H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-38 on Nguyen-Marshall, Between War and the State97 min read

Van Nguyen-Marshall’s Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam (1954–1975) is the first serious scholarly examination of the history of civil society in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN or South Vietnam). Moreover, despite the undeniably central role of the RVN in the Vietnam War—it provided the main battlefield for the conflict and suffered the most civilian casualties—Nguyen-Marshall’s book is one of only a small handful of studies of the domestic political or social history of the southern anti-Communist state.[1] Several factors explain the odd neglect of the RVN within the massive field of Vietnam War studies. For professional historians who work inside the country, a strict regime of state censorship continues to suppress portrayals of the RVN as anything other than a pliant puppet of the United States. For non-Vietnamese historians, on the other hand, poor language skills have made the RVN difficult to research. Most foreign historians of the war, many of whom do not have a reading knowledge of Vietnamese have been unable to consult archival documents from the RVN state or the massive trove of printed material (for example, newspapers, memoirs, and literature) that was published in Saigon between 1954 and 1975. Nor can they conduct in-depth interviews with Vietnamese seniors whose memories of life in the South remain a valuable source for the history of the RVN. Sidelining the RVN further is an enduring residue of an old view that portrays it as a corrupt, authoritarian, and illegitimate state that was undeserving of external support against a local Communist enemy with broad nationalist appeal.

Roundtable Review 16-38 

Van Nguyen-Marshall. Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954–1975. Cornell University Press, 2023. ISBN: ‎ 9781501770579.

12 May 2025| PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-38 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editors: Thomas Maddux & Daniel R. Hart
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan

 

Introduction by Peter Zinoman, University of California, Berkeley. 2

Review by Jessica Elkind, San Francisco State University. 6

Review by Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox, Western Connecticut State University. 11

Review by Tuan Hoang, Pepperdine University. 16

Review by Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê, Columbia University. 21

Review by George J. Veith, Independent Scholar 24

Review by Tuong Vu, University of Oregon. 29

Response by Van Nguyen-Marshall, Trent University. 34

 

Van Nguyen-Marshall’s Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam (1954–1975) is the first serious scholarly examination of the history of civil society in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN or South Vietnam). Moreover, despite the undeniably central role of the RVN in the Vietnam War—it provided the main battlefield for the conflict and suffered the most civilian casualties—Nguyen-Marshall’s book is one of only a small handful of studies of the domestic political or social history of the southern anti-Communist state.[1] Several factors explain the odd neglect of the RVN within the massive field of Vietnam War studies. For professional historians who work inside the country, a strict regime of state censorship continues to suppress portrayals of the RVN as anything other than a pliant puppet of the United States. For non-Vietnamese historians, on the other hand, poor language skills have made the RVN difficult to research. Most foreign historians of the war, many of whom do not have a reading knowledge of Vietnamese have been unable to consult archival documents from the RVN state or the massive trove of printed material (for example, newspapers, memoirs, and literature) that was published in Saigon between 1954 and 1975. Nor can they conduct in-depth interviews with Vietnamese seniors whose memories of life in the South remain a valuable source for the history of the RVN. Sidelining the RVN further is an enduring residue of an old view that portrays it as a corrupt, authoritarian, and illegitimate state that was undeserving of external support against a local Communist enemy with broad nationalist appeal.

In addition to its novelty, the significance of Between War and the State is as a function of its productive revisionism. Challenging the view of the RVN as a thoroughly US creature that lacked its own agency, the book paints a lively portrait of a diverse cast of Vietnamese characters, many of whom were idealistically committed to the state’s republican, anti-Communist project. In each of its core chapters, it examines a different type of organized group in South Vietnamese society: social service associations, community development organizations, youth movements, and human rights groups. It also features an interesting preliminary chapter that surveys precolonial and colonial-era antecedents to the emergence of a civil society in postcolonial South Vietnam. And it includes one additional chapter that breaks with the typological orientation of the others by offering a detailed case study of a fascinating civil society initiative known as the “Highway of Horror Project” that responded to a mass atrocity against civilians committed by Communist forces in 1972.

The overall picture of the RVN conveyed by this approach departs radically from conventional wisdom. Instead of a puppet regime lacking agency, the RVN in Nguyen-Marshall’s account comes off as pluralistic community with a dynamic associational culture that expressed a broad range of civic-minded social, political, and cultural projects. While it does not ignore the persecution by the RVN state of those elements of civil society that it viewed as subversive to its interests, its portrayal of the general flourishing of associational life in South Vietnam makes the government appear less rigidly autocratic and more liberal. The conclusion of the book emphasizes the significance of this point by contrasting the messy complexity of civil society in the RVN with the total suppression of associational life by the northern Communist state in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam).

While the component parts of the monograph are all fashioned to serve a larger revisionist argument, they also bring to light documentary evidence about scores of South Vietnamese individuals, groups, and campaigns that have never appeared in the existing scholarship. Recovered through painstaking research in French, English, and Vietnamese-language archives, libraries, and old newspaper collections across multiple continents, this mass of new data stands as one of Nguyen-Marshall’s most significant scholarly contributions. Especially impressive is her exploitation of a sizable trove of documentary material from RVN state archives in Ho Chi Minh City. She also makes exceptionally effective use of the period press, Vietnamese language memoirs, and secondary scholarship as well as interviews that she conducted with survivors from the era. The quality and quantity of research on display is superb.

The six reviewers of Between War and the State for this H-Diplo Forum largely concur that it is a work of exceptional quality and significance. Even Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê, the book’s strongest critic among the reviewers, commends “Nguyen-Marshall’s measured and contemplative approach to history.” The other reviewers offer fulsome praise for numerous aspects of Between War and the State, especially its prodigious research, its attention to Vietnamese agency, and its depiction of the rich vibrancy and plurality of RVN associational life. Some appreciate its novel focus on non-state actors and forgotten individuals. Others laud its “dignified” portrayal of RVN citizens and focus on South Vietnamese heroism. Tuong Vu and Jessica Elkind endorse the way that Nguyen-Marshall’s approach goes against the historiographical grain by spotlighting Communist atrocities. And George Veith points out that her research confirms the reality of Communist infiltration of Southern civil society groups, which was a contested issue during the War.

Among the most interesting positive responses is Vu’s claim that Between War and the State corrects for a persistent bias towards the countryside and the peasanty in the existing scholarship on South Vietnam. He argues that rapid urbanization in the mid-1960s and the related growth of consumerism, higher education, and democratic activism in South Vietnamese cities and towns justifies the renewed attention to city life exhibited in Nguyen-Marshall’s book. While Vu is joined by other reviewers in praising the diverse picture of Southern civil society on display, his review provides the only note of caution, pointing out the inherent weaknesses of diversity that coexist with its inherent strengths, especially during wartime.

While also great admirers of the book, Tuan Hoang and Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox raise the important theoretical issue of the relationship between civil society and other powerful forces like the state and moneyed interests. Elkind admires what she describes as “the push and pull between civil society and the state” found in the book while Wilcox asks for a more forthright statement from Nguyen-Marshall about the relative autonomy of civil society under the RVN.

Because of its excellent research, lucid prose, and simple yet powerful central thesis, Between War and the State should attract close attention from the large community of scholars of the Vietnam War and help to update conventional interpretations of the conflict.

 

Contributors:

Van Nguyen-Marshall is Professor of History at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. In addition to Between War and the State (Cornell, 2023), her publications include In Search of Moral Authority: The Discourse on Poverty, Poor Relief, and Charity in French Colonial Vietnam (Lang, 2008) and a co-edited volume with Danièle Bélanger and Lisa Drummond, The Reinvention of Distinction: Modernity and the Middle Class in Urban Vietnam (The Asian Research Institute/Sprinter, 2012). She continues to work on Vietnamese society at war.

Peter Zinoman is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Vietnamese Colonial Republican: The Political Vision of Vu Trong Phung (University of California Press, 2014) and The Colonial Bastille: A History Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940 (University of California, Press, 2001), and editor and co-translator of Dumb Luck: A Novel by Vu Trong Phung (University of Michigan Press, 2002).

