March 30, 1971
Page 8505
SILENT VIETNAM
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the United States has paid a heavy price for its involvement in the war in Indochina. Thousands of lives have been lost, priceless resources have been squandered, and public morale has suffered a crushing blow.
Yet the toll which this war has exacted on the countries of South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia has been far more savage, infinitely most costly.
Our obsession with the body count method of measuring the progress of this war has led us to the indiscriminate bombing of the countryside and the wasteful destruction of its people and resources.
The number of people driven from their homes has soared. The number of bodies maimed by bombings and the use of chemical weapons reaches into the many thousands.
And the countryside itself has been stripped of its vegetation and wildlife. The chances are great that the delicate ecological balance has been irreparably upset, and that the social structure built upon this balance has been destroyed.
In the March 6 issue of Look magazine, Orville Schell, codirector of the Bay Area Institute, has provided a detailed examination of the horrors of the "ecocide" which the war has brought to Vietnam. I ask unanimous consent that this article, entitled "Silent Vietnam," be printed in the RECORD at this point.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
SILENT VIETNAM
(By Orville Schell, Jr.)
The gradual dismemberment of Indochinese society has become a fact of life. Learned at first with disbelief and horror, and then integrated into the routines of our everyday existence, the destruction has become a cliche. Even to speak of the "Vietnam problem" or the "Indochina problem" is deceiving because it implies that there remains a real entity that can easily be restored to health with certain reasonable changes. But, like the bodies of men and women mangled by napalm, fragmentation bombs and phosphorous, the land and the peoples of Indochina will not readily recover from the wounds that America has inflicted, even if a peace is achieved.
The war reports speak of particular battles, an accidentally bombed village, a B-52 strike, a defoliated county, the body count and the increasing numbers of refugees. We have understood this conflict more in terms of isolated events rather than as a complex pattern. We have come to assume that the changed structure of a village, the altered chemistry of a jungle or river, the destroyed tissue of a napalmed child or the shattered economy of a nation do not affect each other. We still see the war in Indochina in terms of meaningless categories, of boundaries, programs, operations and invasions, without understanding that Indochina is an organic fabric in which all living things are tied together in innumerable ways.
If we look at all these disparate disasters as part of a whole, however, it begins to become apparent that our actions in Indochina have already gone far in committing what may well be a new kind of crime in the history of warfare – ecocide. Just as genocide is the crime of eliminating one of the earth's peoples, ecocide is the crime of destroying the natural environment in which people live. In the past, armies have often engaged in a "scorched earth" policy. But whereas a scorched-earth strategy killed and burned everything in its path, an ecocidal strategy, which has become possible only through the recent technological transformation of warfare, destroys an environment for an extended period of time.
It is difficult now to recall Indochina before the ecocide began. Over the last few centuries, the countryside had changed little. South Vietnam was an area largely made up of small decentralized villages spread out over the coastal plain and the fertile Mekong River Delta in the South. The village was the essential unit of Vietnamese life. Most people seldom left their village. Fewer left their county or province. Most villages, although simple, gave one a sense of peace and beauty. Many were accessible only by path or canal. Small houses of split bamboo and thatch, many even on stone foundations, were clumped together in an agreeable way so as to allow for both privacy and communality. In spite of poverty and the absence of land reform, the inhabitants had worked out an accommodation with the natural world around them. They planted palm trees and bamboo groves around their houses for shade and shelter. Rice fields surrounded each village. And, of course, not far away, were the ancestral tombs. At his village, a peasant farmer was born, got married, raised his family, grew his rice crops and died. He lived in a simple universe, yet one that gave him dignity.
Now, ten years after the American military began to move into Vietnam, many crucial elements between man and nature have been destroyed. The two principal agents of this destruction have been a saturation bombing unprecedented in warfare, and the massive spraying of herbicides.
