For decades, scholars have depicted the Vietnam War either as a war of Vietnamese national liberation or as an episode in the Global Cold War. In this presentation, historian Edward Miller examines a third interpretation: the Vietnam War as a civil war among Vietnamese. By drawing on testimony contained in letters, interviews, and archival sources, he explores Vietnamese experiences of civil warfare in one part of Vietnam: the Mekong Delta province of Bến Tre. This evidence shows that the war in Bến Tre began as a civil war. It also demonstrates that interplay among civil warfare, violence, and sovereignty deeply shaped the origins and evolution of the conflict in the delta during the late 1950s and early 1960s.