Southern Voices

With all the emphasis on big unit warfare and the role of North Vietnamese forces that dominates American perspectives on the war, it is easy to forget that the backbone of the revolution in the south—in many ways its secret weapon—was ordinary, lower class individuals like these Biet Dong.

~William Turley, professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University

After the victory of 1975, the vital contributions of southern revolutionary nationalists were systematically marginalized in historical accounts since they stood in the way of simplistic US and RVN narratives of a binary conflict, as well as threatened to weaken the northern-based triumphalist claims of the VCP. This book with rare materials on the Biet Dong will help correct this long-imbalanced historical record.

~Christoph Giebel, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

Through Mike Dedrick's Southern Voices at last we can experience the commitment, rigorous discipline, and breadth of the Southern revolutionaries' resistance.

~Lady Borton, author of Beyond Sorrow

Most Americans know the war in Vietnam only through U.S.-centered narratives. Vietnamese narratives—and especially the stories of everyday people who participated in what they believed to be their country's liberation—have much too often been overlooked. Michael Dedrick's Southern Voices is thus a welcome book. In its pages, readers discover the accounts of Biet Dong soldiers who put their lives on the line to resist the American invasion. It is difficult not to be moved by the hardships and tragedies they endured.

~Scott Laderman, professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth and author of Tours of Vietnam: War, Travel Guides, and Memory