Edward Miller: The Vietnam War as a Civil War

How did the Vietnam War begin?  For decades, the rural insurgency that began in South Vietnam around 1960 has been variously depicted as a spontaneous popular rebellion or as an insurrection fomented by and directed from North Vietnam.  More recently, some scholars have offered more nuanced readings of the roles and motives of the communist party cadres and ordinary people who joined the insurgency in its early days.  But the actual process by which the insurgents ignited and rapidly spread their rebellion across wide swaths of the countryside remains obscure.

This presentation examines a key episode from the early days of the insurgency: the “concerted uprising” that began in January 1960 in Ben Tre province in the Mekong Delta.  While Vietnamese communist historians have long celebrated this event as marking the start of the insurgency in Ben Tre, I investigate how both the “political struggle” and “armed struggle” dimensions of the uprising emerged out of pre-existing patterns of violence in the province.  I argue that the uprising is best understood as the moment of emergence (or re-emergence) of civil war in South Vietnam—an aspect of Vietnam War history that remains surprisingly understudied.