Jessica Elkind is Associate Professor of History at San Francisco State University, where she teaches on the US in the world and Southeast Asia. Her publications include Aid Under Fire: Nation Building and the Vietnam War (University Press of Kentucky, 2016) and, with Jerry Combs, The History of American Foreign Policy from 1895, Fifth Edition (Routledge, 2024). She is currently working on a study of US non-military involvement in Cambodia during the 1970s.

Wynn Gadkar-Wilcox is Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University. He is the author of Allegories of the Vietnamese Past: Unification and the Production of a Modern Historical Identity‎ (Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 2011) and editor of Vietnam and the West: New Approaches (Cornell Southeast Asia Publications, 2010). His current research explores how the Buddhist movement in the Republic of Vietnam in the 1960s was influenced by continental philosophy, and in particular existentialism.

Tuan Hoang is Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities and Teacher Education, and Associate Professor of Great Books at Pepperdine University, teaching in the Great Books, humanities, and history programs. His most recent publication is “The Vietnamese Diaspora,” in Pierre Asselin and Lien-Hang Nguyen, eds., The Cambridge History of the Vietnam War, vol. 3 (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He is currently working on a book-long project about Catholicism in South Vietnam.

Adrienne Minh-Châu Lê is a PhD candidate in international and global history at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the twentieth century Vietnamese Buddhist revival, including the political Buddhist movement in South Vietnam and its impact on the global movement against the Vietnam War. Her work has been published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies (Winter 2024); Republican Vietnam, 1963–1975: War, Society, Diaspora (University of Hawai’i Press, 2023); and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the Vietnam War (Cambridge University Press).

George J. Veith is a former US Army Captain who served in armor units in the United States and Germany from 1979–1986. He earned his PhD in history from Monash University and is the author of four books on the Vietnam War. They include Code-Name Bright Light: The Untold Story of US POW Rescue Efforts During the Vietnam War (The Free Press, 1998); Leave No Man Behind: Bill Bell and the Search for American POW/MIAs from the Vietnam War (Goblinfern Press, 2004); Black April: The Fall of South Vietnam, 1973–1975 (Encounter Press, 2012); Drawn Swords in a Distant Land: South Vietnam’s Shattered Dreams (Encounter Press, 2021). Dr. Veith also published an e-book with the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars titled The Return to War: North Vietnamese Decision-Making, 1973–1975 (Cold War International History Project, November 2017). His current project is an examination, using primary Communist sources, of how North Vietnam won the war.

Tuong Vu is Professor of Political Science, University of Oregon, where he has taught since 2008. He has held visiting appointments at Seoul National University, Princeton University, and the National University of Singapore, and taught at the Naval Postgraduate School. Vu is also director of the US-Vietnam Research Center based at the University of Oregon. His research has focused broadly on the comparative politics of state formation, development, and revolutions in East and Southeast Asia, and more recently, on Vietnamese communism, republicanism, and Vietnamese American history.

Van Nguyen-Marshall’s Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954–1975 examines civil society in South Vietnam during the two decades of the country’s existence. In this excellent study, Nguyen-Marshall explores the activities of a range of individuals and organizations and demonstrates the vibrancy and plurality of South Vietnamese society. Her book sheds light on the ways that people engaged with their communities, attempted to improve government and society, and survived during the tumultuous years of the American War in Vietnam. Contrary to the conventional and one-dimensional stereotypes of South Vietnamese as agents of US imperialism, dedicated Communist insurgents, or hapless victims of the war, this book portrays them as active participants in a robust civil society. They responded to myriad challenges such as war, authoritarian governments, and economic underdevelopment in complex and diverse ways. Nguyen-Marshall argues that “South Vietnamese society was teeming with ordinary people from different walks of life, many of whom voluntarily participated in public life” (160). In doing so, she attributes agency and dignity to people that popular and scholarly accounts, in both Vietnam and the United States, have routinely misunderstood or ignored.[2]

Over the past twenty years, there has been an outpouring of scholarship on South Vietnam. Most of this literature focuses on government officials and programs as well as the partnership between the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) and the United States.[3] With only a few exceptions, studies of South Vietnam have largely neglected ordinary Vietnamese and their involvement in public life.[4] Nguyen-Marshall’s book provides a critical intervention in this growing body of scholarship. Unlike most other historians, she emphasizes the role of non-state actors and organizations in South Vietnam. Americans appear as minor figures in this story. Another significant historiographical contribution stems from Nguyen-Marshall’s contention that many aspects of South Vietnamese civil society had roots in the precolonial and colonial periods. Rather than concentrate on the negative legacies of French imperialism, she shows continuity in the constructive ways that Vietnamese people participated in public life before and after independence. This book also offers a nuanced interpretation of interactions between the state and the population. Nguyen-Marshall makes a strong case for limitations on state authority in South Vietnam, and she challenges the widely held and inaccurate view that South Vietnamese people were simply victims of government repression and that their country was merely a pawn in the Cold War.[5]

Nguyen-Marshall relies on an impressive range of primary sources to support her arguments. In addition to official government documents from the National Archives II and the General Sciences Library in Ho Chi Minh City, she draws on archival sources located at Texas Tech University and Cornell University. Some of Nguyen-Marshall’s most original sources are the publications of numerous Vietnamese voluntary organizations, as well as Vietnamese-language newspapers and periodicals that were produced between 1954 and 1975. In addition, Nguyen-Marshall interviewed over twenty individuals who participated in South Vietnamese associations or organizations. Their perspectives, and the insights she gleaned from those conversations, provide an additional window into the experiences of regular people and adds a welcome personal dimension to this history.

Although Between War and the State is a relatively short book, Nguyen-Marshall covers a remarkable number of topics and a wide array of activities. After a brief introduction, the first chapter provides an overview of the historical and political landscape in South Vietnam. While it does not contain much new information, it does a nice job of synthesizing existing literature and setting the stage for what follows. The next six chapters focus on different organizations, individuals, and aspects of civil society. As Nguyen-Marshall explains, she does not intend to cover every aspect of civil society, but instead she strives to reveal the broad range of activities and efforts in which South Vietnamese people and groups were involved.

In chapter two Nguyen-Marshall examines mutual aid groups, which proliferated in South Vietnam in the years following independence (30-54). In 1956, 148 mutual aid and friendly societies operated in the country, and numerous other organizations were established over the next two decades. These groups were often organized around shared experiences and bonds, including religion, native place, lineage, educational background, or professional experience. Religious congregations, alumni associations, trade unions, and other mutual aid societies allowed members to strengthen community ties and foster social cohesion. As Nguyen-Marshall shows, South Vietnamese officials had an “ambivalent relationship” with these groups (53). While politicians appreciated the fact that mutual aid societies generally promoted civic responsibility and national unity, they also worried about the potential for radical or anti-state elements to infiltrate these groups and challenge the status quo. As a result, officials regulated the groups’ activities and supported associations with interests and goals that seemed to align with those of the state.

Chapter three explores charitable organizations that provided social services for orphans, people with disabilities, the poor, and victims of natural disasters (55-79). In this section, as in her discussion of mutual aid societies, Nguyen-Marshall highlights the deep roots of these activities in Vietnamese history. During the precolonial and French colonial periods, multiple sources of moral teachings including Confucian ethics, Buddhist doctrine, and Roman Catholic philosophy informed Vietnamese thinking on the importance of social aid. The emphasis on state-sponsored welfare as well as community-level engagement by voluntary philanthropic organizations continued in the mid-twentieth century. One of the most significant interventions that Nguyen-Marshall makes here is her focus on the gender and class dynamics of social work and charitable organizations in South Vietnam.

As she explains, “women featured prominently in the realm of charity and social welfare” (69). Not only were many women the beneficiaries of these services, they also frequently served as the agents of charitable initiatives by founding organizations, leading relief efforts, and laboring to help others in need. Some groups embraced ambitious goals and a more explicitly political agenda, such as the Vietnam Women’s Association, which sought to advance female literacy and defend the rights of working women (71-75). Nguyen-Marshall’s nuanced analysis in this chapter challenges assumptions that men dominated civil society and demonstrates that many South Vietnamese women, in particular those in the middle and upper classes who had the means and time to volunteer their services, were actively engaged in public life.

