By referring to the conflict as the “American War,” we are adopting the terminology most commonly used in Vietnam, Chien tranh chong My. The war is sometimes referred to in Vietnam as the “Resistance War against America,” Khang chien chong My, but this is often shortened simply to the American War. Outside of Vietnam, people usually refer to the conflict as the “Vietnam War.” Of course, it would not make sense for the Vietnamese to refer to the Vietnam War. Despite the persistent use in the West of the word “Vietnam” as a stand-in for the conflict itself, Vietnam is, first and foremost, a country, not a war.
Outside of Vietnam, the conflict is also sometimes referred to as the Second Indochina War. The First Indochina War was Vietnam’s earlier struggle for independence from French colonial rule, which lasted from 1945 to 1954. At the end of that conflict, the Geneva Accords split newly independent Vietnam at the 17th parallel into North and South. According to the agreement, the split was meant to be temporary, and the country would be reunified for national elections in 1956. That never happened. Instead, the United States began promoting South Vietnam—known also as the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) or the Government of Vietnam (GVN)—as a legitimate country, a “democratic” alternative to Ho Chi Minh’s northern communist government based in the capital city of Hanoi. By 1960, forces opposed to the government of South Vietnam had united under the Hanoi-supported National Liberation Front (NLF), known colloquially and often derisively as the Viet Cong.
By 1965, the conflict had become an all-out war, with the United States eventually committing hundreds of thousands of troops to fight alongside the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to preserve the newly formed country of South Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the NLF fighting to expel the Americans and reunite the country under a single, communist government. In 1973, with American loss of life in the conflict totaling nearly 60,000 and no easy end to the fighting in sight, the United States withdrew militarily from Vietnam and began cutting financial and military aid to the South. The Republic of Vietnam collapsed two years later, in 1975, as communist forces reunified the country by taking control of the southern cities, including Saigon, which they renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
For Vietnam, the impact of the war was devastating. According to the best available estimates, 3 million Vietnamese died in the conflict, roughly 7 percent of the country’s total population at the time; 2 million of those killed were civilians. Over 300,000 Vietnamese soldiers were still missing when the war ended, and hundreds of thousands of farmers and their families were displaced from their homes in the rural countryside. American bombs had left sections of North Vietnam in ruins, and U.S.-manufactured chemical weapons had, quite literally, poisoned the soil and environment across many southern provinces.
The two decades immediately following the end of the war were extremely difficult for Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. Harsh U.S. trade sanctions—intended, some historians argue, to “punish” communist Vietnam for having won the war—kept the country staggeringly poor through the mid-1990s. The communists imprisoned thousands of people, mostly southerners who had been involved with the Americans or the former South Vietnamese government, in austere rural “reeducation” camps where they were held sometimes for upward of ten years. During this period, millions of Vietnamese refugees—again, mostly southerners, many of whom had worked for the defeated regime—fled the country as “boat people.” Those who survived the dangerous journey would go on to build vibrant diasporic communities in places like Southern California, Canada, Australia, and France.
The twenty stories collected in this anthology all address aspects of this conflict that consumed Vietnam for much of the latter half of the twentieth century: the effects of exposure to Agent Orange, one of the most toxic chemical weapons used by the United States, on one peasant farmer and his family; the bond between a North Vietnamese soldier and his fiercely loyal pet dog; the use of psychics in the continuing search for the bodies of missing soldiers; the lingering effects of conscription on romantic and family relationships in the countryside; the treatment of veterans in an economically depressed postwar society. The stories presented in this volume range from the intensely personal and specific to narratives that deal with larger national trends of remembrance, trauma, and healing.
In Vietnam, these stories are some of the most frequently anthologized and popular pieces of short fiction about the war. Their original publication dates cover a wide range, from 1967 to 2014, offering readers the opportunity to explore how Vietnamese narratives of the war have (or in some cases, have not) changed through the decades. Some of these stories originally appeared in mainstream Vietnamese newspapers and literary magazines like Thanh Nien (The Youth Daily), Nhan Dan (The People’s Daily), and Van Nghe Quan Doi (Military Literature Magazine), and others were published in popular anthologies such as Tuyen truyen ngan doat giai cao: 30 nam doi moi, 1986–2016 (Selected Award-Winning Short Stories: 30 Years of Reforms, 1986–2016) and Truyen ngan hay ve khang chien chong My (Best Short Stories About the American War). Many are frequently taught and critically discussed in Vietnam, and several are considered canonical. Yet none of these stories, despite being so popular and widely read in Vietnam, has ever appeared before in English. Other Moons, therefore, represents a unique opportunity for American audiences to learn about how the Vietnamese people continue to think about, commemorate, and generally process the conflict that consumed their country for so many years.
Many of these stories provide a firsthand glimpse of the experiences of Vietnamese soldiers both during
