Like Rain falling from the Sky / Nicola Bertasi [extrait / extract] by Les Rencontres de la photographie, Arles

This work would not have been possible without the help of Truong Giang Pham. More than an interpreter. A traveling companion. Thanks to all the people met on the road. Thanks to their kindness and patience. A special thought to my mum and dad. They help me to keep the sail raised.

SUMMARY

by Damarice Amao 17

Like Rain Falling from the Sky

Map

Vietnam War Timeline

The Chemistry of War

The Sign of Fire

Beyond the Places of War Little Faults, Great Silences and Flying Squirrels

From One Side to Another

Translations Ludovica Fales, Bennett Bazalgette-Staples Text Revision Bennett Bazalgette-Staples Graphic design and typesetting pupilla grafik Paper Munken Pure, 120 g/m2 Gmund Colors matt 92, 120 g/m2 Reflex, 60 g/m2 Typography Kingfisher (Jeremy Tankard, 2009) References p. 13 Graphic elaboration with a caption from US Army Archive footage p. 20 Source: britannica.com pp. 16, 144, 145 Archive photo source: US Army/National Archives pp. 69, 108, 115, 135 Document source: US National Archives pp. 79, 117 Courtesy Bravo project/US National Archives p. 133 Courtesy Charles Shyab p. 143 Courtesy Masha Four p. 148 Courtesy Archivio Eugenio Carmi Photographs, texts and graphic elaborations 2017/2018/2019/2020 ÂŠ Nicola Bertasi

Vietnam: a Critical Memory

The Chemistry of Peace Afterword

A LĂŠo, sorriso dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;inverno

VIETNAM: A CRITICAL MEMORY Damarice Amao

An orange-tinted blitz, a hazy atmosphere, shades of green across a wide and delicate chromatic range, from the lush vegetation to the darker shades of the fighters, whole or dismembered bodies sweat evaporates in the heavy tropical heat, the red of the blood and the rage of the victims. Tragically photogenic, the Vietnam War perfectly embodies the contemporary phenomenon of the spectacularisation of violence, sublimated by cinema, made accessible to the masses via television, which—at the height of the golden age of the wartime photo-reportage—provided some of the most surprising and shocking images of the twentieth century. And so as soon as it was over, its duration, intensity and ensuing media feeding frenzy ensured the Vietnam War fueled post-WWII visual imagery, with both still and moving images, through both reportage and films. This served to crystallize the tensions of the geopolitical context—both the Cold War and the decolonization process—which the identity crisis of the United States symbolically represented with its Vietnam veterans, the tragic heroes that continue to haunt the Hollywood television and cinema industry.1 We thus have the impression of having seen, heard and experienced everything about Vietnam… mixing up films, memories of news items and media icons. Like the photographic intertwining of the contemporary artist Dinh Q. Lê2 that draws on the medium of traditional Vietnamese weaving, featuring mythical scenes from movies and images from newspapers, and thus symbolizing that visual and mnemonic confusion that is aroused in us by evocation of the Vietnam War (From Vietnam to Hollywood, 2003–2005). Be as it may, beyond this imagery that feeds off both reality and fiction, 45 years later extremely tangible traces of the conflict still remain to this day, both on people’s bodies and the territory itself. Wars don’t end with armistices and peace treaties: an observation which has become banal yet which still holds true, as shown by the long-lasting psychological, ecological, and physical consequences suffered by Vietnamese society over a period of several generations.

1 Benjamin Stora, Imaginaires de guerre. Les images dans les guerres d’Algérie et du Viêt-nam, Paris, La Découverte, 1997; Marjolaine Boutet, “Le Vietnam et l’Amérique au cinéma et à la télévision: du traumatisme au déni,” Hermès, La Revue, 2008/3 (n° 52), pp. 75–82. Also available online.

And it is along the lines leading to the creation of an alternative memory of Vietnam that Like Rain Falling from the Sky is to be found: in quite an opposite direction compared to the shock imagery of traditional photo-reportage, and with the extended time necessary for enquiry and travel, piecing together a sensitive and poetical narrative drawing on the voices of those involved in the conflict, all too often ignored or forced to hold their silence.