In subsequent chapters of the book, Nguyen-Marshall focuses on community development initiatives, youth and student organizations, and various rights movements. These chapters highlight the relationships and tensions between civil society and the state in South Vietnam. Some groups, including the Popular Culture Association, produced publications and implemented programs that advanced the government’s ideology and nation-building goals (81-86). Such groups enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship with officials in the Government of Vietnam (GVN). On the other hand, newspapers like Sóng Thân (128-133) and organizations such as the Buddhist School of Youth for Social Service and the Committee for Prison Reform (86-89) offered a critique of specific policies as well as a broader challenge to the status quo. The GVN attempted to curtail such organizations’ activities and often surveilled or imprisoned their leaders. But the state did not enjoy a monopoly on coercive power. As Nguyen-Marshall demonstrates, government officials sometimes found it preferable to accommodate these groups rather than risk widespread public condemnation.

In many ways, the sixth chapter of Between War and the State represents a powerful apex of the book. In this chapter, Nguyen-Marshall details an effort led by the daily newspaper Sóng Thân to recover and bury the remains of the victims of a brutal North Vietnamese attack in the spring of 1972 (134-137). During the Easter Offensive that year, North Vietnamese troops slaughtered scores of South Vietnamese civilians and military personnel who were fleeing the city of Quang Tri in central Vietnam. When the South Vietnamese army regained control of the area several months later, they discovered a ten kilometer stretch of Highway 1 littered with destroyed vehicles and the bodies of hundreds of people, including women and children, who had been killed and then abandoned.

After journalists from Sóng Thân, a newspaper that had been founded as a cooperative to expose official corruption and injustice, learned of the corpses along so-called “Highway of Horror,” they embarked on an ambitious endeavor to retrieve and identify the victims of the attack and to provide a proper burial for each of them. Their effort inspired people from all socio-economic backgrounds and sectors of society to support the project. Numerous people provided financial assistance in the form of donations. Other individuals and groups offered logistical support or locations for identifying the dead. A military unit stationed in the area loaned trucks for transporting workers and corpses. And many local people performed the physically and emotionally draining work of recovering the victims’ remains. When the work concluded, after seven months, those involved in Sóng Thân’s burial project had recovered 1,841 bodies (135).

Nguyen-Marshall’s treatment of the events surrounding the mass killing on Highway 1 and the Sóng Thân burial project is even-handed, sensitive, and poignant. Because the post-war Communist government in Hanoi has sought to cast South Vietnam as an illegitimate state, official histories in Vietnam tend to celebrate the Easter Offensive as a critical step on the road to victory while glossing over the atrocities committed outside of Quang Tri and elsewhere. By relying on local, contemporary reports as well as observers’ recollections of the mass killing, Nguyen-Marshall provides an important account of an episode that most scholars of the Vietnam War have overlooked.[6] More importantly, her discussion of the burial project itself illustrates the significant degree to which there existed in South Vietnam a socially conscious and actively involved public.

This chapter demonstrates the commitment of Sóng Thân and similar organizations as well as the widespread engagement of ordinary South Vietnamese citizens in civil society and social justice. As Nguyen-Marshall explains, the endeavor also carried political undertones. She argues, “the paper’s burial project could be interpreted as an oblique criticism of the [Saigon] government not only for being overwhelmed by the DRV’s attack but also for neglecting its victims” (133). Furthermore, Nguyen-Marshall’s analysis highlights the complexity of the political, social, and cultural landscape in Vietnam and the nature of the civil war in the country. She concludes that the Sóng Thân burial project shows that “the Vietnamese were victims of the war, but they were also their own rescuers and the perpetrators of violence” (136).

Between War and the State is an incredibly important contribution to scholarship on the Republic of Vietnam. Despite its many strengths, however, the book does have a few minor shortcomings. Nguyen-Marshall’s narrative portrays the South Vietnamese people as complex, rational actors who often came together in an effort to create a better future for their society. It does not always attribute the same complexity to the Americans in the story. In the discussion of voluntary efforts and community development, for example, Nguyen-Marshall focuses heavily on two Americans in particular: Edward Lansdale, the famous counterinsurgency expert who advised Ngo Dinh Diem and other Southeast Asian leaders, and Charles Sweet, an aid worker with the International Voluntary Service (IVS) who worked undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency (94-97). She also refers to the resignations of several IVS leaders in response to public allegations that the organization’s primary purpose was to implement the United States government’s wartime agenda in Vietnam rather than assist impoverished communities (106-109).

International and American aid groups certainly advanced the United States’ strategic and military goals. However, Nguyen-Marshall’s characterization of these groups as simply serving Washington’s interests gives the impression that American aid workers did not really care about the people they claimed to be helping and that US involvement in development assistance merely offered a way to gather intelligence and advance military aims. This depiction minimizes the sincere desire of American volunteers to support Vietnamese people in building a better life for themselves and discounts the constructive and meaningful relationships that numerous American and South Vietnamese developed during this period.[7] Nguyen-Marshall also might have provided more comparison with civil society programs in North Vietnam during this period. While she offers brief comparisons in a few sections of the book, particularly in the discussion of press censorship, a more sustained assessment of the similarities and differences between public life and voluntary activities in the two countries might have further highlighted the nature of Vietnamese civil society during this period (146-150).

Notwithstanding these minor critiques, Between War and the State represents a ground-breaking and welcome addition to the ever-expanding body of scholarship on South Vietnam.[8] Nguyen-Marshall’s research is impressive, her arguments are persuasive, and her writing is clear and engaging. Ultimately, this book tells a compelling story of people who struggled to improve the lives of their fellow citizens, implement their own vision for development, hold their leaders and journalists accountable, and participate in civil society, even as war raged around them. For those who are interested in Vietnamese history and the American war, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand South Vietnam without reading Between War and the State.

 

There is no shortage of books on what most people in the United States refer to as the “Vietnam War.” By one estimate, over thirty thousand books have been written on the subject.[9] The vast majority of those works in English, however, have been on the American conduct of the war. A smaller but still very significant subset are on American political and diplomatic calculations related to the war. In Vietnamese studies, one of the most salient and laudable trends in the past two decades, which started around the turn of the twenty-first century, has been a reevaluation of the conduct of the war and the political history of the period based on the decisions made by Vietnamese actors.[10] Van Nguyen-Marshall’s new book participates in perhaps the newest trend, which expands the discussion of the agency of Vietnamese actors to social, cultural, and intellectual history of Vietnam from the 1950s to the 1970s.[11] Her work is significant because it presents a deep examination of the actions of students, monks, priests, journalists, professionals, and young people who supported their society by voluntarily assisting in building schools, roads, and houses. It also shows ordinary (but frequently wealthy) people courageously braving wartime conditions to properly bury the dead, protest repressive government actions, and fight against abuses by Communist forces.

This work is most valuable for its innovative and pathbreaking research. It makes copious use of underutilized archival collections. One example among many is Nguyen-Marshall’s use of the Charles F. Sweet papers at Cornell University’s Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Using these papers, she uncovers how Sweet, who was simultaneously a volunteer with International Volunteer Services and an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), used his connections to support initiatives of the New Life Project and summer youth programs and to ensure that these efforts were in line with US anti-Communist aims. Sweet also used his influence to interfere with civil society in almost absurdly minute ways, such as interfering in an election of student leaders at universities in order to ensure that left-leaning students were not afforded power in student organizations.

This book is replete with such fascinating stories, many of which offer new perspectives on names or events that will be familiar to those who have studied the period. Colonel Edward Lansdale, for example, is well known for his operations in support of Catholic repatriation to South Vietnam in the 1950s, in promoting General Trình Minh Thế (as famously and quasi-fictionally depicted in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American), and in propping up President Ngô Đình Diệm.[12] However, less is known about aspects of Lansdale’s second act in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, when he was assigned a pacification role as special adviser to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.[13] In Nguyen-Marshall’s book, we see Lansdale assisting Sweet’s work in shaping the voluntary New Life Project into a development project to serve United States ends (94-97).