From the point of view of the Indochinese peasant, Vietnamization and President Nixon's claims of withdrawal have not meant an end to the destruction, but a clear escalation of the assault on the countryside by American air power, bombing and defoliation. Aerial bombardment has increased, and systematically replaced ground forces as they have withdrawn. Whatever selectivity the military once exercised in picking targets has disappeared With the massive continuous bombing in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, Indochinese society has become our target, and, in turn, our enemy. We are waging a war against an abstraction that has turned out to be a war against the people and the land itself. Gen. William C. Westmoreland's billion-dollar electronic battlefield for automated warfare has arrived. A year and a half ago, he told the Association of the U.S. Army, "I see battlefields on which we can destroy anything we can locate through instant communications and almost instantaneous application of highly lethal firepower. With first-round kill probabilities approaching certainty, and with surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy, the need for large forces to fix the opposition physically will be less important."
Technology and firepower have now allowed America to wage a wider war while reducing its own casualties, and thus hardly notice what it is doing.
With the replacement of General Westmoreland by Gen. Creighton W. Abrams, the much publicized "search and destroy" operations that were the heart and soul of the Westmoreland tenure began quietly to be phased out in favor of "cordon and search" and "reconnaissance in force" operations, which simply meant that large ground operations were phased out and technology substituted. The high U.S. casualties – over 1,500 during an average week – had become too great a political liability at home. There was a pullback on the ground away from the bloody Loc Ninh, Hamburger Hill, Khe Sanh battles, and the Junction City or Cedar Rapids type of military operation. Drug problems and insubordination among U.S. troops rendered such operations worthless. The war moved to the air. Planes that had been flying daily strikes over North Vietnam were diverted, after the bombing halt in October, 1968, to Laos and South Vietnam. B-52's began to be used as tactical weapons on daily runs. Bomb tonnage soared, and US. casualty figures dropped. Mr. Nixon began to speak effusively about withdrawal and of Vietnamization. But the tonnage still has reached amounts that are difficult to comprehend. Le Monde reported last July 29 that 1,387,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Indochina in 1969.
During the first five months of last year, 594,171 tons of bombs were dropped. The total tonnage dropped during the war is now just under six million tons. (The U.S. dropped just over two million tons of bombs during the whole of World War II on Europe and Japan.) This does not even include artillery shells fired (for example, some 5,172,588 tons fired between January 1, 1968, and May 31, 1970). Since then, B-52's have been flying a thousand sorties and dropping up to 2,000 tons of bombs a day. Such figures stagger the imagination; we have dropped almost 20 tons of explosives for every square mile in Vietnam.
The war has shown that United States firepower is almost limitless. Our inability to win has not stemmed from an absence of ordnance but from an absence of targets. In this technological warfare, our lethal firepower has been turned on society itself, like a broad-spectrum antibiotic that makes no distinction between wanted and unwanted organisms. Target bombing and air support for ground operations have given way to saturation bombing. Artillery strikes, once called in on specific targets, have evolved into harassment and interdiction (H&I) fire that is shot around the clock into "freefire zones" (now conveniently called "specified strike zones") from coastal and inland fire bases. Navy guns are now computerized to fire continuously at whole counties for several days running rather than just at isolated targets. Whole villages are incinerated by napalm strikes because of single snipers. Armed helicopters of days gone by have become "gun ships" capable of launching rockets, grenades and machine gun fire. C-47's, now nicknamed "Puff-the-Magic-Dragons," have been armed with multiple "mini-guns" that are capable of laying a withering blaze of fire, 18,000 rounds a minute.
One of the most disastrous, and least noticed, effects of our bombing has been the destruction of the irrigation system in rural Vietnam. The waterworks are one of the most important elements in inter-village life of South Vietnam, the one undertaking that makes cooperation within the village, and even between adjacent villages, absolutely essential. As in all Asian countries, the irrigation system for the rice fields is extremely complicated. Water runs down through scores of paddies on which hundreds of different people and families depend. Disruption at any point of the long chain threatens the survival of everyone further down the line.
