Rough Guide to Vietnam - Jan Dodd [372]
The environmental impact was perhaps greatest on the mangrove forests, which are particularly susceptible to defoliants. Spraying destroyed about a half of all Vietnam’s mangrove swamps and forests, and since they don’t regenerate naturally, they have to be replanted by hand, a slow operation with a low success rate. The herbicides also had a severe impact on soldiers, both Vietnamese and American, and villagers who were caught in the spraying or absorbed dioxins from the food chain and from drinking water. Children and the elderly were the worst affected: some died immediately from the poisons, while others suffered respiratory diseases, skin rashes and other ailments. Soon it became apparent that the dioxins were also causing abnormally high levels of miscarriage, birth defects, neurological disease and cancers. Surveys suggest that over three million Vietnamese may be affected, many of whom now receive a tiny monthly allowance from the government.
For years, doctors in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tu Do Hospital, supported by international experts, have been trying to convince the American government of the link between the use of defoliants and these medical conditions, in the hope of claiming compensation for the victims. In 2004, a group of Vietnamese took their case to a New York court, claiming compensation from 37 American chemical companies on behalf of all victims. The case was dismissed in March 2005 on the grounds that the use of defoliants was not prohibited under international law at the time.
For their part, American war veterans who were exposed to dioxins, many of whom have children with serious birth defects, have also been seeking reparations. In 1984, a group of ex-servicemen won a landmark out-of-court settlement from the manufacturers; though the government refused to accept culpability, they were later forced to reimburse the chemical company following legal proceedings.
Apart from using herbicides, American and South Vietnamese troops cut down swathes of forest land with specially adapted bulldozers, called Rome Ploughs. These vehicles were capable of slicing through a three-metre-thick tree trunk, and were used to clear roadsides and riverbanks against ambushes, or to remove vestiges of undergrowth and trees left after the spraying. Finally, there were the bombs themselves: an estimated thirteen million tonnes of explosives were dropped during the course of the war, leaving a staggering 25 million bomb craters, the vast majority in the South. In addition to their general destructive power, explosions compact the soil to the point where nothing will grow, and napalm bombs sparked off forest fires. The worst single incident occurred in 1968 when U Minh forest, at the southern tip of Vietnam, burned for seven weeks; 85 percent of its trees were destroyed.
Since the war, Vietnamese environmentalists led by Professor Vo Quy, founder of the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Studies at Hanoi University, have instigated reforestation programmes, slowly coaxing life back into even the worst-affected regions. This has involved pioneering work in regenerating tropical forest, planting native species under a protective umbrella of acacia and eucalyptus.
A symbolically significant success of local environmentalists has been the return of the Sarus crane to the Mekong Delta (See "Cao Lanh and around"), near the Cambodian border. The crane, a stately bird with an elaborate courtship dance, abandoned its nesting grounds when the Americans drained the wetlands and dropped herbicides and then napalm in their attempts to rout Viet Cong soldiers from the marshes. After the war thousands of landless farmers were settled in the area, but the acid soils proved difficult