The ghost of General Trình Minh Thế appears in another unexpected place: in General Thế’s associate from the early 1950s, the muckraking newspaper editor Uyên Thao, who rose again to prominence in the mid-1970s by using his newspaper not only to expose corruption but also to catalyze scores of ordinary people in central Vietnam. These righteous volunteers gave proper burial rites to the victims of the “Highway of Horror” that was caused when North Vietnamese forces opened fire on those fleeing south from the city of Quảng Trị during the Easter Offensive of 1972 (130-133). Finally, Nguyen-Marshall gives us a welcome and refreshing picture of orphanages in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN or South Vietnam) and of Operation Babylift. Her analysis focuses not on heroic Americans such as the “Angel of Saigon” Betty Tisdale, who helped facilitate the airlift of hundreds of babies during the fall of Saigon, but on Vũ Thị Ngãi, who founded the An Lạc Orphanage in the 1940s and kept it running for decades in trying circumstances that forced her to relocate the orphanage multiple times (61-62).

Vũ Thị Ngãi’s story is one of many tales of courage in the face of extraordinarily difficult circumstances that Nguyen-Marshall tells. Portions of this book are deeply inspiring, particularly given that most of the individuals who act to help others do so without any desire for or expectation of pecuniary remuniation. Nguyen-Marshall describes young people with the School of Youth for Social Service who worked hard to improve the lives of impoverished rural people even though their friends had been killed or injured by grenade attacks (86-89). She describes reporters with Sóng Thần newspaper going into a war zone in the immediate aftermath of the “Highway of Horror” massacre to recover bodies even though they faced the imminent possibility of injury or death from an enemy attack. She shows how journalists and activists continued their protests despite facing lengthy imprisonments and, like Phạm Thị Thanh Vân, continuing their protests from their jail cells, fighting against censorship and repression at a critical juncture near the end of the war (121-128).

These tales of courage in the face of repression and war are significant in themselves. They demonstrate how Vietnamese civilians did not wait for politicians or armies to aid them but used their own initiative to improve their society. However, these stories require interpretation, and Between War and the State frequently should have made its interpretations more explicit. While Nguyen-Marshall does offer specific and nuanced interpretive claims about specific elements of the book, it is not always clear what the relationship is between these specific claims and the overall argument of the book. In the introduction, the main argument seems to be that “the interplay” of associational life, the “exigencies of war,” and surveillance by the RVN, the influence of the US, and the infiltration of the National Liberation Front (NLF) into some voluntary organizations rendered “civil society a highly contested domain, wherein diverse groups and participants vied for influence and advantage” (6). There are two problems with this interpretation. The first is that the argument runs dangerously close to the definition of civil society itself that the author provided on the previous pages, which stakes a claim for civil society that threads the needle between sanguine definitions of civil society, such as those offered by Robert Putnam and Alexis de Tocqueville in which it is viewed as an essential basis for a democratic public, and more skeptical views, such as that of Antonio Gramsci, in which civil society is a mechanism for those in power to maintain their hegemony (4-5).[14] The similarity between the author’s interpretation of civil society and the articulation of the book’s thesis renders the book’s argument circular and tautological: the nature of RVN civil society, in other words, is that it was civil society.

Too often the book’s analysis rests on a mere assertion of importance or agency. For example, the conclusion in Chapter Five, on youth activism, demonstrates that “political groups saw young people as an important constituency” (120). At other times, the point is primarily that the Vietnamese had “agency in their associational lives” and participated in determining their social destiny (161). This assertion of agency is important. What is wanting is a clearer position on whether, on balance, “ordinary people” truly had agency most of the time, or not (160). After all, the analysis rightly points to the ways in which many of these organizations were influenced, shaped, and controlled by external actors. The Library Association was tainted by the anti-Communist agenda (and CIA links) of the Asia Foundation (47-50). The New Life Development Project was similarly restricted by its dependence on US actors with hidden agendas. The Vietnam Woman’s Association was “pressured to join the Women’s Solidarity Movement,” founded by President Diệm’s sister-in-law and de facto First Lady Madame Nhu, who used “coercive tactics” to force prominent women to join (72-73). The NLF as well influenced the decision of people to join or not to join organizations; frequently, such influence included either the threat of violence or actual force. Though Nguyen-Marshall argues in her nuanced and thoughtful conclusion that though “these competing forces must have been challenging for civil society participants to negotiate,” they nevertheless were able to do so because “state hegemony was not complete” (162). This argument seems to be neither fish nor fowl. Clearly, it was possible for some organizations to act as counterhegemonic forces, while others were not successful in doing so, but ultimately, it is not clear to me that the book demonstrates definitively that collectively, the voluntary acts of internal compassion and resistance of these organizations outweigh the substantial influences, restraints, and restrictions put on them by external forces.

Similarly, some very important debates are mentioned in passing. Do voluntary actions in the public sphere provide an essential check on state power by mediating between private life and the state and providing a forum to critique the state, as Jürgen Habermas claimed in his early work, or are these forms of civil society constricted by the fact that they are driven by economic and social elites, as Pierre Bourdieu claims?[15] Nguyen-Marshall mentions this debate in passing but does not take a position beyond conceding the elitist background of many of the actors she highlights. To what extent did the influence of these organizations penetrate beyond urban elites? This is also an important question, which Nguyen-Marshall similarly mentions but never wholly resolves.

The same is true with the author’s engagement with Olga Dror’s Making Two Vietnams.[16] In that work, Dror paints a picture of a subset of increasingly disengaged youth in the second republic who were influenced by US and other cultural trends to become hippies or “cowboys,” listen to folk or rock music, and spend their time in “leisure and debauchery” smoking marijuana or taking opium rather than attempting to change their society for the better.[17] Nguyen-Marshall’s young people in the RVN are nearly the opposite. She points to engaged youth who were “self-confident, media-savvy, informed activists who were not cowed by a repressive state” (158). Clearly, neither picture is inaccurate, since each is a snapshot of different segments of society. The ineluctable conclusion is that some Vietnamese youth responded to the vagaries of war by becoming engaged in assisting their society, while others responded by withdrawing from society. In general, however, which segment was more significant? Or were there some young people who followed both trends? Nguyen-Marshall mentions Dror’s analysis in passing but does not subject this contrast between the two works to further scrutiny and analysis.

Nevertheless, because of its groundbreaking research and inspirational stories, this is a little gem of a book. It provides an organized introduction to a very important topic in the social history of the Republic of Vietnam that has been little studied, particularly in English. Even though the agency of those discussed was perhaps incomplete, the stories this book tells of the courageous actions of people young and old, rich and (occasionally) poor, helping their less fortunate brothers and sisters, burying the neglected dead, and standing up against tyranny provide an important reminder in our own moment of global polarization and warfare that the actions of ordinary individuals can, and often do, matter.

Contextualizing Van Nguyen-Marshall’s monograph in the broader historiography of the Vietnam War reveals its importance. Although Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam (1954–1975) is relatively short, at 164 pages of main text, it deals with an oft-neglected topic in the scholarship about the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). The first wave of this scholarship began during the Vietnam War and kept on until the late 1990s. Although the RVN’s name often appeared in print, the bulk of this historiographical wave focused on US involvement vis-à-vis the Communist forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and, especially, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam). The RVN was seen to be a weak and passive player that could not have existed, or even been created, without massive US economic and military largesse. Orthodox historians in this wave generally acknowledged the willful personality of Ngo Dinh Diem, the founder of the RVN and President of its First Republic (1955–1963) who did not always follow American designs and objectives. On the other hand, they mostly interpreted the RVN’s origins to be rooted in US policy of containment, accounting for Washington’s massive support of the anti-Communist state until it could no longer be supported in 1975.[18] 

The second wave of historiography about the RVN began approximately at the turn of the millennium. A result of the opening of Vietnamese archives, this wave was partially encouraged by some orthodox historians, who recommended that scholars should be more attentive to US-RVN relations.[19] Scholars in the second wave have typically examined RVN documents along with documents found in Western archives. Initially focusing on the relationship between Diem and the US, they have published a number of works about the anti-Communist leader’s attempts to chart his own course in terms of nation building while having to depend heavily on US support.[20] More recently, they have examined the policies and actions of Nguyen Van Thieu, president of the Second Republic (1967–1975), and his relationships with the US and other anti-Communist countries.[21] Besides focusing on South Vietnamese leaders, historians of the second wave have made the theme of nation building central to their works.[22]

While the second wave of historiography is still going on, another wave began to emerge in the late 2010s. Led by scholars in Vietnam studies, whose field has seen its own changes since the 1990s, this new wave focuses on Vietnamese perspectives, intra-Vietnamese relations, and Vietnamese politics and society even as it recognizes the significance of American intervention and influence in the RVN.[23] Moreover, the scholarship in this wave tends to stress the perspective that the Vietnam War was initially if not also ultimately a civil conflict. It gives greater attention to the dynamics of anti-Communism among Vietnamese actors, and it prioritizes Vietnamese sources while utilizing Western sources, especially US ones. A notable example of this wave is Nu-Anh Tran’s study of anti-Communist domestic politics during the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem.[24] Tran demonstrates that on the one hand there was much political factionalism and disunity among non-Communist groups, to which Diem’s authoritarian rule also contributed. On the other hand, Diem’s creation of the RVN came out of a distinctly anticolonial, revolutionary, and nationalist tradition which diverged from the path embraced by the Vietnamese Communists.

