| Summary/Abstract |
The shooting ended forty years ago but American scholars still fight over how to interpret the Vietnam War. Historians, especially, continue to debate the meaning, significance, and experience of the Second Indochina War. Skirmishes in 2011 over a college textbook pitted conventional US-centric narratives emphasising American actors against Vietnam-centric narratives stressing the other side.1 In 2014, critical portrayals of US military conduct in Vietnam stirred old battle lines arraying hawks versus doves, many of whom have one eye trained on ongoing interventions in the Middle East.2 Such polarised debates often reproduce simplistic, binary representations of what was, in fact, a complex Cold War conflict unfolding through a hot civil war. They do so to the neglect of the everyday experience of people who lived through it.
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