The Vietnam War ranks among the 20th century’s most momentous and horrendous calamities. The United States, in a desperate bid to roll back the spread of communism and to curtail the unification of a divided Vietnam, let loose the full might of its unparalleled arsenal on a penurious peasant society. The record of this carnage is extensively documented. US air raids dropped 6.162 million tons of bombs on Indochina—a total tonnage at least three times greater than all US bombs dropped in Europe and the Pacific during World Word II and a hundred times more impactful than nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (Miguel & Roland, 2005: 2). Bombings defoliated around two million hectares of forest, while eighty million liters of chemical toxins like Agent Orange seeped into vegetation, groundwater, milk, and even the genetic codes of animals and humans. 3.5 million landmines leftover from the war either killed or disabled forty thousand Vietnamese since 1975. The fighting itself left around three million Vietnamese dead, another fourteen million wounded, and 300,000 missing in action. The United States lost sixty thousand mostly young and working-class men (Martini III, 2004: 112).
Much less is known about South Korean involvement in this disaster. President Lyndon Johnson sold an unsellable war by initiating the “Many Flags” campaign, an illusion
— source quo-vademus.org | Jean-Philippe Stone | Oct 13, 2022