Taking a different tack, Olga Dror compared educational and governmental promotions of youth identities in North Vietnam and South Vietnam during the height of the Vietnam War.[25] In the north, the DRV controlled virtually all youth organizations and indoctrinated youths to love President Ho Chi Minh and the proletarian class, believe in socialism and Communism, hate the enemies of the state, and develop revolutionary zeal towards mobilization for the war effort. In contrast, the RVN was much less regimented in its educational policies and practices. It also allowed greater space in the socialization of belief among children, emphasizing, for example, love for the Vietnamese country while leaving out hate, even hatred against Communism. Besides these monographs, several conferences organized or co-organized by Tuong Vu of the University of Oregon have led to three recent collections about nation building, politics, and society in the RVN.[26] Placing the extinct state at the center rather than the periphery of the Vietnam conflict, these works seek to elaborate on the theme of agency and to flesh out non- and anti-Communist dynamics of nation building in the multifaceted and complex southern society.[27]

Perhaps this recent trend in historiography should be called a 2.5 wave, if not completely a third wave. Naming aside, it is to this wave that Between War and the State makes a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the RVN. Nguyen-Marshall has previously studied certain aspects of Vietnamese civil society under late colonialism, namely, Vietnamese discourse on relief and charity.[28] She now shifts her attention to the relationship between the RVN and civil society in South Vietnam following independence, situating this relationship in the evolving contexts of nation building, Communist insurgency, and, eventually, US intervention. The book begins with a theoretical discussion of the concept of civil society. It concludes that the associational life in the RVN was rich and although the state “controlled the parameters of civil society… its hegemony was not complete” even during the putatively greater repression of the First Republic under Diem (4-5).

Nguyen-Marshall comes to this conclusion after describing and analyzing six main categories of civil and civic organizations in the RVN. The first are mutual aid and friendly societies (MAFS), which are not normally considered a part of civil society because they focus on kinship or professional ties rather than civic responsibilities. Nonetheless, the prevalence of MAFS, whose roots were deep in Vietnamese history during the early RVN bode well for the growth of civil society in subsequent years. Moreover, the Vietnam Confederation of Workers, which sought to protect their members and were therefore placed under the MAFS’ umbrella, was inspired in part by its founder’s anti-Communist belief (51-54). The second are organizations that performed social service, including religious ones. Gender was a feature of social service agencies and organizations in the RVN, the best example is the women, including Buddhist and Catholic nuns, who staffed orphanages and daycare centers run by churches and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The third category is voluntary organizations which sought social and community development. These organizations engaged in different activities, from teaching literacy to the masses to village initiatives begun by the Buddhist School of Youth for Social Service, to the New Life Development Project focusing on a poor district in Saigon (86-96). Trade unions and social service agencies somewhat straddled the boundaries among group interest, social aid, and civil society. In comparison, organizations such as the Buddhist School and the New Life Development Project operated firmly within the RVN’s civil society, because their programs sought to build a postcolonial nation. 

Student organizations engaging in political activism form the next category of analysis. Underscoring Olga Dror’s conclusion about the variety of choices offered to youths in South Vietnam, Nguyen-Marshall finds that “students had choices [to be antiwar or pro-government] because of the competitive nature of South Vietnam’s civil society” (120). The fifth category is the press, which the author analyzes through the example of the civic activism of the Saigon newspaper Sóng Thần [Tsunami] in 1972. Responding to Vietnamese deaths caused by the fighting between the armies of the RVN and the DRV during the Easter Offensive, the newspaper quickly organized a project to recover and bury claimed and unclaimed corpses alike (120-133). Last, the book examines a host of organizations that emerged in the 1970s and protested the government’s restrictions on rights and freedoms. They include a prison reform movement, an anti-censorship movement, and anti-corruption campaigns, and their leaders came from different segments of the RVN’s citizenry, including anti-Communist publishers, Catholic priests, and even members of the NLF.

The delineation of these vastly different segments within the South Vietnamese civil society is the book’s most significant contribution. Through seven chapters, Nguyen-Marshall succinctly demonstrates the rich tapestry in the RVN, concluding that “South Vietnam clearly had a vibrant and plural public sphere” by the 1970s (158). Although the book does not engage in any substantial comparison with the public sphere in North Vietnam, it offers indirect comparisons such as the fact that former South Vietnamese journalists and publishers “especially those who had remained in Vietnam [after the war] and endured years of imprisonment, expressed a new appreciation for the freedom they had enjoyed under the Second Republic” (159). Its findings and arguments add much to the growing interest in Vietnam studies about divergent visions for the postcolonial nation between the Communists and nationalists; different exercises in nation building between the DRV and the RVN; and different approaches and outcomes regarding the state’s control over society.[29] 

Thanks to the book’s careful categorization, Vietnam studies and other scholars are also in a better position to explore non-governmental actors in the construction of the non-Communist state. This is most true of the shortest sections such as that on the Buddhist School of Youth for Social Service, which will, hopefully, receive a full-length study in the future. Conversely, the chapter on the newspaper Sóng Thần shouts out for a comprehensive history of the press in the RVN. Such studies would likely come from the field of Vietnam studies. Yet it also invites research based on Western sources while exploring the relationship between non-Vietnamese NGOs and the RVN’s civil society. There is, for example, exceedingly little historical scholarship about the relationship between international Christian churches and the South Vietnamese civil society. While the book focuses on Vietnamese, its few references to the presence of international Christian organizations in the RVN behooves historians to consider examining hitherto unexplored archives of Western Catholic and Protestant groups such as Catholic Relief Services, the Mennonite Central Committee, and the Christian and Missionary Alliance; and to find out their relationships to the South Vietnamese society.[30] Not only does Between War and the State make a substantial contribution to the new wave of historiography, but it also opens an exciting new vista that should deepen our understanding of the Vietnam War. 

The core message of Van Nguyen-Marshall’s Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam, 1954–1975 is that civil society in South Vietnam was diverse and alive, and that ordinary people struggled through extraordinary circumstances to make it so. People living under the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) were not completely controlled by its authoritarian regimes, Nguyen-Marshall maintains, and their lives were not entirely defined by the war in their country.[31] The underlying motivation of the book, in her words, “is to understand the wartime experiences of the South Vietnamese people in a way that does not reduce them to mere victims of violence” (2). 

Overall, Between War and the State is accessibly written and professionally researched, with even-handed analysis that refutes narratives of pure victimhood or heroism. The book touches on an impressive array of organizations that were active in South Vietnam between 1954 and 1975. This is not, however an argument-driven work and it does not contain a central analysis. The point that ties the book together, and that Nguyen-Marshall returns to repeatedly, is the simple fact that South Vietnamese civil society persisted through difficult conditions, and often in defiance of state policies.

As Nguyen-Marshall states in the introduction, the intention of this project is “to display the plurality of public life” in the Republic of Vietnam (7). Between War and the State does so by touching on a plethora of organizations including “mutual-aid associations, cultural clubs, professional societies, charitable organizations, community development groups, women’s associations, student organizations, and rights movements” (6). This diversity reflects the breadth of Nguyen-Marshall’s research, which relies mostly on Vietnamese newspapers and government records, along with personal interviews and memoirs.

