THE WAR IN INDOCHINA - WHEN THE LANDSCAPE IS THE ENEMY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP80-01601R000300350027-5
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 13, 2000
• Sequence Number: 27
• Publication Date: August 7, 1972
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

A stand of mangroves destroyed by herbicide: `Rerncniber,'only we can prevent forests'
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When the Landscape Is the
0 rice again, U.S. policy in Vietnam was
on public trial. And once again, an
odd assortment of public figures-
U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim,
World Council of Churches head Dr.
Eugene Carson Blake and actress Jane
Fonda-were hurling the charges. The
U.S., they claimed, was bombing North
Vietnam's elaborate system of dams and
dikes and thus threatening to cause dis-
astrous flooding in the rainy months
ahead. Gradually, the critics began to
find an audience, and last week, obvious-
ly feeling the heat of world opinion, the
Nixon Administration moved to counter
the attacks. Calling Waldheim and simi-
lar critics "well-intentioned [but] naive,"
the President himself coolly told a news
conference: "If it were the policy of the
United States to bomb the dikes, we
could take them out ... in a week." Then,
to document Mr. Nixon's defense, State
Department officials released an intelli-
gence report 'concluding that "stray" U.S.
bombs had inflicted only minor damage
Ai North Vietnam's dikes,
did not release the intelligence pictures,
it gave some newsmen a peek. "Of the
12 locations where damage has occurred
[to the dikes]," said the report, "10 are
close to identified [military] targets." In
addition, the report charged that the
North Vietnamese were making no seri-
ous effort to repair the damage, presum-
ably because they want to use the "evi-
dence" for propaganda purposes.
It seemed unlikely, however, that the
Administration's own propaganda cam-
paign would change many minds one
way or the other. For, in a sense, the
controversy over the bombing of the
dikes has become a symbol of a far larger
issue-the intense debate over the way
the U.S. has waged war in Indochina as
a whole. In Vietnam, on a scale unprec-
edented in the history of warfare, the
landscape itself has become an enemy
subjected to systematic destruction. In
order to get' at the elusive Communists,
the U.S. has ravaged jungles with mil-
lions of tons of bombs and shells, sprayed
thousands of acres of farmlands and
if it had been torn by an angry giant."
But how serious and long-lasting is the
impact of a decade of ecological warfare
likely to be? In the eyes of inany scien-
tists, the U.S. has been guilty of nothing
less than ecocide-that is, the intentional
destruction of a functioning, life-support-
ing environment. Last week, that charge
appeared to strike a responsive chord on
Capitol Hill when the Senate voted to
outlaw two of the more exotic ecological,
weapons: firestorms and rain making.
Moral Question: To other equally rep-
utable scientists, however, the damage
appears far too limited to warrant the
term ecocide. In fact, not enough field
studies have been made to support either
view and, so far, much of the specula-
tion on both sides seems inextricably
.bound up with the larger moral question
of the legitimacy of U.S. entry into the
war in the first place. Yet whatever the
ultimate judgment on that, one thing
seems certain: the long American involve-
ment has literally changed the face of
Indochina.
The report-an eight-page assessment forests with deadly herbicides and sent By far the most widely used weapons
compiled largely by the Central Intelli- teams of giant bulldozers to cut huge in the U.S. arsenal of ecological warfare
gence Agency-was based ort recent re- swaths through the jungles. Today, from (see page 26) have been herbicides, or
connaissance photos of North Vietnam's the skies over some parts of Vietnam, the defoliants. Designed to remove the thick
entire 1.1 1 Ve iliRel e 200ti /0x44 ,,RDPMG41601iR 10030035O02il-5 uncover ene-
dike system, And although Washington tary observer put it: "The land looks as my troop movements, the defoliants-la-
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U.S. bomb craters disfigure Vietnam farmland: 'The land looks as if it had been torn by an angry giant'
beled according to the color on their Vietnamese territory. To provide instant attempted-with only limited success-to
containers as "Agents Orange," "Blue" helicopter landing zones, the Air Force increase rainfall over the Ho Chi Minh
and "White"-were first used as far back has dropped so-called "Daisy Cutter" or Trail in order to hinder the movement of
as 1961. By the time mounting pressure "Cheeseburger" bombs. Detonated a few enemy supplies.
