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6. American War
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197 T he arrival of American troops in Vietnam in 1965 inaugurated one of the bloodiest engagements of the Cold War; it also triggered a surge of writing on the conflict that has yet to abate. As a literary genre represented in many languages, the events of the war form the backdrop in many memoirs, novels, and films in which authors and protagonists strive to work out the ethical dilemmas associated with American intervention. As Colonel Kurtz explains in the final scenes of the movie Apocalypse Now, many attempt to reconcile the personal and collective horrors of this brutal engagement in which more than four million Vietnamese, Laotians, Khmers, Americans, Koreans, Australians, and others died in just eight years. Besides the literary realm, historiography of the war has likewise grown steadily, from military and diplomatic works to social and cultural histories. Yet despite all of this artistic and scholarly work, few works have yet to consider the role of environments—historic, built, or natural— 6 American War The bombs in this area were uncountable because this was the central village in the district, a liberation base area. The Americans bombed everywhere, and if they had any bombs left in the day, they dropped them here. At night, the fighters from Trà Nóc Air Base came shooting through the night. We couldn’t sleep . . . many people died then . . . just a few survived. Just imagine you step everywhere and see all the bomb craters and bullet casings. Cluster bombs were used the most here; chemical poisons were also dropped many times, but we couldn’t dredge the canals to drain them. We could only clear a little bit of silt and debris in the main waterways to make passage for the movement of our soldiers. It would take four or five people with big branches to push the water hyacinth out of the way so that they could pass.—Ông Rỡ1 198 amer ic an war in shaping the events of the conflict. Nor do very many postwar studies consider lasting effects of the conflict on Vietnamese places except for some studies on bombing, unexploded ordnance, and sites damaged by chemical defoliants.2 The figurative quagmires identified in much of the war literature are the sticky moral, political, and diplomatic situations that enveloped people at all levels, while little attention is paid to how places such as the Mekong Delta also shaped policy and played into the successes and failures of war campaigns. The rapid growth of an American military and civilian infrastructure in the 1960s altered Vietnam’s urban and rural landscapes in different ways that reflected evolving concerns over movement, visibility, and each place’s perceived importance to the war. As a densely occupied, agricultural region far from the demilitarized zone, the delta environment largely constrained American military operations to the deep waters of the main rivers and the wide streets and airport tarmacs of larger towns. Until the Tết Offensive in January 1968, most Americans and other foreigners working in the Mekong Delta lived in relatively small numbers with a relatively small presence of troops living for the most part on floating base ships. Americans served as advisers to Vietnamese units and provincial governments, as pilots of helicopters and jets providing air support and surveillance, and as volunteers and consultants working in towns (fig. 29). By 1965, the National Liberation Front (NLF), or “Việt Cộng” (VC), had reoccupied most of the pre-1954 liberated zones (đất giải phong) and expanded into some new areas, while American advisers set up quarters inside South Vietnamese bases and offices. The war in the delta was a counterinsurgency war, defined less by major combat operations than by a host of programs aimed to “pacify” the population through refugee settlement, psychological operations, agricultural mechanization, police surveillance, and small-unit patrols into contested areas. The 1968 Tết Offensive caused a shift in American military planning with a series of highly destructive campaigns launched against the NLF base areas, but the boundaries between government and NLF territories did not move much until American ground forces left in 1973. What Vietnamese typically call the American War—short for the War of Resistance against America to Save the Nation (Kháng Chiến Chống Mỹ Cứu Nước)—differed the most from past conflicts in the delta with respect to the new technologies it introduced. Americans brought a spectacular array of jet aircraft, helicopters, jeeps, patrol boats, radar, microwave...