Since most of the book is organized thematically, it can be a valuable reference work for those seeking an introduction to specific aspects of civil society under the RVN. Chapter one, “The Historical and Political Landscape,” is essential reading for those who are unfamiliar with South Vietnamese history, as it provides necessary context for the rest of the book. In this first chapter, Nguyen-Marshall draws on historiography to provide an excellent summary of the period from 1930–1975 which treats developments in both northern and southern Vietnam as legitimate nation-building efforts.[32] The following six chapters cover associational life; social service; community development; student activism; a case study of Sóng Thần newspaper and its humanitarian projects; and the fight for press freedom and prison reform. The conclusion summarizes the main topics of the book and comments briefly on associational life in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam) and in contemporary Vietnam. 

While Nguyen-Marshall’s writing is clear and easy to follow, the book’s broad scope and core aim of demonstrating plurality results in a work that at times reads like an encyclopedia. She mentions many groups and projects in passing, sometimes discussing a subject for just a few sentences before switching to the next example. The section titled “Social Service in the Republic of Vietnam” in chapter three, for example, introduces three orphanages, three health and disability societies, six Christian orders and service groups, five Buddhist organizations, plus a handful of smaller projects–all within just three pages (62-63, 65). Much of the research is presented anecdotally, rather than to support an analysis or identify a larger trend. Perhaps choosing a handful of representative case studies, and dedicating a full chapter to each of them, would have made a more narratively cohesive book and allowed for the emergence of a core analytical argument. 

We get a taste of what this might have looked like with the sixth chapter, titled “Sóng Thần Newspaper and the “Highway of Horror” Project.” This chapter easily stands out as the most robust and compelling part of the book. It details the case of Sóng Thần and its mobilization of donors and volunteers to recover, identify, and bury nearly two thousand human corpses, many of them civilian, that were strewn along Highway 1 in Quảng Trị province during the 1972 Easter offensive. This chapter exhibits the best of Nguyen-Marshall’s careful research and even-handed analysis. With an abundance of quantitative and qualitative evidence, including eyewitness accounts, she paints a complete picture of the horrors of the April-May attack and its aftermath. The strength of this chapter lies in its use of a single case to highlight several themes, including the scale and importance of grassroots humanitarian efforts, the influence of the press, and the ways in which ordinary people’s lives and experiences were devalued and denied by state powers. As Nguyen-Marshall reveals, this case also stands out as an atrocity in which Vietnamese were the perpetrators, victims, and saviors–underscoring Vietnamese agency and the fact that this was a civil war (136). This particular instance of civilian slaughter was carried out by Communist forces but, as Nguyen-Marshall notes, “the DRV was not the only side guilty of indiscriminate violence against civilians. It is well documented that the US and RVN were just as culpable” (128). Importantly, Nguyen-Marshall insists on not villainizing or valorizing one side or the other, and on recognizing the culpability of all parties involved in the war. If bias exists in this book, it is an emotional alignment with ordinary people and the ways in which they suffered, endured, and persevered. 

Between War and the State is a welcome addition to the small body of scholarship that prioritizes the experiences and agency of South Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War. RVN-centric scholarship is no longer new to the field, but the vast majority of books in this category focus on state actors, especially the government of Ngô Đình Diệm from 1954–1963.[33] The only published academic monographs that center aspects of RVN civil society, to my knowledge, are Robert Topmiller’s The Lotus Unleashed; Sophie Quinn-Judge’s The Third Force in the Vietnam War; and Heather Stur’s Saigon at War.[34]The Lotus Unleashed and The Third Force focus on anti-war activists, namely religious leaders and students, while Saigon at War highlights political unrest and urban struggles for democracy. Nguyen-Marshall is the first scholar to dedicate a book to the topic of voluntary associations in the Republican era. As such, Between War and the State finds its place in historiography as an indispensable introduction to South Vietnamese civil society. Along with clear and concise overviews of broader social and political context, it introduces readers to a dizzying number of organizations that were active in that landscape and is sure to spark curiosity and further research. 

Between War and the State is like an impressionist painting of civil society in South Vietnam. Through it, one gets a general sense and feeling for the subject, its essence, but little detail. It is not, and does not claim to be, an analytical piece of scholarship. To fully enjoy the book as it is, one must abandon the scholarly instinct to pinpoint an argument, and instead treat it as a reflection on civil society striving under the pressures of war. This is the best way to appreciate Nguyen-Marshall’s measured and contemplative approach to history.

The aphorism “do not judge a book by its cover,” or in this case by its title, precisely captures this important work. Scholars still argue whether the Republic of Vietnam was a hopeless dictatorship propped up by the United States or whether it had achieved a semblance of legitimacy in its short lifespan.[35] Although these historians focus almost exclusively on the high politics of statecraft, diplomacy, or nation building, Van Nguyen-Marshall has instead chosen to examine the social and associational life of South Vietnam’s citizens. In doing so, she may have settled the argument with this book. Her clear assertion that, for the most part, South Vietnam’s people organized and at times defied the state puts a stake in the obsolete but unfortunately still widespread notion that the Second Republic was a dictatorial regime that was unresponsive to the needs of its citizens.

To clarify her thesis, Nguyen-Marshall provides competing definitions from several academics of social organizations and their relationship to the state and to democracy building. She cites scholars such as Antonio Gramsci, who have classified social organizations.[36] Some civic groups supported orphanages or local development, while others only served “narrow interests” such as economic or political advancement for its members (4). Regardless, civic groups provided societal outlets for both elites and for public involvement in numerous non-state areas. That these citizen-led bodies flourished in South Vietnam is a testament to its relative political openness despite wartime ravages, outsized foreign intervention, and the organizational and political struggles inherent in new states.

Gramsci posited that civil society was neither “separate nor independent from the state,” a theory with which it is not clear that Nguyen-Marshall agrees (4, 5). In several instances it would have been helpful for her to have more clearly stated her opinion. One example of an unequivocal statement is the concluding sentence in the introduction, which provides a compelling assertion of Nguyen-Marshall’s analysis and neatly encapsulates the main thrust of the book: “The wide array of social and political activities…illustrates that South Vietnam’s public sphere was pluralistic and its civil society robust, albeit beleaguered at times by state control and the demands of warfare” (8).

Yet Nguyen-Marshall does not use the word ‘freedom’ to define South Vietnam’s social life, even within limits, in the analysis of the country’s tortured path from postcolonial birth through the authoritarian President Ngo Dinh Diem era (1955–1963) and the military juntas of the Interregnum and ending with the constitutionally spawned life of the Second Republic under President Nguyen Van Thieu (1967–1975). Since freedom had different degrees of expression in each period, it might have been interesting to know whether the author considers the South Vietnamese to have been free at any points in the country’s life and, if so, to what extent. It is an important question that remains contested, even among the Vietnamese.

Nguyen-Marshall has plumbed a variety of Vietnamese primary and secondary sources to create the first study of South Vietnamese associational life. Methodologically, the book focuses mainly on urban and legally registered organizations, as those groups left written records to draw upon. The chapters are organized by subject and cover volunteer organizations, orphanages, and Chinese associations, among others. Nguyen-Marshall delves deeply into each type and artfully frames their successes or failures. This is key to supporting the book’s main theme: that these groups generally flourished on their own merits, but they were sometimes assisted by unofficial US funding or South Vietnamese government blessing. The Chinese associations, for example, survived despite official Diem government efforts to force Chinese nationals to acquire Vietnamese citizenship (41). Labor unions also came under government scrutiny, mainly due to Diem’s fears that union membership might supplant national loyalty (54). Alternatively, their failures or lack of impact were often due to their own missteps rather than to any government suppression or indifference.

Student associations also drew government attention, particularly when they protested specific government laws or actions. Student activism became prominent during the last days of the Diem regime, when students poured into the streets to protest government repression. After the coup and assassination of Diem in 1963, the Communist National Liberation Front (NLF) invested considerable resources in inserting agents into the student ranks. By late 1964, the NLF controlled the “Saigon-Gia Dinh City Youth Group and had recruited many agents. Of the fourteen schools and faculties at that time, we had been able to insert our people into the representative committees of the Faculties of Science, Pedagogy, Literature, Forestry and Agriculture, Medicine, etc.”[37] Aware of this Communist infiltration, the Saigon intelligence community eliminated the bulk of these Communist agents.[38] Eventually, most students participated solely in social development programs.

