By 1953, the communist-led Resistance had been marginalized in much of the Mekong delta. But the cost was high. "Traditional" institutions of the village had, in large swaths of the delta, been destroyed. The Franco-Vietnamese "coalition" had defeated the communist-led Resistance. But who would win the peace? The militia leaders, so skilled in war, were not fluent in the arts of peace. This chapter looks at the endgame of empire, when France was withdrawing from rural areas all over the South, downsizing its military presence, and shifting its support to the State of Vietnam. The end result by 1954, however, was a balkanized southern Vietnam with fragmented sovereignty where militias entrenched themselves in rural fiefdoms. The chapter shows how Ngo Dinh Diem, faced with this divided South, won the battle for post-war control of the South. It pays particular attention to his expulsion to Cambodia of the Cao Dai leader Pham Cong Tac, the co-optation of the Hoa Hao militia leader Tran Van Soai, and the arrest, trial, and execution of the Hao Hao militia leader Ba Cut. The chapter also examines the regional, national, and international legacies of the war.

Chapter Two, ‘The Journey’, takes the men from home to embarkation, as they boarded troopships that brought them to training camps and fighting fronts. The chapter explores the role of distance in the men’s representations of their travels and the impact of being on board a ship. The ship was a contact zone in its own right as the extended period of travel prompted new forms of encounter and the anticipation of ‘arrival’. Examples of ‘bad behaviour’ in port towns, from Cape Town to Colombo, demonstrate how these journeys facilitated openness to encounters and new, often aggressive articulations of identity. Accounts of arriving in England and experiencing how the Mother Country welcomed its colonial troops, particularly those of colour, reveal just how precarious the men felt about their reception and how meaningful this moment was for them in affirming their status within the empire.

In August 1945, almost all southerners in Vietnam opposed the French and supported the Viet Minh. By the end of 1947, however, this coalition was in tatters. Mekong Delta politics fractured along ethnic and political lines. This chapter looks at the "priming" phase of this violence in 1945 and 1946. It distinguishes sharply between the development of a political fracturing among Vietnamese groups, on the one hand, and of a second, less-noticed development: the ethnic split between Vietnamese and Khmer. The chapter looks at the intervention of France, including the French military, from October 1945 onwards, emphasizing their weakness and unpreparednesss. It examines the challenges facing the Viet Minh, including its contentious relations with the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao politico-religious groups. Discusses the common use of violence, including killing, against perceived traitors.

In February 1987, members of a Russian ethnonationalist network calling itself Pamiat’ (Memory), after the title of Chivilikhin’s 1982 novel, rallied to the defense of a war memorial design by the sculptor Viacheslav Klykov. Klykov’s design – one of nearly 400 proposals exhibited in central Moscow as part of the renewed search for a “Victory” complex on Poklonnaia Hill – had incorporated a central monument that closely resembled a Russian Orthodox church. Although Klykov had conspicuously substituted a “Soviet” mother-motherland figure in place of a Christian cross, the Pamiat’ activists keeping vigil around the exhibition hall saw the motif for what it was: an attempt to anchor the Soviet victory in Russian historical continuity.

In late November 1941, as the Battle for Moscow raged, Soviet newspapers heralded a remarkable act of bravery at a place west of the capital called Dubosekovo. According to reports, twenty-eight members of the 316th Rifle Division (later redesignated the 8th Guards “Panfilov” Division) stood their ground against a column of fifty-four German tanks, destroying as many as eighteen in the process. Although all twenty-eight men perished in the fighting, their gallantry had forced the withdrawal of the much larger and better equipped German force. This story, repeated in various iterations throughout the war, proved extremely popular. As the Germans advanced on the city of Stalingrad in the late summer of 1942, for example, one political officer noted in his diary that he was suddenly compelled “to call out to the soldiers of the south: ‘Fight like the twenty-eight! Crush tanks as they were crushed by the Panfilov-Guardsmen outside Moscow.