Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2022. US$30.00, cloth. ISBN 9780813155951.
The Biệt Động, or “commandos,” have been the subject of low-intensity but constant fascination in studies of the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, the works of authors Mã Thiện Đồng and Trầm Hương have contributed to a revisiting of these special units operating under communist command in secrecy within the major cities of southern Vietnam (Mã Thiện Đồng, Biệt động Sài Gòn. Chuyện bây giờ mới kể [Saigon Commandos: Recently Revealed Histories], Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb. Tổng hợp TP. Hồ Chí Minh, 2006; Trầm Hương, Đêm Sài Gòn không ngủ [Saigon does not Sleep at Night], Hô Chi Minh City: Nxb. Văn Nghệ TP. Hồ Chí Minh, 2008). The publication of Nguyễn Đức Hùng’s memoirs (one of the Biệt Động leaders during the war) in 1998, and as a bilingual English-Vietnamese edition in 2016 (Nguyễn Đức Hùng (Tư Chu), Biệt động Sài Gòn – Chợ Lớn – Gia Định trong 30 năm chiến tranh giải phóng (1945–1975) [Saigon – Cholon – Giadinh Special Forces in the 30-year Period of the Liberation War (1945–1975)], Ho Chi Minh City: Nxb. Văn Hóa – Văn Nghệ, 2016) has also contributed to this interest and shows a will on the Vietnamese side to share these stories with a non-Vietnamese audience. The same could be said about the opening of a Biệt Động museum in August 2023 in Ho Chi Minh City’s third district. The “Saigon Biệt Động,” as they are called in Vietnam, could be considered a trendytopic in the Vietnamese historiography of the 1954–1975 conflict that ravaged the country. For all those familiar with the constraints of research in Vietnam, this means something that is uncommon for other topics: former actors of these organizations enjoy a certain freedom of expression that allows them to share their life stories (at least in a substantial manner with foreigners). Michael Robert Dedrick’s research thus took place at a particularly favourable moment in this historiographical conjuncture. The book that emerged from it serves as a start towards filling a curious gap in the English-language literature, for the interest in the Biệt Động has barely crossed the Pacific Ocean.
The first observation the reader will make is that, despite the academic nature of the publisher, this is not an academic book. It does not seek to build a scientific analysis of the Biệt Động or to elaborate a critical scrutiny of the firsthand materials it provides. The merits of this publication first lie in the author’s approach. Transparently explained in the introduction, Dedrick’s processes and motivations behind the book are both unique and commendable. As a former American military intelligence officer in Saigon, he was one of the interrogators of the Biệt Động commander who had led the assault on the American embassy during the 1968 Tết Offensive. This quest for Ba Đen, code name for Ngô Văn Giang, the captured Biệt Động leader of the attack, led Dedrick to return to Vietnam on various occasions in the 2010s and, through Vietnamese veterans’ associations, he conducted several discussions and interviews with former members of the Biệt Động. In a field saturated with first-person accounts of American veterans who tell about their own experience of the Vietnam War, Dedrick chooses instead to give voices to his former enemies and minimize his own views in the process.
At first, a brief but incomplete history of the Biệt Động gives the reader rudimentary information with which to understand the general context in which the revolutionary commandos operated. The eight interviews that follow with former Biệt Động members manage to effectively retrace those actors’ trajectories, the reasons for their engagements with the revolutionary side, as well as appreciable details that reflect the realities of conducting that kind of fieldwork in Vietnam. A historian might notice some key details like the diversity of geographical origins with the sample of interviewees and their similar social conditions, especially when they settled in Saigon. Despite the lack of information on the editing and translation processes for the publication of these interviews in English, it represents a precious collection of primary sources for a historian specializing on these questions. Vietnamese readers might also be bemused by some of the transcript materials in the second part of the book, which could have been reviewed more thoroughly.
Yet the clear target of this book is not the professional historian. Instead, Southern Voices seems to be more clearly addressed to readers already sufficiently knowledgeable about the Vietnam War’s classic historiography but who are looking for more firsthand accounts on the Vietnamese Communist side, and in particular those who operated clandestinely within enemy-controlled territory. In the current historiographical environment, the title itself serves as a reminder of the civil war nature of the conflict in which geographical origin did not shape political affiliations. In other words, the Southerners were not all anticommunist or following the Republic of Vietnam, and many of them rallied under the revolutionary banner. In that regard, Southern Voices gives the reader a humane look into those Communist Party members. Far from the stereotypical image of the emotionless, interchangeable, and obtuse Communist cadre, the interviews show individuals in their complexity: able to resort to deadly, and sometimes blind, violence to accomplish their missions but also subjected to fear, pain, and homesickness, and driven by a desperate hope to liberate their country from what they saw as a foreign invader.
Dedrick’s Southern Voices remains an honest nonacademic contribution to the Vietnam War’s history, and will hopefully open the way for more contributions of this sort. It seems to fulfill the objective it set for itself in both format and content: to be a bridge between a Western audience and some of the Vietnamese experiences of the war on the revolutionary side.
Lê Antoine
Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE)/INALCO, Paris