Long-term consequences of the Viet Nam war on the landscapes: Case study in Thua Thien Hue province

Résumé En

During the Viêt Nam war, the American army sprayed a great quantity of herbicides (like Agent Orange) and dropped a lot of bombs, including incendiary ones (napalm). The purpose was to defeat the enemy by destroying its crops and the forest under which he hid. The Viêt Nam war is thus considered as a war against the environment. But the consequences on the landscapes are controversial. Conducted in the framework of a PhD study, the present work focus on the long-term consequences of the war, on the prints which the military practices left on the landscapes and which are still visible today, more than thirty years later. The studied landscapes are those of the Thua Thiên Huê province, chosen because it was particularly affected by these military practices; it was crossed by the Hô Chi Minh trail, followed by the Viêt Công and it was located in the south of the border between South and North-Viêt Nam. The landscapes were studied on the ground and by remote sensing (satellite images) and, to understand the dynamics of their formation, to identify the factors, the archives data and the accounts of some villagers were also considered. Some prints left by the war can still be seen today in the landscapes: bomb craters, blockhaus… But, at the end of the research, these landscapes appear more marked by the accumulation of the anthropic perturbations than by the only impacts of the conflict; the weight of the war in their formation is relativized.