Into the maelstrom

In Vietnam, the American government vowed to win "hearts and minds" of the people. On the other side, among those who led and sympathized with insurgents, the term "people's war" gained a wide currency. While much has been written about those who professed to speak for Vietnamese population, we know little about everyday life of peasants who made up the bulk of the country's inhabitants. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including interviews conducted by Rand Corporation with informants from Mỹ Tho Province in Mekong Delta, David Hunt shows the daily experience of villagers in the midst of war and revolution. The peasants of southern Vietnam were neither onlookers nor mere victims as fighting raged through their country. From the "concerted uprising" in 1959-1960 to Tet Offensive of 1968, the revolutionary movement they created was the driving force within the war. Known as "Viet Cong" to their adversaries, the rebels called themselves the "Liberation Front." They demanded an end to landlordism and an egalitarian distribution of means of subsistence and a democratization of relations between town and countryside, parents and children, men and women. They hoped the Vietnamese people would achieve a fuller sense of their place in the world and power they possessed to fashion their own destinies. Hunt analyzes this cultural revolution. As fighting spread and became more destructive, especially after U.S. escalation in 1965, villagers were driven from their homes, rural infrastructure collapsed, and customary notions of space and time lost purchase on an increasingly chaotic world. Hunt also shows how peasants, who earlier had aspired to a kind of revolutionary modernism, now found themselves struggling to survive and cope with American intruders who poured into Mỹ Tho, and how they managed to regroup and spearhead Tet Offensive that altered the course of the war--Publisher's description.