Despite the Vietnam war ending nearly 45 years ago it is still a topic of discussion in today’s society; films and books, both fiction and non-fiction, ensure that the lasting effects and impacts of the war are not forgotten. However, the popular media’s coverage on this war, particularly in the Western world, remains considerably one sided, focusing on the American people and veterans and their experiences. For example, two of the biggest films this year related to the Vietnam war: ‘Da 5 Bloods’ and ‘The Trial of the Chicago Seven’, were both primarily about the experiences of American soldiers, civilians or veterans. Whilst the war had a great impact on American society, it can be argued that the Vietnamese people’s stories are equally important, if not more. Unfortunately, the impacts of the war on Vietnamese civilians are often overlooked in Western media because if they were properly acknowledged, it would result in the US government having to wholly acknowledge and atone for its war crimes in the Vietnam war. Undoubtedly, American warfare was responsible for the majority of the devastation and destruction that so many local Vietnamese people experienced during the war and long after, and this article seeks to illuminate the direct effects of the war on both North and South Vietnamese citizens.
When in 1965 US troops arrived in Vietnam, they soon realised that the jungles provided ideal hiding places for the Viet Cong and that rice paddies and rural villages were good sources of food and supplies for them. To eradicate the enemy’s useful sources the U.S. military bombed the South Vietnamese countryside using airplanes and heavy artillery for many years. Although the USA’s allies were the South Vietnamese people, it didn’t stop the US military from using more than 14 million tons of explosives during the war, predominantly the bombing was concentrated on the South Vietnamese countryside - American planes dropped more than twice as many bombs as US forces had used during World War II, all on an area about the size of California. On average the USA used 142 pounds of explosives per acre of land. The facts and figures expose the extent of the destruction caused by America bombing, however, the personal devastation that occurred is often lost in these unfathomable numbers. Tragically, not only did the bombings result to many deaths, but those who managed to survive the annihilation of the farms and villages in the countryside, became homeless refugees (after their families had lived there for generations). Subsequently, many of these people fled to the cities, and ended up living in makeshift refugee camps in Saigon because four million Vietnamese (one-fourth of the total population of the South) were fleeing to the outskirts of cities and towns and moreover, sixty percent of the population lived in urban areas, meaning the cities were not equipped to handle the huge number of refugees. Edward Doyle and Stephen Weiss write in A Collision of Cultures: Americans in Vietnam, 1957–1973 that "There were insufficient housing, sanitation, transportation, social services, and jobs to accommodate the tens of thousands of newcomers who settled in each month,”. With job prospects being as bad as living standards for the refugees, many of them were forced to participate in illegal activities to earn money. An estimated 500,000 South Vietnamese women became prostitutes during the war. Many of these women were poor peasants who had no other way of feeding their families. There was also an active drug trade in Saigon during the war and they were sometimes sold by children on street corners. Many South Vietnamese found these illegal jobs more attractive than a legal one because ultimately a woman who worked as a prostitute could earn more money in a week than her peasant family would usually earn in a year. These people formed a new, privileged urban class which upturned the structure of Saigon society. Suddenly, construction workers and drug dealers made significantly more money than policemen and soldiers in the South Vietnamese army. This created a city of people with distorted morals and values in the city as they began to prioritise jobs that would enable them to purchase luxuries, even if these jobs were illegal or immoral. Many blame American influence for this and there is a reason that in his book ‘Vietnam: A History’ the renowned historian Stanley Karnow commented that ‘The United States, motivated by the loftiest intentions, did indeed rip South Vietnam's social fabric to shreds.” Families were torn apart, children were corrupted, young men were mutilated, the prostitution of women occurred and all this was caused by a country ruined by war and the society would continue to feel its effects for generations.
Unfortunately, the story was no different in North Vietnam. Whilst it didn’t face as much destruction from bombing (the US military still dropped one million tons of bombs on North Vietnam during the war), it experienced illegal American warfare in a different way. Between 1961 and 1971 the US military sprayed a range of herbicides across more than 4.5 million acres of Vietnam to destroy the forest cover and food crops used by enemy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. The most infamous herbicide the USA used was called Agent Orange, it was deadly because it contained dioxin in the form of TCDD, so it had immediate and long-term effects and is universally known to be a carcinogen. In addition, to the environmental devastation, 400,000 people were killed or maimed as a result of exposure to herbicides like Agent Orange. The effects are still evident in the modern world, Vietnam claims half a million children have been born with serious birth defects, while as many 2 million people are suffering from cancer or other illness caused by Agent Orange. In 2004, a group of Vietnamese citizens filed a class-action lawsuit against more than 30 chemical companies, including the same companies that settled with U.S. veterans in 1984 over the same issue. The case was dismissed in 2005 and in a final appeal in 2008 it was rejected again by another US court, understandably this outraged Vietnamese victims. However, the harsh truth is they will never receive reparations from the US government because as Fred A. Wilcox, author of Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, told the Vietnamese news source VN Express International, “The U.S. government refuses to compensate Vietnamese victims of chemical warfare because to do so would mean admitting that the U.S. committed war crimes in Vietnam. This would open the door to lawsuits that would cost the government billions of dollars.”
At the hands of illegal American warfare the lives of both North and South Vietnamese were destroyed and it altered Vietnamese society for generations. The bombings and utilisation of herbicides were only part of a much more upsetting picture; victims of war were raped, beaten, tortured, or maimed, and some of the bodies were found mutilated. This war’s impacts will be felt by the Vietnamese people for decades.
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