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The Vietnam War tends to conjure up images of American soldiers battling an elusive enemy in thick jungle, the thudding of helicopters overhead. But there were in fact many Vietnam wars - an anticolonial war with France, a cold war turned hot with the United States, a civil war between North and South Vietnam and among the southern Vietnamese, a revolutionary war of ideas over what should guide Vietnamese society into its postcolonial future, and finally a war of memories after the official end of hostilities with the fall of Saigon in 1975. This book looks at how the Vietnamese themselves experienced all of these conflicts, showing how the wars for Vietnam were rooted in fundamentally conflicting visions of what an independent Vietnam should mean that in many ways remain unresolved to this day. Drawing upon twenty years of research, Mark Philip Bradley examines the thinking and the behaviour of the key wartime decision-makers in Hanoi and Saigon, while at the same time exploring how ordinary Vietnamese, northerners and southerners, men and women, soldiers and civilians, urban elites and rural peasants, radicals and conservatives, came to understand the thirty years of bloody warfare that unfolded around them - and how they made sense of its aftermath.

Burgess addresses the role of religion in the massive political changes that took place in Eastern Europe in 1989, focusing particularly on the role played by the East German Church in that country’s bloodless revolution.

On the morning of 11 June 1963, more than 300 Buddhist monks and nuns marched through the streets of Saigon. At the head of the procession was a blue Austin Westminster sedan carrying the 76-year-old monk Thich Quang Duc. Born in the central Vietnamese village of Hoi Khanh in 1897, he was ordained as a monk at 20 and played an active role in the Buddhist reform movement of the late colonial period, supervising the construction of more than fifty new temples in central and southern Vietnam.

‘I unsystematically record the often aching doubts of a shedding of the skin,’ the northern Vietnamese poet Nguyen Dinh Thi wrote in December 1947 just as the first year of the French war came to a close; ‘the old body falling without fully separating, the newly grown young skin not yet strengthened, bleeding at the slightest touch.’1 Nguyen Dinh Thi sought to articulate the soul-searching dilemmas of many Vietnamese intellectuals who supported the Ho Chi Minh government in its war against the French. Deeply sympathetic to the state’s calls to use their talents to represent the struggles of peasants, workers, and soldiers in the French war, Thi and other patriotic intellectuals found it difficult to know how to place their art in the service of state politics and at the same time maintain a sense of themselves as creative artists.

At 2.45 a.m. on 30 January 1968, a team of NLF cadres blasted a hole in the wall surrounding the US Embassy in Saigon and dashed into the courtyard of the compound. For the next six hours, this potent symbol of the US presence in southern Vietnam was the scene of one of the most dramatic episodes of the American war in Vietnam. Unable to get through the heavy door at the main entrance of the Embassy building, the attackers retreated into the courtyard and took cover behind large concrete flowerpots, pounding the building with rockets and exchanging gunfire with a small detachment of military police. They held their positions until 9.15 a.m., when they were finally overpowered.

In the spring of 1967 Dang Thuy Tram, a young woman fresh out of medical school in Hanoi, arrived in the mountainous central Vietnamese province of Quang Ngai to serve as the chief physician at a thatched-roof Weld hospital. In this lonely and remote spot, she cared for wounded North Vietnamese and NLF soldiers. Tram kept a diary: simple notebooks of five by seven inches, dull brown with cardboard covers.

On 2 September 1945 Ho Chi Minh mounted a raised wooden podium in Hanoi’s central Ba Dinh Square. Before an enthusiastic crowd of more than 400,000, he proclaimed Vietnam free of French colonial rule. The speech marked the culmination of the August Revolution, which brought to power the first post-colonial independent Vietnamese state, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Ho began his speech this way: ‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Drawing on the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, he contrasted the universal ideals of liberty with the lived realities of more than eighty years of French colonial repression. ‘Vietnam’, Ho concluded, ‘has the right to enjoy freedom and independence, and in fact has become a free and independent country.’

In the early 1990s a short story by a young author, Tran Huy Quang, entitled ‘The Prophecy’ (‘Linh Nghiem’), appeared to great interest in Hanoi. It told the tale of a young man named Hinh, the son of a mandarin, who longed to acquire the magical powers that would one day enable him to lead his countrymen to their destiny. The destiny itself does not particularly concern Hinh, but he is intent upon leading the Vietnamese people to it. In a dream one evening, Hinh meets a messenger from the gods, who tells him to seek out a small Xower garden. Once he reaches the garden, Hinh is told, he should walk slowly with his eyes fastened on the ground to ‘look for this’. It will only take a moment, the messenger tells Hinh, and as a result he will ‘possess the world’.

At 6:00 a.m. on April 17, 1961, a lone B-26 roared out of the dim light of the distant western horizon to challenge the Cuban brigade as it hurried to complete a night-time landing at Red Beach in southern Cuba. The pilot, one of Fidel Castro’s best, circled the Barbara J before zeroing in on the huge gunboat with rhythmic blasts of machine-gun fire that disabled two engines and almost sank it on a return assault. But those on board the ship returned the volleys with the steady hammer of BARs and machine guns, hitting the plane on its third pass and sending it down in a fiery crash beyond the dense mangrove trees and into the swamp.

The morning after the invasion opened in ominous fashion for the brigade. At 4:00 a.m. Blue Beach underwent heavy artillery shelling near San Blas that thundered on throughout the day. In the meantime a brigade commander deepened the growing despair by erroneously reporting that four Russian MIG-15s had joined Castro’s T-33s and a dozen tanks in the assault. Those on the ground often mistook the identity of jets, resulting in several alleged MIG sightings. But this fear was not entirely unfounded. If not yet in the air, nearly two dozen MIGs sat on Castro’s airfields, still uncrated or not fully assembled while awaiting the imminent return of his pilots training in Czechoslovakia