from scientists forced the Nixon Admin- feet above the ground, the bombs leave Oddly, in fact, these arcane ecologi-
islration to abandon the program (code- no crater but level an area the size of a cal weapons proved less 'dam igintr than
named operation "Ranch Iland") in 1970, football field. For bigger jobs, the U.S. more conventional types, such as U.S. pilots had sprayed almost one-tenth turned to the 32-ton Rome Plow bull- nary bombs and shells. According to two
of South Vietnam's cropland and nearly, dozers. Sometimes operating twenty longtime students of Vietnam's ecology,
one-third of the country's total forest abreast, these monsters . scraped away Profs. Arthur II. Westing and L.\V.
acreage. The unofficial motto of the pi- some 800,000 acres of land (roughly the Pfeiffer, the U.S. has gouged more than
lots who conducted "Ranch Hand": "Re- area of Rhode Island) before retiring 21' million bomb craters-each roughly
member, only we can prevent forests." early this year. As they ripped through 30 feet in diameter and more than 5 feet
To a considerable degree, they made the landscape, they piled precious top- deep-into the South Vietnamese land-
good on their boasts. Two years ago, soil in heaps-leaving it to wash away scape over the past decade. Like a giant
Harvard Prof. Matthew S. Meselson and with the next rain. Occasionally, more- pox, the craters cover some 345,000
a team of researchers under the auspices over, the tractor operators exhibited a acres and have displaced a total of more
of the American Association for the Ad- rather cavalier attitude toward the land. than 3 billion cubic yards of earth. In the
vancement of Science found that half of In Binh Long Province, some gouged a Mekong Delta, says Pfeiffer, where the
South Vietnam's mangrove forests-or mile-long image of the First Infantry water table is less than 5 feet below
roughly 540 square miles-had been "ut- Division's "Big Red One" insignia into ground level, the craters fill quickly with
terly destroyed" by herbicides and the earth. water, and since there are no predatory
showed no signs of recovery. But the Exotic: Another ecological weapon fish in the craters to eat larvae, the
damage to the nation's hardwood for- turned out to be an expensive failure. ponds soon become vast breeding
ests has been somewhat less dramatic. After years of testing, the U.S. military- grounds for malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
Sprayed into the dense triple canopy with the help of experts detached from But that is not the only problem
jungle, Agent Orange usually dissipated the U.S. Forest Service-attempted in caused by the massive outpouring of
in the tree tops, and generally such areas 1966 and 1967 to ignite huge firestorms heavy ordnance. By the Pentagon's own
have regenerated quickly. Often, how- to clear parts of the South Vietnamese estimate, 1 to 2 per cent of all U.S.
ever, the, removal of the upper canopy jungle. These missions, nicknamed "Pink bombs and shells are duds, which means
has caused subtle changes at ground Rose" and "Sherwood Forest," failed be- that after years of bombing, some areas
level, allowing bamboo and other %vorth- cause the jungle was simply too moist to of the countryside have become virtual
'less but hardy jungle weeds to invade burn. "It produced a lot of smoke and minefields of unexploded devices. Worse
time rich forests. not a whole heck of a lot of fire at all," yet, shrapnel has lodged in countless
In addition to the massive defoliation recalled one Pentagon official recently. trees, promoting fungal rot and making
campaign, the U.S, military also relied Also in the realm of exotic weaponry, the timbering extremely difficult. And since
on pure explosive power to clear South U.S. has reportedly seeded clouds and heavy bombs tend to compact the earth
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rather than heaving it out of the holes
they create, filling the -craters will be no
simple task. In some cases, moreover, the
violent concussions have changed the
very composition of the soil. "We know'
that the bomb craters, the defoliants
and chemical influences of the war have
had effects," says A. Van Der Sluijs, a
UNESCO geologist who is advising the
South Vietnamese . Government on eco-
logical problems. "But the soil is a living
world. It's a whole cycle, and when just
one element is upset, it interrupts a
whole chain of processes and living
things which depend on it."
Some scientists contend that the U.S.
campaign of deliberate destruction has
'inflicted permanent ecological damage.
