Review by Choice Review
A decade after the US war in Vietnam ended, a thriving trade in books on the war flourishes. Although the majority of these works address the American wartime experience and the reasons for the US defeat, Wiesner's book seeks to assess the impact of the war on dislocated Vietnamese civilians. Such a humanitarian concern is a welcome contribution to the field. Because the policies that created wartime refugees--e.g., the strategic hamlet program and American combat presence--were so central to the failed war effort, any account of the refugee phenomenon quickly joins an often emotional debate about the politics of the war as a whole. In this regard, the author's reluctance to consider broader political issues tends to weaken the context in which she locates her refugee analysis. Unaddressed, for example, is the degree to which the nature of the governments in South Vietnam, allied with the US, may have produced few alternatives to the cumulative antipersonnel tactics the author correctly condemns. Chapters on civilian relocation in Vietnam north of the 17th parallel are unfortunately diminished by overt anti-Communist rhetoric, which unavoidably returns the reader to an explicitly political climate. Nonetheless, Weisner's account serves to remind its readership that the Vietnam War was lost, first and foremost, in the daily lives of Vietnamese civilians, not in the foibles of the American military. College, university, and public libraries. -H. R. Chauncey, Georgetown University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
