Photograph Source: US Army – Public Domain
With the Vietnam War and larger wars in Southeast Asia in Cambodia and Laos, two lines of thought on resisting that war in a material way were apparent. Many believed that not participating in the military during the war was a moral good no matter how that end was achieved. Others felt that it mattered just how a person went about resisting the war. The late writer, journalist, and draft resister David Harris makes his views clear in Our War (1996), where he considers how former President Bill Clinton resisted the military draft and what his resistance meant for the future. Others condemned those young men who used what some considered questionable means to stay out of the draft and the military. A former presidential candidate recently called Donald Trump a draft dodger, a label that many would have condemned during the war because staying out of the military was seen as admirable by many, again no matter what strategy a person used.
At the close of a work day while working as a census enumerator in 2010, I met and spoke with a Vietnam veteran who said unequivocally that he would have liked to have stood at the Canadian border during the Vietnam War and shot those fleeing the US from either the draft or the military.
These issues were revisited recently when Donald Trump halted US aid to programs in Southeast Asia dealing with both the lethal and the lingering effects of unexploded bombs from the Vietnam War and the defoliant Agent Orange that causes cancer and birth defects.
The US Agency for International Development has offered aid to Vietnam in the past where 40,000 people have died from unexploded US bombs since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. In Cambodia, 60,000 have died, and in Laos, the most heavily bombed nation in recent history by US forces, 22,000 have died. Some of the anti-personnel bombs that are in Southeast Asia today resemble playthings and attract young children who do not know better. Other bombs explode during routine farming activities. Landmines are also weapons that continue to kill.
A fifth of the land of Vietnam remained contaminated by Agent Orange in 2023.
Japan has stepped in to assist Laos, while China in recent years has stepped in to carry out bomb-clearing operations (“‘A Good Chance People Are Going to Die’ After U.S. Halts Funding for Mine Clearing” (New York Times, January 28, 2025). The US State Department has ordered a three-month suspension of programs that addressed unexploded bomb programs within a larger foreign aid freeze that affects only some federal programs. It might be of interest to some, that while a ceasefire continues in Gaza, Trump has allowed 2,000 pound bombs to continue to be delivered to Israel (Reuters, January 25, 2025). Two thousand pound bombs are indiscriminate killing machines that can kill innocent people. The latter is a military and not a State Department expenditure. The mixing of the past and present, and issues of war and peace, sometimes have consequences not easily predicted.
Reparations for war damages were never offered to Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos. This was very much different from the rebuilding of Germany, Japan, and Italy by the allies following World War II. Many refugees from the three countries affected by the Vietnam War were brought into the US following the end of the war. In some places, where Vietnamese fishermen sought to earn a living in their new country, discrimination and acts of revenge of different kinds took place.
It is impossible to know exactly how many people were killed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but estimates of around 3 million are usually cited with between 1.5 and 2 million killed by the Khmer Rouge, a radical communist movement brought to power in Cambodia partly by the US destabilization of that nation during the Vietnam War.