More than anything else since the advent of Chinese hydraulic technology hundreds of years ago, the irrigation system made a social fabric out of the patchwork of villages in the Vietnamese countryside. Without the dams, dikes and canals to temper the heavy monsoon rains and assure a supply of water during the long dry months, tillable land, crops, and hence society, could not exist.
Almost without noticing it, the U.S. military have destroyed this system in Vietnam and much of Indochina. As one flies over the countryside, he sees brownish-yellow rivers and streams flowing aimlessly across paddies and eroded fields. Some areas are scorched dry and pitted with craters.
One looks down on mile after mile of uncultivated rice fields pockmarked with millions of large craters filled with water in which malarial mosquitoes have been breeding in epidemic numbers.
Reportedly, 2.5 billion cubic yards of earth have been removed. This is 25 times greater than the Suez Canal excavation. In the coastal areas of I Corps, one searches for signs of life in the vast "sanitized" free-fire zones. On the borders of fields, at the treeline, one can often see evidence of pathetic gardens where people attempt to grow basic foods like sweet potatoes, taro or squash.
They do not dare work the rice fields for fear of being shot by Americans who are out "squirrel hunting" in bubble choppers. In free-fire zones, people are subject to bombardment 24 hours a day and live like moles in bomb-shelter holes beneath the ground.
While the bombing was being stepped up, the use of herbicides continued unabated. Beginning in 1961, the U.S. began the "experimental" use of herbicides in South Vietnam as a weapon to destroy crops. The initial objective was to deny food to the National Liberation Front. In 1962, herbicides became "a central weapon" in the overall chemical and biological warfare (CBW) strategy of America throughout Southeast Asia. Known as "Operation Ranch Hand," the project's motto became "Only we can prevent forests."
The defoliation program soon expanded into a critical aspect of the whole shift of strategy from ground to air power in South Vietnam. Besides destroying crops, defoliants began to be used to destroy the forest canopy that hid NLF forces from detection by air. The process is described in an Army Training Circular #TC3-16 Employment of Riot Control Agents, Flame, Smoke, Antiplant Agents and Personnel Detectors in Counter Guerrilla Operations: "Guerrilla operations rely heavily on locally produced crops for their food supply. Crop destruction can reduce the food supply and seriously affect the guerrilla's survival. Naturally dense vegetation in jungle areas is ideal for illusive hit and run tactics of guerrillas. Removal or reduction of this concealment limits the guerrilla's capability to operate in the defoliated area." A report released last December by the American Association for the Advancement of Science claims that in Vietnam, some 600,000 people have been deprived of their normal food supply by defoliation. The report claims that chemical agents sprayed by the U.S. have been responsible for killing over $500 million worth of prime hardwood, covering an area the size of Massachusetts. It states that some 400,000 acres of coastal mangrove forest have been killed, leaving lifeless swamps. These vast areas were once major sources of smaller species of fish and shrimp, on which larger kinds of seafood depend for life. The effect of this disruption in the food chain, and, consequently, of the livelihood of fishermen in the area, is not known.
Over 12 percent of South Vietnam's territory, including croplands and grazing lands, has been damaged or destroyed. Sen. Gaylord A. Nelson of Wisconsin reports that "The U.S. has sprayed [in South Vietnam] enough chemicals to amount to six pounds for every man, woman and child in that country."
Last spring, American military sources announced that after nine years, use of the deadliest herbicide, Agent Orange (some 60,000 tons had already been used), was suspended. The use of other herbicides continued. But in November, it was revealed that the 90th Chemical Attachment in Quang Ngai province had, in fact, continued to use Agent Orange and had defoliated thousands of acres in spite of the ban. As one soldier remarked, "Hell, we've been using it all through the summer." Sen. Stephen M. Young of Ohio quoted another young soldier, who had been asked where all the barrels of Agent Orange had disappeared: "If we ain't been using it, where do you think those missing barrels went? We sure ain't makin' milkshakes out of it."