Nguyen-Marshall acknowledges the Communist infiltration of these groups (161). There often was Communist involvement, but discerning what was normal political jousting or disagreements over policy versus proving that it was a Communist-directed denunciation was extremely difficult.[39] Even today, governments find it challenging to uncover or even limit media that has cleverly hidden foreign backing.[40]

For example, Nguyen-Marshall outlines the commendable efforts by several notable Vietnamese, including Vo Long Trieu and Ho Ngoc Nhuan, to ameliorate the difficult living conditions in Saigon’s District 8. Home to some of the capital’s most destitute citizens, the New Life Development Program was a fascinating improvement project (89–96). Trieu was a Catholic firebrand who became youth minister in 1966 in Premier Nguyen Cao Ky’s government, only to have a rancorous falling out with him.[41] Later elected to the National Assembly, he was both a government critic and a virulent anti-Communist. Nhuan, who became the chief of District 8, was also a Catholic who was also voted into the National Assembly. Nhuan, however, took a different political path than Trieu. Nhuan’s social activism led him to reject Thieu’s more ardent anti-Communism, and Nhuan was often in contact with NLF cadre, providing shelter and information.[42] Although never a Communist, his political leanings landed him in the Third Force, an amorphous “peace at any price” group who demanded negotiations with the NLF and an immediate exit of US forces.[43]

Nguyen-Marshall’s outstanding research has enabled her to provide a broad overview of the development of social services in Vietnam from the colonial period to 1975. This context, which is often tricky to uncover and define, provides important insights into the foundations of Vietnamese life. Confucian philosophy, religious dogma (Catholic, Buddhist, ancestor worship), and French republican ideals created “multiple sources of moral teaching” that fostered a deep appreciation for communal assistance in Vietnam. Much of this social work—involving orphanages and charities, for example—was often conducted by and for women (57). Unfortunately, these groups were poorly funded and could not fill the holes in South Vietnam’s gaping social net. Worse, both sides viewed them with suspicion: the Communists saw them as potential US spies or government agents, while the Government of Vietnam (GVN) often thought they were overly sympathetic to Communist aims.

To address that very issue, the last two chapters switch the focus from social organizations to the activities of anti-government outfits. Nguyen-Marshall reviews the anti-Thieu newspaper Song Than (Tidal Wave), which strove to expose official corruption and to condemn what it viewed as government inaction to address the difficult life of the urban poor. Song Than rose to fame for its exposé of the People’s Army of Vietnam’s (PAVN) massacre of civilians and military stragglers on Route 1 as they retreated from Quang Tri City to Hue in late April 1972.[44] In July, two Song Than journalists discovered the smashed vehicles and the rotting and unburied corpses of almost 2,000 people who had been killed by PAVN artillery while attempting to flee the Communist advance. The two reporters nicknamed this section of road the “Highway of Horror” (Dai Lo Kinh Hoang). After printing the story, the paper began a campaign to raise funds to recover, identify, and bury the dead. Although the GVN had undertaken a similar project to recover the civilians massacred by PAVN troops during the occupation of Hue in February 1968, it was too hard-pressed in the summer of 1972 to devote the resources to clearing the debris and human remains on Route 1. Song Than’s humanitarian project unmistakably shows that both local civilians and national organizations possessed the ability to undertake an important mission without GVN approval or assistance. As Nguyen-Marshall so eloquently states, the burial project “clearly indicates the existence of a socially conscious public willing to engage with issues in the public sphere and participate in collective actions” (137). In other words, the free people of the GVN did not need government permission to act, unlike in the totalitarian state in North Vietnam.

Nguyen-Marshall examines the claims of the different authors who wrote about the carnage to ascertain the number of killed and the composition of the column (the number of civilians versus military). The narrative maintains a neutral tone and refrains from judging the PAVN atrocity. Attacking a retreating military column is not a war crime, but killing retreating civilians is one, especially when the PAVN artillery observers could easily see the women, children, and elderly. The section ends with the sentence that the “DRV was not the only side guilty of indiscriminate violence against civilians” (128). Nguyen-Marshall argues that the US and GVN were as well (128). While both statements are true, they are irrelevant to the discussion; one can easily condemn allied war crimes while also denouncing PAVN brutalities.

Nguyen-Marshall then examines several of the nascent left-wing, anti-government political organizations that appeared in Saigon and other cities during the later stages of the war. She focuses on organizations such as Father Chau Tin’s Committee for Prison Reform and briefly mentions Mrs. Ngo Ba Thanh, a firebrand lawyer (141–145). The chapter does not, however, discuss pro-government organizations and other political fronts such as The Southern Old Students’ Association (Hoi Lien Truong Mien Nam), which the US embassy called Lien Truong.[45] A discussion of them would have provided a more balanced approach and given a wider view of the South Vietnamese nongovernment political scene.

Finally, Nguyen-Marshall compares associational life in South Vietnam to that in North Vietnam only in the book’s conclusion. She notes that “voluntary organizations in South Vietnam stand in stark contrast to the public life in North Vietnam” and that the Communist “Lao Dong Party effectively restricted activities…into associations controlled by the party and state” (162). Although it is correct that everyday life in the DRV is an “understudied topic,” the assertation that it is “premature to assume the state completely dominated society” feels unnecessarily neutral (163). But as Sarah Maza notes, “social historians have shown that even in circumstances of extreme deprivation and powerlessness, men and women have…carved out areas of freedom by finding strategies to…rise above oppressive power.”[46] Yet our knowledge of DRV life is limited because the state-controlled media was intentionally focused on propaganda extolling the virtues of Communism rather than reporting on wartime social conditions. Thus, a more in-depth appraisal is called for here. This is not meant as a criticism but rather a plea for a future topic of research, one that Tuong Vu is also investigating.[47] The book’s focus is rightfully on providing a detailed examination of South Vietnam’s previously unexplored social activities rather than a side-by-side comparison with North Vietnam’s repression.

In summary, Between War and the State highlights that South Vietnam’s society was complex, “pluralistic, and robust” (139). Such an investigation and pronouncement are long overdue, and Nguyen-Marshall has done a masterful job in making it. Her thorough and much-needed examination of South Vietnamese life reveals the relative openness of a society attempting to nation-build amidst a ferocious war where the enemy used the hallmarks of freedom to undermine it. This interpretation is at odds with that of most scholars who fall into the orthodox interpretative school on Vietnam.[48] The field of Vietnam War studies desperately needs books like Between War and the State to reinvigorate stale debates, ones that do not feature dueling opinions that simply mask ideological bias. By centering the book on the South Vietnamese, where it rightfully belongs, Nguyen-Marshall has taken a large step in changing the discussion from blaming the US government for every failure, real or imagined. My points are more appeals for added insights rather than criticisms. I await the author’s next project eagerly.

 

Van Nguyen-Marshall’s study offers a rich analysis of civil society under the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) during its two decades of existence from 1954 to 1975. The book adds to a growing body of works that challenge the US-centric view of the RVN.[49] That view ignores non-Communist South Vietnamese agency and dismisses the RVN as a mere creation of the US. Another contribution of Between War and the State: Civil Society in South Vietnam (1954–1975) is its focus on urban South Vietnam, in contrast to the longstanding scholarly bias toward the countryside where the Communist insurgency began.[50] That preoccupation with the Southern peasantry overlooks significant developments in the towns and cities under the First Republic (1955–1963) and especially afterward.[51]

By the mid–1960s, the Communist insurgency was transformed from a guerrilla struggle into a conventional war, with entire People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, the armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV or North Vietnam)) regiments teeming into the South via Laos and equipped with Soviet and Chinese machine guns, long-range artilleries, advanced antiaircraft systems, and, in due course, tanks. At the same time, with National Liberation Front (NLF) forces decimated during the Tet Offensive, much of the focus of the war shifted to towns and cities, where millions of refugees and migrants now converged.

