Vietnam - the effects of the war on Vietnam and on the USA

The first 200 words of this essay...

Vietnam

In 1975, the Hanoi government was faced with a country devastated by thirty years of war. There were three million dead, another four million injured, a land pock-marked by 25 million bomb craters. In the South, an enormous area (including 50% of the jungle, 41% of the coastal mangrove forests and 40% of the rubber plantations) had been poisoned by 11 million gallons of chemical defoliant. Intricate irrigation networks built over hundreds of years had been blitzed into oblivion. Bamboo villages had been reduced to cinders. Giant B52 bombers had destroyed ports, railways, bridges, hospitals and factories in the North.

A greater tonnage of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam than in all of World War II. It had taken 15 years, and billions of dollars in aid, to repair that damage in post-war Europe. In Vietnam, the ravages of war were compounded by other factors. For more than twenty years, the South had been living off American aid of over $1 billion a year.

Even rice was imported and paid for by the US. When the Americans pulled out in April 1975, this income disappeared overnight. They left behind serious social problems. Approximately 10