Fire in the American Lake: Toward a Regional Turn in Vietnam War Studies

Most Americans and many non-Americans know it as the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese refer to it as the American War, the concluding phase in their thirty-year war of resistance. And some historians prefer to label it the Second Indochina War, both to distinguish it from the French struggle to reestablish empire after World War II and to acknowledge the central place of Laos and Cambodia in the conflict. But the war waged in those countries during the 1960s and early 1970s was also connected to the broader Asia Pacific region. We hold that this regional context is central to any