US intervention was a major factor in the conventionalization and urbanization of the war, but so was Soviet and Chinese support for Hanoi to escalate the war, which enabled North Vietnam to send main-force troops and massive amounts of war material to the South and launch one “general offensive” after another against Southern urban centers. The South Vietnamese state was no passive onlooker; while busy fighting the war and building a nation, it “controlled the parameters of civil society, determining the limits of the public sphere and its associated activities, [although] its hegemony was not complete” (161).

But South Vietnamese civil society was also developed by its own rhythm. It inherited a vibrancy from the colonial period and expanded with the rapid development of education and infrastructure under the First Republic. The 1963 coup that toppled President NgôĐình Diệm facilitated its explosive growth as the generals in power yielded to popular demands for a multi-party democracy. A ballooning urban population, diversifying consumer demands, and the rapid spread of Western education and culture drastically transformed the urban scene of South Vietnam by the early 1970s. This pattern of globalization can be observed concurrently across non-Communist Asia, from Seoul to Bangkok and Jakarta, but the change was perhaps most dramatic in Saigon and other South Vietnamese towns.

Between War and the State convincingly demonstrates that the US role in South Vietnamese politics and society was important, but the US was only one player among others. While caught in a seemingly endless and brutal war, surveilled by governments with authoritarian tendencies, infiltrated by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-funded agencies, and terrorized by Communist violence, urban South Vietnamese society exuded a vibrant, if often raucous, diversity that was imbued with complex motives and sensibilities. Rapid changes in politics, economy, society, and culture enthused and benefited many people while unsettling and hurting many others.[52] The liberalization of politics since the end of the First Republic opened numerous opportunities for political and civic participation. A belief in the national community and desire to contribute to collective goods beyond personal interests led many citizens to participate, whether to promote social and cultural development, or to support peace and alleviate war sufferings.

Nguyen-Marshall analyzes various civil society organizations whose activities contributed to civic life and nation building, including mutual-aid associations, social-welfare charities, and student and religious political organizations. These diverse organizations were spearheaded by ordinary citizens and served as vehicles for them to organize and voice their political concerns, provide relief and social welfare to vulnerable groups, and ultimately cultivate social and national solidarity. For South Vietnam’s nation-building project, this diversity was simultaneously a weakness and a strength. On one hand, it complicated efforts by Republican leaders to forge national unity against Communism. On the other hand, it produced a more inclusive political system in which citizens’ voices from different strata could be heard. This posed a stark contrast to the society in North Vietnam, where a coerced uniformity was maintained and all activities were focused on war, often oblivious to ordinary people’s concerns.[53]

One of the most fascinating parts of the book is the stories of numerous remarkable figures who contributed to the vibrancy of civic life under the RVN. The stories of these figures are largely forgotten, but the Nguyen-Marshall, by meticulously tracing them through various sources, offers an appreciation of urban society and politics in South Vietnam. One such person is Vũ Thị Ngãi, who first established An Lạc orphanage in her home province in Thanh Hóa in 1949, during the first Indochinese War. Ngã subsequently relocated An Lạc to South Vietnam in 1955, and it was from here that 219 children were selected and brought to the US in Operation “Babylift” in 1975 before Saigon fell to Communist forces. When the travel documents were prepared for them, the government reportedly gave those children Ngãi’s own last name, “Vũ,” as theirs.[54] Vũ Thị Ngãi’s contribution has long been neglected, while Betty Tisdale, who organized “Babylift,” was touted as the “Angel of Saigon” in the media, and US naval physician Tom Dooley who had earlier helped move the orphanage to the South was mistakenly believed to have been the founder of the orphanage (55, 62). Ngãi died three years after the war, but her story, which spread over two wars and nearly three decades, speaks about many aspects of war that are not yet reflected in scholarship.

Another remarkable figure is the Redemptorist priest Trần Hữu Thanh, whose life story spanned both the war and postwar periods. Father Thanh was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Ngô Đình Diệm who published a book on the “personalist revolution” in 1955 when Diệm founded the Republic of Vietnam and made Personalism the official ideology of his government (190).[55] After a period of preoccupation with his studies and his religious work, Father Thanh shook South Vietnamese politics in 1974 by leading an anti-corruption movement against the Saigon government, targeting especially President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and his family. The movement led to a dramatic confrontation between the government and the press, which wanted to publish Father Thanh’s accusations in their papers (154-155).[56]

The truthfulness of Father Thanh’s accusations, such as the allegation that Gen. Đặng Văn Quang, President Thiệu’s trusted aide, was smuggling heroin, has been questioned.[57] Although the Communist regime in Hanoi must have been happy to see turmoil in Saigon with Thiệu being challenged, it suspected Father Thanh of working with the Americans and criticized him for helping to raise the hope that the Saigon government could be reformed. After 1975, Father Thanh spent 3 years in Communist prisons, then lived the next 9 years under house arrest, and was next banished to rural parishes in North Vietnam until his death in 2007.[58]

Besides individual stories, Between War and the State’s focus on urban life helps shed some light on the topic of Communist atrocities, which were significant in the cities in the last decade of the war. These atrocities were aimed at individuals as well as urban communities and took place during normal life and at war. The events add to our knowledge of widely exposed acts committed by the US and the South Vietnamese states, providing a fuller understanding of the conflict and the physical environment in which urban residents lived. Throughout the war, but especially since 1964, Communist commando squads carried out numerous terrorist acts in the cities, some of which targeted the best and the brightest of South Vietnam simply because these individuals might have contributed to a Southern victory.

The best known examples of these cases are the assassinations of the Constituent Assembly’s deputy Trần Văn Văn, National Progressive Movement leader Dr. Nguyễn Văn Bông, and Minister of Education Dr. Lê Minh Trí.[59]The deaths of these individuals marked a great loss for the RVN and also diminished the legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government as its leaders were often suspected of having carried out the killings for political reasons. In a television interview broadcast in the US, Trần Văn Văn‘s wife was quoted by her interpreter as saying “[Nguyễn Cao] Kỳ killed my husband.”[60] The New York Times quoted “a well-informed American who is close to Education Ministry affairs” who said that he did not think “the Vietcong had anything to do with” the assassination of Dr. Lê Minh Trí, implying that he had been killed by those in the government who opposed his efforts to curb corruption in public education.[61]

The fact that Communist terrorists even targeted an education minister suggests the salience of schools as literally a battlefield. Between War and the State briefly discusses several cases of intimidation and assassination of pro-government student leaders, namely, Ngô Vương Toại, Bùi Hồng Sỹ, and Lê Khắc Sinh Nhật. The latter lost his life while the former two were wounded (116-117).The Buddhist School of Youth for Social Service (SYSS), which was founded by the monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, was another target of Communist terror.[62] This school organized rural development activities andmany students were wounded, killed, kidnapped, or executed by mysterious groups. As Nguyen-Marshall argues, it was unlikely that the government saw the SYSS as a threat since the authorities did not try to close the school even though it operated without permission (89). In contrast, the SYSS’s Buddhist revolution directly competed with the NLF’s rural programs. By placing these attacks in the context of the terror campaign by the NLF at the same time, Nguyen-Marshall contends that Communist agents more likely committed those atrocities.

While the Huế massacre in 1968 is now well-known thanks to Olga Dror’s recent work,[63] no scholarly analysis exists on the mass killings in Quảng Trị by Communist long-range artilleries during the retreat of the Republican army (122-128). Through an examination of the burial project of the newspaper Sóng Thần’s editors and correspondents, Between War and the State provides the first detailed discussion of this tragic yet forgotten event during which about 2,000 people, of which approximately two-thirds were civilians, were killed as they fled the city in the chaos.[64] Whether this event can be called a “massacre” or not, the number of civilian casualties who fell under Communist fire was perhaps the largest killing in a single military battle during the war.

Van Nguyen-Marshall’s study provides a long-overdue examination of the vibrant and diverse civil society in urban South Vietnam under the Republic of Vietnam. Her compelling study breaks away from both American-centric and rural-centric biases in scholarship on South Vietnam and the Vietnam War. It demonstrates the agency of South Vietnamese amid a savage civil war that was orchestrated from the North with the participation of both Cold War camps.

Response by Van Nguyen-Marshall, Trent University

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