On February 2, 1971, General Abrams and U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker issued a statement saying that herbicide spraying of crops by fixed-wing aircraft would cease, but that the program would continue, from the ground and from helicopters, around U.S. bases and in other "unpopulated areas." Most people, however, remain justifiably confused as to the real status of the herbicide program. Even if the program were ended in toto, the indications are that many important aspects of the whole organic fabric of Vietnam have already been affected. Scientists are concerned that herbicides have damaged the soil by destroying the process through which foliage regularly falls to the ground, decays, and returns minerals and nutrients to the earth. As a result plant life is unable to replenish itself, and erosion washes the essential soil nutrients away.
Other scientists fear that a process called laterization may set in in many areas, turning the soil into a hard, rocklike substance in which nothing will grow.
Reports indicate that patterns of wild animal life have been altered through the interruption of food chains and the near extinction of several rare species. The regeneration of vast jungle areas that are pollinated by animals and insects rather than air currents are affected in turn. Elephants, often used by both sides for transportation, are shot on sight, while the tiger population has soared as a consequence of an abundant supply of fresh human meat.
There are even reports of women giving birth to monsters, though most occurrences are not reported because of nonexistent procedures for compiling statistics. The Saigon Ministry of Health classified the files of malformed babies as "secret" in 1969.
Quietly, the whole nature of Indochinese agriculture is being changed by the aerial destruction. In 1964, South Vietnam exported 48,563 metric tons of rice. The following year, largely because of bombing and spraying, South Vietnam imported 240,000 metric tons of rice. In 1968, the figure rose to 677,000 tons. The destruction of rice has meant the destruction of a culture. The people of Asia have been growing and eating rice for 5,000 years. Rice is central not only to their diet but to the entire spiritual relationship between the Vietnamese people and the natural world. If a Vietnamese has not eaten rice, though he may have eaten other foods that day, he considers himself not to have eaten at all. During the day, Vietnamese often greet each other with the words, "An Com Chua?" literally, "Eat cooked rice yet?"
The destruction of the rice crop has meant that the fundamental connection between peasant and earth is broken. Without the rice to plant, grow and harvest, the village is without function or meaning, even if it is not bombed or burned. A man forced off his land is left without reason to exist or connection with the world around him. He becomes a purposeless human being.
For the people of Vietnam, the immediate consequence of the bombing and the destruction of their crops has been the growth of the refugee camps. Such camps are usually located in "secure areas," away from trees or hills. They are placed in the baking sun on bulldozed lots surrounded by barbed wire. Small houses with tin roofs that cause them to heat up like ovens under the tropical sun are lined up like cars on a parking lot. U.S. surplus commodities, dietary food and food banned in the U.S. because of cyclamates, are brought in to replace the native rice. Here a refugee, or "detainee," frequently separated even from friends and family in the evacuation shuffle, is "resettled."
As with every other aspect of the war, statistics on refugees have almost no real meaning. Authorities in Vietnam have compiled "statistics" to give the illusion that the problem is not totally out of hand. Their figures give only an incomplete, shadowy picture of the devastating reality.
On December 28,1967, the New York Times reported that although the military have "classified" two million Vietnamese as refugees, a "competent source" put the figure at four million.
Meanwhile, officials claimed that 309,000 "classified" refugees were in camps and 475,000 were "elsewhere." Where is "elsewhere"? Journalists in Saigon are usually told that the refugees are "staying with relatives." One can understand what this means by seeing the squalid overcrowding of South Vietnamese cities.
In February, 1970, Rand Corporation anthropologist Gerald Hickey said, "Just 15 years ago, all but 15 percent of the South Vietnamese people lived in rural areas. Now, 60 percent live in urban areas. Saigon has grown from a city of 300,000, which it was designed to be, to more than three million." The pattern is the same in most Vietnamese cities. Da Nang, for example, has grown from a city of 25,000 to 300,000 in five years. Similarly, Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, has grown from half a million to two million in eight months. This kind of "urbanization" is a tactic that Samuel P. Huntington, chairman of the Department of Government at Harvard University, and a long-time supporter of the war, advocated in Foreign Affairs, July, 1968. He claimed that Vietcong support could be cut off if there were "'direct application of mechanical and conventional power ... on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city."
