South Vietnam.
Twenty years.

Whether the Republic of Vietnam was a legitimate sovereign state is a question that historians, jurists and Vietnamese themselves have argued about for sixty years and still argue about. The case for sovereignty: it had a written constitution; it held elections (although these were notoriously irregular under Diệm and only modestly cleaner under his successors); it was a member of the United Nations system as a non-member observer; it was diplomatically recognised by some seventy states; it had functioning institutions of government for twenty years; it maintained a national currency, a national army, a national broadcaster, a national curriculum. The case against: it was a creation of the Geneva Accords as a temporary administrative zone rather than a sovereign state; the 1956 unifying election would, on most assessments, have produced a Communist-led unified Vietnam; the United States' military and financial support was decisive in its survival from 1965 to 1973; its government was substantially captured by military and religious factions that did not, by any plausible standard, represent the population at large.

The Lost Lands position is that the Republic of Vietnam was a state for the purposes of this library — it was internationally recognised, it had functioning sovereignty over a defined territory and population, and its existence as a distinct political entity for twenty years is too consequential a fact to leave out. Whether it should have existed at all is a separate and more difficult question, and the volume tries to be honest about how that question looked in 1955, 1963, 1968 and 1975.

The narrative covers the Geneva partition, the Diệm dictatorship, the Buddhist crisis and the 1963 coup, the American escalation through 1965, Tet 1968, Vietnamisation, the Paris Accords of 1973, and the collapse of April 1975. Then we go to the country itself — Ho Chi Minh City (still Saigon to most older inhabitants), Huế, Đà Nẵng, the DMZ at the seventeenth parallel, Khe Sanh, the Cu Chi tunnels — and walk through what is left of the war and the country.