Things We Lost to the Water

Vietnam’s history is tumultuous. Colonized by France in 1858 and invaded by Japan during World War II, Vietnam finally gained independence in 1954 thanks to armed conflict led by Ho Chi Minh’s Communist guerilla force, the Viet Minh. It then split into Communist North Vietnam—led by Ho Chi Minh and supported by the Soviet Union and Communist China—and capitalist South Vietnam, backed by the US. Conflicts between the North and South continued. The US, fearing the spread of communism via the domino theory—the belief that if one country succumbed to communism, so would its neighbors, like falling dominos—entered the Vietnam War in 1964 after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. One of the most controversial and deadly wars in US history, it lasted until American troops pulled out, defeated, in 1973, and Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975.

While 58,000 American soldiers were killed and 304,000 were wounded during the war, its effects on the Vietnamese people, especially in South Vietnam, were also widespread. Some four million Vietnamese citizens were killed or wounded, 1.3 million of them civilians. Their lush farmland was destroyed because the US military dropped more than 14 million tons of explosives—over double the amount used in World War II—on South Vietnam, which is roughly the size of California, and American soldiers used millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange, to destroy South Vietnamese jungles, forests, crops, and vegetation and thereby combat Communist guerilla forces (“