This book opens with the events of April 30, 1975. Nobody can secure a path to the future without a truthful understanding of the past, especially a past, which we played a part in and were collectively responsible for. It is what the Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Duy beautifully summarizes in his two lines: “ In every war, whichever side wins, after all / It’s the people who take the fall.” And that’s how the two-volume book was titled. Only one, though, kept haunting me since the beginning. During that time a great many ideas for the title of the book came to mind.

I began my research for this book in the late 1980s and spent three years and four months – between August 2009 and December 2012 – completing the draft. The war that ended on Apbrought one side to power. Have you subscribed to diaCRITICS yet? Subscribe and win prizes! Read more details. In this three-part series, diaCRITICS provides three different views on the significance of The Winning Side, by the author himself, by Nguyễn Vạn Phú, managing editor of the Saigon Times, and Long Le, Director of International Initiatives for Global Studies at the University of Houston.

A second volume, Quyền Bính (The Power ) awaits publication. Only the first of two volumes (Giải Phóng , or The Liberation ) has been published. The book recounts postwar life in Viet Nam, including many politically sensitive aspects, such as the discriminatory persecution of ethnic Chinese, the impact of re-education camps, the challenges of daily life for ordinary people, and the wars with China and the Khmer Rouge. Huy Đức is a longtime Vietnamese journalist and army veteran whose groundbreaking book, Bên Thắng Cuộc (The Winning Side), has made quite a splash.

Bên Thắng Cuộc - Quyền Bính by Huy Đức