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The most important changes in Vietnam since 1975 have occurred in the countryside, where over three-quarters of the people live. When the Communists totally abandoned the public land ownership system that had existed for thirty years, the impact was enormous. It has produced mounting social and economic instability and conflicts among the peasantry to an extent few outside Vietnam appreciate. The rural social system is being transformed fundamentally and this traumatic process has created a large and growing number of discontented, marginalized peasants.

All wars profoundly transmute social and human realities, and it is only with this pervasive truth in mind that we can begin to comprehend the whole course of Vietnam’s history, not only over the thirty years of the war but, above all, after it ended in 1975. There is a direct continuity between the war’s overwhelming heritage and the two decades that followed it. We cannot understand the anatomy of the peace unless we fully appreciate the war’s incalculable physical, human, and psychological damage, how its legacies defined the Communist party’s structure and ideology, and left Vietnam destroyed and burdened.

The vast responsibilities for managing the south, with the prodigious problems of reconstructing the nation materially, socially, and psychologically, and repairing the infinite varieties of damage that had been inflicted on the people, now fell entirely upon them. This book begins where my Anatomy of a War ended. DEALING WITH THE PEACE My fundamental assumption is that the thirty-year Vietnam War profoundly defined the peace that followed, and only such a perspective allows one fully to understand its profound legacies—including, above all else, the nation’s expectations and the party’s responsibilities.