Published on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war in Vietnam, this book brings to life the experiences and memories of South Vietnamese soldiers—the forgotten combatants of this controversial conflict.
List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Generations of Soldiers 2. In the Field 3. Army Doctors 4. Military Women 5. Friendship and Sacrifice 6. Aftermaths 7. Recognition of Service 8. Children of Veterans Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen is Professor of History at Monash University, Australia, and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA). She is the author of four books including 2010 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Memory is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (2009) and South Vietnamese Soldiers: Memories of the Vietnam War and After (2016).
Nguyen's remarkable achievement is her ability to allow the
veterans to speak for themselves in this groundbreaking study from
that tragic conflict. Summing Up: Essential. All
levels/libraries.
*Choice*
[An] outstanding book. . . . The South Vietnamese military—which
lost a quarter of a million men killed in action and nearly one
million seriously wounded—has largely been ignored, forgotten or
dismissed as irelevant. This excellent and much-needed book,
however, gives voices to those unknown soldiers of the Vietnam War,
and constitutes an important and necessary addition to the
burgeoning scholarship of the war.
*Vietnam Magazine*
Nguyen's book is a welcome and important contribution to the study
of the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese state and society, and the
post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora. It is also a fine example of the use
of personal testimony to explore the complex and ongoing interplay
between history and memory.
*Australian Historical Studies*
Nguyen's book breaks ground with its broader societal focus,
especially in its inclusion of the children of ARVN veterans, who
for the most part do not reside in Vietnam…It is important not only
for scholars of the war, but also for the veterans and their
children and grandchildren who have long been robbed of the chance
to commemorate the lives and struggles of their parents and
grandparents.
*Journal of Southeast Asian Studies*
This book does what oral history enables one to do: it adds to the
historical record the experiences and perspectives of groups of
people who might otherwise have been hidden from history. . . .
South Vietnamese Soldiers thus provides new and valuable first-hand
accounts by South Vietnamese soldiers about their service during
the war and their lives in its aftermath.
*Oral History Review*
These oral narratives of South Vietnamese veterans offer one of the
first resources of the previously neglected South Vietnamese
perspective. Moreover, Nguyen's work is permutated with memories of
childhood in the 'country from before', focusing on much more than
just the military struggle of Saigon. This impressive study would
therefore be a good place to start further research on individual
South Vietnamese military experiences from the First Republic
(1955–63), the Interregnum (1963–7) and the Second Republic
(1967–75).
*Journal of Contemporary History*
There is much to commend about this well researched book. It offers
a rich and at times heart-wrenching reconstruction of the
experiences of combatants whose efforts have been written out of
national history by an authoritarian regime and are rarely
acknowledged. . . . This book is a valuable addition to the
historiography of the Vietnam War.
*History Australia*
A deeply profound work of both historical and current political
significance. Nguyen's combination of oral and textual historical
research, and her accessible delivery make this text a highly
important work for advanced undergraduate students, graduate
students and those more broadly interested in issues within
Vietnamese history, colonial history, refugee studies, gendered
histories and the politics of remembrance.
*Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific*
Nguyen uses oral histories to reveal a key facet of the Vietnam War
in a way that challenges U.S.-centric narratives. . . . This work
certainly helps to fill a gaping hole in the Vietnam War's
historiography while better balancing recognition of who
fought.
*Journal of Military History*
Nathalie Nguyen memorializes [South Vietnamese soldiers] stories in
her astounding and remarkable book . . . a rare collection of the
narratives of RVNAF veterans whose stories have mostly been
shrouded behind a cloak of silence. . . . The most notable segment
of the book are the oral histories of women who served in the
Women's Armed Forces Corps (WAFC)—narratives that cannot be found
anywhere else.
*diaCRITICS: Art & Culture of the Vietnamese & SE Asian
Diaspora*
Nguyen provides a strong oral history in which those who were
associated with the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF)
discuss in their own words their experiences during the war and its
aftermath. . . . This work is strongly recommended.
*Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement*
Overall, Nguyen's book is a welcome addition to the literature on
the Vietnam War that achieves its aim of writing the personal
stories of South Vietnamese soldiers into the military history of
the conflict.
*New Mandala: New Perspectives on Southeast Asia*
South Vietnamese Soldiers, by Monash University academic Nathalie
Huynh Chau Nguyen, is . . . an unusual and welcome addition to the
burgeoning literature on the war. The South Vietnamese soldiers in
this book, and the hundreds of thousands whom they represent, were
people not puppets, who fought for a country and a set of ideals in
which they believed.
*The Strategist (Australian Strategic Policy Institute)*
As two distinguished historians, Peter Edwards and Jeffrey Grey,
have separately noted this book recovers a dimension of the Vietnam
War missing from the massive literature on the War: It provides the
remembered perspective, albeit after 40 or more years and across a
chasm of suffering and exile, of those who fought for the losing
side.
*Australian Institute of International Affairs*
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