A young Vietnamese child was buried alive in the ground by American bombs during the Vietnam War. The first few times I experienced a B-52 attack, I shouted orders to escape, but lost control of my bodily functions due to fear. In most parts of North Vietnam, hospitals, schools, and churches were the only brick or cement buildings above the second floor that were bombed as military barracks. Everywhere in northern Vietnam, the North Vietnamese took control and bombed them as part of their food supply. The worst atrocities were caused by cluster bombs and anti-personnel bombs, releasing small bombs and killing evacuees due to problems in rescuing patients injured by the bombs because the steel was so small. Dropping the bombs on the ruins re-scarred the burnt foundations of the houses and smashed the piles of rubble, the roar of the B-52 explosions tore eardrums in an area about a kilometer away and left many inhabitants of the jungle permanently deaf.
The Vietnam War did not spare children from the cruelty of war. The physical suffering caused by intense fighting and highly toxic chemical bombardment remains today. During the war, life became very difficult for children in both the North and South of Vietnam. Homes and schools were bombed and destroyed. Many children became homeless and had to move schools and teach classes after dark to avoid becoming targets of heavy bombing. Schools in the south moved locations three times in four months due to US air raids.
In 1965, the Gulf of Tonkin incident became the pretext for the U.S. to send troops to Vietnam, and the Johnson administration executed Operation Rolling Thunder on North Vietnam. It forced a halt to the insurgency in South Vietnam and cut off supply lines. About 643,000 tons of bombs were dropped, destroying about 65% of North Vietnam's oil storage capacity, 59% of its power plants, 55% of its major bridges, 9,821 vehicles, and 1,966 railroad cars. Despite claims of bombing accuracy, an estimated 52,000 civilians were killed in the bombing of hospitals, schools, pagodas, agricultural cooperatives, fishing boats, embankments, and sanatoriums. In Nam Dinh, the third largest city in North Vietnam, there was no war-related production, and even the main silk and textile production disappeared. Vinh, with a population of about 72,000, was hit by some 4,131 attacks in four years, destroying nearly every house, 31 schools, universities, four hospitals, and two churches.
Bombed at four times the rate of North Vietnam, the South Vietnam area was bombed about 21 million by the end of the war, resulting in about 1,544,624,000 square kilometers of defoliated forest area. There were no restrictions on bombing the South Vietnam area, and South Vietnam was endangered in 1967. The main purpose of the bombing was to push the Vietnamese masses into villages and some into cities. The phosphorus-laced napalm bombs became the terror of the masses, and some patients were so scarred from the napalm bombs that it became impossible to identify them as male or female. Phosphorus burns scorched skin and bones on the hands of children. He was overkilled by indiscriminate shelling of guerrillas in the outskirts of Saigon.
In the final years of the war, the strength of the U.S. military's anti-war campaign and insurgency made the Nixon administration dependent on air power to keep the war going.In the spring of 1972, some 55,000 tons of bombs were dropped per month to drive the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in North Vietnam to the negotiating table. It resulted in at least 500,000 civilian casualties, including more than about 5 million refugees. U.S. Air Force use in Indochina reached the level of genocide, a grave violation of the laws of war, laws that committed the U.S. After the Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, it was rebuilt, but the ecosystem was devastated and prospects for development were curtailed.
