When the forest became the enemy and the legacy of American herbicidal warfare in Vietnam

This dissertation offers an environmental perspective on the Vietnam War by an intensive interdisciplinary and cross-cultural examination of the American use of herbicides for war purposes to destroy the jungles in the Vietnamese Central Highlands. The main issues explored are the cultural, political and military causes of U.S. ecocide in Vietnam at a time of rising domestic environmentalist concern about pollution and toxicity, and the search for extreme visibility in Vietnam that led to massive destruction of ecologically dependent human communities and local eco-systems with questionable military results. The thesis begins with an account of how the Kennedy Administration and the South Vietnamese Diem government started the program of defoliation and crop destruction and ends with the Agent Orange Controversy in the United States.