From Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's "Manufacturing Consent":

In April 1975, the war came to an end, and the thirty-year conflict entered a new phase. Indochina faced the near-insoluble problems of reconstruction in a land that had been reduced to ruin by foreign armies after a century of colonial oppression. In the United States too, elite groups faced a problem of reconstruction, but of a different kind. The problem in the United States was the reconstruction of ideology, the taming of the domestic population that had lost its faith in the nobility of intent and the inspiring benevolence of the elites who determine U.S. policy. It was necessary to overcome what Norman Podhoretz, echoing Goebbels, calls “the sickly inhibitions against the use of military force,” the dread “Vietnam syndrome,” finally cured by the stirring triumph of U.S. arms in Grenada, so Podhoretz hoped.

An ancillary task has been to keep the devastation that the United States left as its legacy in Indochina hidden from public view. Indeed, one finds only scattered reference to this not entirely trivial matter in the U.S. media—a remarkable achievement, given the agency of destruction and its scale. Keeping just to Vietnam, the death toll may have passed three million. In an article entitled “Studies Show Vietnam Raids Failed,” Charles Mohr observes that the CIA estimated deaths from bombing of the North at well over 30,000 a year by 1967, “heavily weighted with civilians.” Crop-destruction programs from 1961 had a devastating impact, including aerial destruction by chemicals, ground operations to destroy orchards and dikes, and land clearing by giant tractors (Rome plows) that “obliterated agricultural lands, often including extensive systems of paddy dikes, and entire rural residential areas and farming hamlets,” leaving the soil “bare, gray and lifeless,” in the words of an official report cited by Arthur Westing, who compares the operations to the “less efficient” destruction of Carthage during the Punic Wars. “The combined ecological, economic, and social consequences of the wartime defoliation operations have been vast and will take several generations to reverse”; in the “empty landscapes” of South Vietnam, recovery will be long delayed, if possible at all, and there is no way to estimate the human effects of the chemical poison dioxin at levels “300 to 400% greater than the average levels obtaining among exposed groups in North America.”

In the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, along with some twenty-five million acres of farmland and twelve million acres of forest. One-and-a-half million cattle were killed, and the war left a million widows and some 800,000 orphans. In the North, all six industrial cities were damaged (three razed to the ground) along with twenty-eight of thirty provincial towns (twelve completely destroyed), ninety-six of 116 district towns, and 4,000 of some 5,800 communes. Four hundred thousand cattle were killed and over a million acres of farmland were damaged. Much of the land is a moonscape, where people live on the edge of famine, with rice rations lower than those in Bangladesh. Reviewing the environmental effects, the Swedish peace-research institute SIPRI concludes that “the ecological debilitation from such attack is likely to be of long duration.” The respected Swiss-based environmental group IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) concluded that the ecology is not only refusing to heal but is worsening, so that a “catastrophe” may result unless billions of dollars are spent to “reconstruct” the land that has been destroyed, a “monumental” task that could be addressed only if the United States were to offer substantial reparations, a possibility that cannot be considered in a cultural climate of abysmal ignorance, chauvinism, and the self-righteous pursuit of self-interest. Destruction of forests has increased the frequency of floods and droughts and aggravated the impact of typhoons, and war damage to dikes (some of which, in the South, were completely destroyed by U.S. bombardment) and other agricultural systems has yet to be repaired. The report notes that “humanitarian and conservationist groups, particularly in the United States, have encountered official resistance and red tape when requesting their governments’ authorization to send assistance to Vietnam”—naturally enough, since the United States remains committed to ensure that its achievements are not threatened by recovery of the countries it destroyed.

In one of his sermons on human rights, President Carter explained that we owe Vietnam no debt and have no responsibility to render it any assistance because “the destruction was mutual,” a statement that elicited no comment, to our knowledge, apart from our own—a fact that speaks volumes about the prevailing cultural climate.