Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam by David Biggs (review)

This text is both a local history that tells us a lot about Hue and Thua Thien Province, and an original and powerful analysis of military violence and its environmental consequences during the Vietnam War. Beginning with ruins dating back several centuries, the author reflects on Vietnamese landscapes that have been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again by competing armies. He calls attention to ecological disasters during the civil wars in the late eighteenth century, the terreaforming ambitions of French colonialists, and U.S interventions that began in the early 1950s to help France in its fight against the Viet Minh, continued in the first years of the Saigon-based Republic of Vietnam, and accelerated beyond measure after escalation in 1965.

Making innovative use of aerial photographs, Biggs helps readers literally to "see" the coastal flatlands, the gradually ascending foothills, and the Central Highlands in Thua Thien. He superimposes place names and topographical color-coding on pictures that foreground locales such as Hoa My and Nam Dong tactical zones, which served as gateways between hills and mountains and which mattered to military planners just as much as did towns and cities. U.S. forces drew on supply depots and repair facilities outside Vietnam. They constructed huge bases in the Hue region that are best pictured as "round-the-clock military cities," with airfields, paved roads, power plants, and barracks for soldiers and civilians (3). To create better sightlines, they cleared hillsides that customarily provided families with wood and pastureland for animals and served as favored places for ancestral tombs. In the mountains, where the enemy was always close, they stripped away jungle terrain to make room for hamlet-like firebases Bastogne and Birmingham and regularly sprayed the perimeters with defoliants.

Troop reinforcements, equipment, and weaponry originating in the north and coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail could not match offshore deliveries to U.S. forces. But Vietnamese work crews managed to build a network of trails, reinforced bunkers and tunnels, and an eight-inch pipeline supplying diesel fuel and kerosene. In the hills, tiny shacks scattered among bomb craters hinted at an enemy presence, while black smocks worn by guerrillas served as camouflage as they made their way across ground charred by napalm. Hue itself was contested terrain, and in 1966 dissidents staged protests against the RVN and its American allies, and then, during the Tet Offensive, lent support to NLF and northern soldiers. After the Offensive, the U.S. launched a "rapid and unprecedented" military response (158). Conventional bombing intensified (see illustrations on pages 151 and 166), and ecologically destructive technologies were weaponized in the form of Agent Orange, pesticides, diesel fuel for defoliation, and cannisters of tear gas that could flush out combatants hiding in bunkers and tunnels. Drums of napalm strapped together were rolled out of cargo helicopters, then strafed by fighter jets, creating giant fireballs that destroyed people and landscapes below.

This violence did not disable the other side, and with no end in sight, the Americans in January 1972 abruptly pulled out of Thua Thien, taking with them all movable parts worth saving. Overnight, military bastions turned into ghost towns, "littered with industrial wreckage, garbage landfills, and pits of discarded chemicals. Essential systems—high voltage generators, perimeter lighting, air conditioners, water pumps, water treatment plants, telephone switchboards, radios, and signal equipment—disappeared." Local authorities and ARVN commanders, who had assumed they would inherit these military bastions, were stunned (177-178). A few weeks later, they survived the 1972 offensive launched by northern and Front soldiers largely because of the U.S. Air Force, which for the last time was there to provide support. In 1975, another offensive marched down roadways that had been built by American construction crews, took control of Hue, and on March 25 made a point of declaring victory at a beach where French colonialists had landed in 1884 and again in 1947.

Garbage dumps, industrial wreckage, and buried drums filled with...