The city of Saigon perhaps best illustrates this tactic of forced urbanization. In December, 1964, an article in the Christian Science Monitor described Saigon as the "Paris of the East." In a scant two years, the same paper began to run articles describing Saigon as a city in which "labor shortages due to the war have made services worse than usual. The streets are very dirty. Huge piles of uncollected trash and rotting garbage lie about, and sanitation is sadly lacking." Saigon has become one of the ugliest and most congested cities in the world, with an average population of 140 persons per acre (Tokyo has 63).
The overriding problem of civilian dislocation, euphemistically called "pacification," is one that the American military have never taken seriously. The index of General Westmoreland's final report on the war includes five references to "Refugees"all with the misleading subtitle, "Care of ... ." There is no serious discussion or even statistical reference in that report to the disruption that has been taking place in the countryside because of U.S. firepower.
In June, 1969, John Hannah, head of the Agency for International Development, told Sen. Edward Kennedy's Subcommittee on Refugees that 3.2 million Vietnamese had "become homeless" since 1965. A chart accompanying the testimony lists 1,328,517 of them as "current temporary refugees" for 1968. Then, there is an asterisk referring to a footnote in minute print: "Refugees are defined as persons who leave their home for war related reasons, and have not yet reestablished a permanent home. Statistics do not include victims of the Tet and May offensives numbering in excess of 1,000,000."
Hannah's report further states that 61,101 of these "current temporary refugees" are "in camp." Another 600,105 are listed as "out of camp" or "elsewhere" It all sounds like a reasonably manageable proposition. But as any honest refugee adviser in the provinces of Vietnam is quick to point out (since he has to work with actual people, not fantasy-land figures), official statistics only deal with "classified" refugees. Conservative estimates place the figure of dislocated people at twice the number of those "classified." This means that, as of 1969, roughly seven million Vietnamese (or nearly half the population of South Vietnam) had become homeless.
According to Royal Laotian Government figures in 1970, 1.5 million people there have been displaced since the US. began intensive bombing of Pathet Lao-held territory in 1968. Laos has a population of only three million. According to Jacques Decornoy of Le Monde, who was in the province of Sam Neua, a Pathet Lao area, all but two villages there had been destroyed as early as 1968. Since then, the U.S. has been flying up to 20,000 sorties a month over Sam Neua. One can only guess the effect the February invasion of Laos has had on the already severe refugee crisis in that country.
In 1970, a report of the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees said that in Cambodia, with a population of seven million, one million of refugees have already been "generated." We also know that the Lon Nol regime "generated" some 100,000 refugees from the ethnic Vietnamese population living in Cambodia just before the invasion of the NLF sanctuaries last spring. We also know that since then, the U.S. has provided unlimited air power to Lon Nol's tragicomic army. Whole cities like Snoul, where thousands of people lived, have been destroyed. And yet, in spite of this obvious escalation of the air war and the inevitable rural dislocation that must follow, U.S. authorities continue to claim, even with self-satisfaction, that the refugee problem is under control.
One wonders where all the refugees went. They began to disappear from our consciousness just as the B-52 raids increased. One is justified in conjecturing whether people are simply being killed in their villages without being brought into a pacification camp where they can be tabulated.
Fact has been piled on fact – few of them are new and fewer capable of shocking. The immensity of the destruction in the Indochinese war has led to a kind of national numbness that is only momentarily interrupted by another escalation or invasion. Government "experts" speak of "urbanization," "protective reaction," "crop control," and "Vietnamization." But the old words are incapable of conveying just what it is that the U.S. is doing to Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. The crime is a new one, ecocide, our addition to the annals of man's inhumanity to man.