentsia—indubitably the product of a peculiar French colonial milieu, yet never divorced from the Vietnamese past and always looking to a brilliant Vietnamese future—spearheaded every debate beginning ini 1925. After 1945, Vietnamese intellectuals either placed themselves under ruthless battlefield discipline or withdrew to private meditation. David Marr suggests that the new problems facing Vietnamese today make both of these approaches anachronistic. Whether the Vietnam Communist Party will allow citizens to subject received wisdom to critical debate, to formulate new explanations of reality, to test those explanations in practice, is the essential question lingering at the end of this study.

Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communisim illuminates the real and imagined lives of Ton Duc Thang (1888�1980), a celebrated revolutionary activist and Vietnamese communist icon, but it is much more than a conventional biography. This multifaceted study constitutes the first detailed re-evaluation of the official history of the Vietnamese Communist Party and is a critical analysis of the inner workings of Vietnamese historiography never before undertaken in its scope. In prominence and public visibility second only to Ho Chi Minh, whom he succeeded in the presidency, Ton Duc Thang in fact lacked any real power. Author Christoph Giebel reconciles this seeming contradiction by showing that it was only Ton Duc Thang who could personify for the Party crucial legitimizing �ancestries�: those that linked Vietnamese communism with the Russian October Revolution, highlighted proletarian internationalism among its ranks, and rooted the Party in Viet Nam�s south. The study traces the decades-long, complex processes in which famous heroic episodes in Ton Duc Thang�s life were manipulated or simply fabricated and�depending on prevailing historical and political necessities�utilized as propaganda by the Communist Party. Over time, narrative control over these tales switched hands, however, and since the late 1950s the stories came to be used in factional disputes by competing ideological and regional interests within the revolutionary camp. Based on innovative archival research in Viet Nam and France and on analyses of biographical writings, propaganda, and museum representations, the study challenges core assumptions about the history of the Vietnamese Communist Part and sheds light on divisions within the revolutionary movement along regional, class, and ideological lines. Giebel uses the fictions and contested facts of Ton�s life to demonstrate that history-writing and the constructions of memories and identities are always political acts.

This historically grounded examination of the dynamics of contemporary society in Vietnam, including cultural, political and economic dimensions, focuses on dynamic tensions both within society and among societal forces, the state, and global capital.

In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam is a pioneering exploration of the discourses on poverty and poor-relief activities in early twentieth-century Northern Vietnam. Treating poverty as a socially constructed idea, Van Nguyen-Marshall argues that poor relief was a domain where both French colonialists and Vietnamese intellectuals vied for moral authority. For the French colonial officials, poor relief fell within the purview of the French «civilizing» mission, the official justification for imperialism. However, the colonial agenda, racial prejudices, and the French administrators' own ambivalent attitudes toward the poor made any attempt at poor relief doomed for failure. For Vietnamese intellectuals, the discourse and activities on poor relief became a rallying call for patriotism, nationalism, and, for some, anti-colonialism. In Search of Moral Authority deals with social issues such as charity and poor relief, as well as the construction of national and gender identity by Vietnamese intellectuals. This book is essential reading for students and specialists of Vietnamese history as well as those interested in issues of poverty, public welfare, and charity.

Human Rights in Asia considers how human rights are viewed and implemented in Asia. It covers not just civil and political rights, but also social, economic and cultural rights. This study discusses the problems arising from the fact that ideas of human rights have evolved in Western liberal democracies and examines how far such values are compatible with Asian values and applicable in Asian contexts. Core chapters on France and the USA provide a benchmark on how human rights have emerged and how they are applied and implemented in a civil law and a common law jurisdiction. These are then followed by twelve chapters on the major countries of East Asia plus India, each of which follows a common template to consider the context of the legal system in each country, black letter law, legal discussions and debates and key current issues concerning human rights in each jurisdiction.

Why have some states in the developing world been more successful at facilitating industrialization than others? Challenging theories that privilege industrial policy and colonial legacies, this book focuses on state structure and the politics of state formation, arguing that a cohesive state structure is as important to developmental success as effective industrial policy. Based on a comparison of six Asian cases, including both capitalist and socialist states with varying structural cohesion, Tuong Vu proves that it is state formation politics rather than colonial legacies that have had decisive and lasting impacts on the structures of emerging states. His cross-national comparison of South Korea, Vietnam, Republican and Maoist China, and Sukarno's and Suharto's Indonesia, which is augmented by in-depth analyses of state formation processes in Vietnam and Indonesia, is an important contribution to understanding the dynamics of state formation and economic development in Asia.