Natural Disasters Cause Devastation

The natural disasters to which agriculturally based Viet Nam was subject, also created many problems. From May through to September the monsoon rains can cause floods and yet immediately they cease drought often dries the land and shrivels the crops. To cope with this problem 4,000 km of dykes and dams with an average weight of 10 m had been constructed. Maintainance was a massive engineering task.

In 1971, the floods had been so bad that people were able to wash their hands in the Red river while on top of the dykes. The level of the water in the Red river had been 7 km above street level in Hanoi. If Richard Nixon's 1972 scheme for bombing the dykes had been a year earlier, the Vietnamese would have lost millions of their numbers.

I recalled the slogan of the anti-Kennedy pro-Nixon lobby in another context: 'Nobody drowned at Watergate.' But then Americans have always been told to put a different value on American lives.

Typhoons also took their toll, such as in 1968 when the effects were worse than 3,352 raids and again in 1973 when a typhoon wiped out ¼ of the harvest.

There is a lack of arable land in the DRV, only two million acres of arable land to feed 24 million people. In Vien's uncomplicated logic, to collectivise is the only way to prevent infrequent widescale starvation for it is only on collective that modem machinery could be utilised efficiently.

The tasks from now until 1980 emphasise reconstruction of the destroyed power plants, bridges and housing. The destruction of all these was extensive. Hong Gai had been completely razed, Haiphong had been 30% destroyed and yet the population growth had continued at 3% per year. Vien seemed amused at the fertility of the Vietnamese.

The problems in the South are even greater. Between 1965 and '74 some 10 million people had left the countryside for the urban centres, some because they were rounded up by the Saigon regime under Operation Phoenix, some just fled the war.

This migration had massive recruitment into Thieu's army and it had also caused huge problems of unemployment and half a million prostitues, of unemployment and half a million prostitutes. Vien estimated that there were 3-4,000 orphans of mixed blood in the South and a total of 100,000 drug addicts.