Anticipations on a Social History of the Vietnam War
David Hunt, U.Mass Boston

During the Vietnam War, the National Liberation Front promoted its message with leaflets, newspapers, radio transmissions, study sessions, and town criers who shouted bulletins through megaphones from the edges of the hamlets. The Saigon-based Government of Vietnam and the United States responded in kind with the hope of winning "the hearts and minds" of the people, a formulation usually taken to mean that Vietnamese peasants had no ideas of their own and were waiting for others to tell them what to think and do. The slogan was part of a larger misperception, an inability to grasp that there existed a pre-established framework of social relations and socially determined meanings in the countryside, constantly in movement according to a dynamic that no state or political party could fully control. Those relations and meanings are what I am trying to understand in my current work.

I am drawing on Rand Corporation interviews conducted in My Tho Province from 1965 to 1968 with prisoners and defectors from the NLF, with attention in my talk to what those informants have to tell us about the My Tho grapevine. The NLF was more successful than the RVN and its American allies in eavesdropping on the word-of-mouth exchanges that helped villagers make sense of current events. But the Front could not dictate what people thought and felt. Its propaganda instruments were only one source among many feeding the grapevine, and its cadres, while trying to shape opinion in the villages, were themselves dependent on the grapevine as they struggled to keep up with developments in an increasingly chaotic war zone. My study of this complicated interaction is one step toward what I hope will be a social history of the Vietnam War.

David Hunt is Professor of History at UMass/Boston. He is the author of Parents and Children in History: The Psychology of Family Life in Early-Modern France; he co-edited and contributed to The American War in Vietnam; and he has written articles and chapters on the French Revolution and French social history and on Vietnam and the Vietnam War. His book Vietnam's Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War was published by UMass Press in 2008, and his article "Dirty Wars: Counter-Insurgency in Vietnam and Today" will appear in Politics and Society in spring 2010. He is now working on a book tentatively titled "Ethnography of Revolution: A Social History of the Vietnam War."

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