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 several 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 decisionmakers in Hanoi and Saigon, while at the same time exploring how ordinary Vietnamese people, northerners and southerners, 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.

About the Author
Mark Philip Bradley is Bernadotte E. Schmitt Professor of History at The University of Chicago. He is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919-1950, which won the Association for Asian Studies Harry Benda Prize. He is also co-editor of Making the Forever War, Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn, and Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars.

Reviews
The first concise history of the conflict that fully integrates Vietnam's "American War" into the more familiar story of America's "Vietnam War". Mark Bradley has succeeded in making the Vietnamese and Americans mutually visible. It is a considerable achievement. * Marilyn B. Young, co-editor of A Companion to the Vietnam War *
Consciously written to render the Vietnamese visible in ways too few American histories of the war do . . . * The Nation *



Book Information
ISBN 9780192895783
Author Mark Philip Bradley
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 304g
Dimensions(mm) 15mm * 130mm * 196mm