As evidence, they point to some World
War I battlefields in France that have
yet tp recover from that conflict.* Other
scientists, however, do not think the situ-
ation is quite that bad. In the first place,
they cite the astonishing paucity of rig-
orous scientific study of the impact of
U.S. weaponry on Vietnam's ecology.
While a component of Agent Orange has
been shown to cause birth defects in
*In the cataclysmic trench warfare at Verdun,
more than 39,000 wooded acres were almost totally
devastated. And although French forestry officials
long ago launched a massive reclamation project, the
land still bears the scars of war. Unexploded shells
remain buried in the earth, and pine trees planted in
the 1920s have grown uncommonly slowly and are
malformed and unusually susceptible to disease. Says
one official: "It will take at least another hundred
years before all the World War I damage has been
repaired and we have a normal forest again."
laboratory animals, for example, there
have been no studies linking the herbi-
cide with any human ailment. What's
more, some observers say that such men
as Westing and Pfeiffer simply do not
have enough data to justify their pessi-
mistic projections. Administration scien-
tists, in particular, point out with pride
that malaria rates in South Vietnam ac-
tually declined last year and that the ex-
tensive Rome plowing has paradoxically
contributed to an increase in South Viet-
nam's available crop land.
'Lunarized': Many of the Administra-
tion's arguments sound self-serving. But
many people, both in and out of govern-
ment, take issue with the pessimists-
particularly on the extent of the damage.
To be sure, certain areas such as Quang
Tri, Pleiku and Kontum provinces and
the so-called Iron Triangle have taken
a vicious battering and the local eco-
systems have surely suffered serious
damage. But South Vietnam is by no
means the parched, "lunarized" country
some war critics depict. Even along the
I-io Chi Minh Trail, which has been
bombed almost daily for years, there
was enough jungle vegetation left to
cover the movement of a staggering
number of Communist tanks and trucks
before this spring's enemy offensive.
"Hard as it is to credit, the countryside of
Vietnam is not, a desert," wrote Edmund
Stillman, a harsh critic of the military
conduct of the war, after a recent visit
to Indochina. "The ceo-system is sur-
prisingly hard to destroy."
At the same time, many people con-
tend that the devastation in Vietnam is
no worse than that wreaked upon Dres-
den or Tokyo during World War 11. And
in terms of pure physical damage, their
point seems well-taken. But these cities,
say the critics, are manmade cco-systems,
which are relatively easy to rebuild. The
Vietnamese countryside, on the other
hand, is a delicate natural system-once
disrupted, it may never fully recover.
Ultimately, however, perhaps the most
serious and long-lasting effect of the U.S.
war against the land in Vietnam has been
the expulsion of the people from it. Al-
though the land has always been the cor-
nerstone of Vietnamese life, the fury of
war has forced millions of peasants to
abandon their rural heritage and to move
into the nation's squalid cities. Social sci-
entists say these people will never be the
same, and therein may lie the ultimate
tragedy of the war and the apogee of
ecocide. The damaged trees may grow
back, but Vietnam's centuries-old culture
has suffered permanent damage, For
with many areas still seeded with booby
traps and mines, with farms and forests
cratered and stripped and with the ad-
diction to urban living now established,
it seems certain that many of Vietnam's,,
onetime countryfolk will never return to
enjoy and use the land they were once
so much a part of.
Weapons That Changed the Face of Vietnam
Fire Bombing
PROJECTS "SHERWOOD FOREST"
AND "PINK ROSE"
Using World War II magnesium incendiary
bombs, the U.S. has tried to burn large
sections of damp rain forests
-unsuccessfully
Rain Making
By dropping silver iodide crystals above Vietnam,
the U.S. has attempted to make it rain on the flow of troops
and materiel from North Vietnam into the south
Defoliation
AGENTS "BLUE," "ORANGE"
AND "WHITE"
Named for the color codes on their ship-
ping drums, these herbicides have denuded
"DAISY CUTTER" AND "CHEESEBURGER" 6 million acres of trees and crops-an
ound concussion bomb creates area the size of the State of Massachusetts
A 15
000
,
p
helicopter landing zones by scything
everything that grows in a 3-acre area
Ground Stripping
800,000 acres of forests to deny coverage
to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops
ROME PLOWS