2 Vietnamese artist born in 1968. Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City.

Missing faces

Past/Present

Offering visibility to the silent memories or at least acknowledging their marginal position within the traditional narratives often more or less openly constitutes the driving force behind contemporary documentary approaches in photography, in a context of deep crisis in photojournalism and an ethical redefinition of documentary enquiry. In the case of Vietnam, such new approaches are largely defined in reaction to the overabundance of movie imagery, criticizing absences, those missing faces. On the occasion of a residence in Ho Chi Minh City in 2007, the photographer and historian Arno Gisinger3 was amazed by the disincarnation of the figures of Vietnamese fighters in American mainstream cinema.4 Hence, whether they celebrate war or question its value, movies like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket or even The Deer Hunter reduce the other, the enemy, to mere interchangeably bodiless silhouettes, bereft of human depth and history.

Compared to the critical dialectic that emerges with regard to movie production, the simplicity and documentary neutrality of Like Rain Falling from the Sky seem to offer a tool with which to reread the history of the conflict, in the sense of turning the tables on the domination of memory and visual imagery. In his work on Vietnam, Gisinger devotes a part of his reasoning to the contemporary history of the country and to Vietnamese veterans through a series of large-format portraits; now elderly, these ex-fighters pose inside their homes or in emblematic sites linked to the war (Veterans, 2007). The photo sessions suggest a degree of trust consolidated over the course of various preparatory encounters and interviews—the contents of which remains omitted—without any consideration for our curiosity. In Like Rain, the same material of gathered testimonies—transcribed here on typewritten pages using an old typewriter—becomes stronger by virtue of its polyphonic dimension, digging away at the memories lying around the conflict: a form of time travel, of making the past interface with the present. Over the course of the narrative, the montages—which blend declassified American archive documents and photographs of war sites as they currently stand—also serve as a chronological catalyst.

Gisinger’s observation is linked to that of Jean-Paul Godard, originating from a context of militant radicalism bound up in his own commitment alongside the Palestinian population in the 1970s: “Ever since the invention of photography, imperialism has made films to prevent those it oppressed from making others,”5 and following his logic we might add: preventing the oppressed from taking center-stage as subjects. Along the same lines of such a critical approach to history and politics, reconsidered in relation to movie imagery, the filmmaker Harun Farocki feigns surprise before this systematic relegation to the sidelines of the Vietnamese, and the fact that they are not recognized as actual participants in the conflict in—even the best—American movies dedicated to this chapter of our recent history. “There are 200 movies about how difficult it was to come back from Vietnam being unemployed or traumatized etc. That’s a bit strange. First, you kill 1.5 million people and then your concern is: has your wife left you? Will you still love her and so on. That’s all a bit strange.”6 3 Austrian artist and photographer, born in 1964. Lives and works in Paris. 4 Arno Gisinger. “A conversation with Florian Ebner”, Camera Austria, No. 110, 2010, pp. 23–34. 5 Quotation from a text by Jean-Luc Godard published under the title “Manifeste” and then in 1970 in the Palestinian newspaper El Fatah; republished in Jean-Luc Godard, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2006 and available from the website of the magazine Période 6 Extract from an interview with Harun Farocki, undated, available from the website of the dead filmmaker 7 Thomas Voltzenlogel, “Les images clivantes du Vietnam. Stratégies et tactiques cinématographiques” Revue Période, 2017. Also available online from magazine website.

In Inextinguishable Fire (1969) and also in Before your Eyes Vietnam (1982), two of his films dedicated to the war, Farocki tries to measure these problematic distances and to rethink the role of imagery, its use and its power in the construction of views of the conflict deployed by mainstream cinema. Produced during the war, Inextinguishable Fire focuses on Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used on a massive scale by the US Army. Farocki is not interested so much in denouncing these crimes, these acts of war, but rather in reflecting on the role of imagery, on their power to influence our interpretation of historic events. According to Harun Farocki, the shock to which the audience is subjected by the realism and the violence of the imagery of the conflict, broadcast in real time by the television or published in the papers, actually prevents the spirit from adopting a critical stance: going back to the origins of this wartime violence, evaluating its catastrophic consequences, or unravelling the interlacing political and economic causes. Otherwise, the image “would force the gaze to turn elsewhere, obstructing the desire to investigate reality,”7 as Thomas Voltzenlogel recently suggested.

In Like Rain, the war veterans are not the only bearers of memories: space is also given over to a wider range of individuals, often witnesses of the conflict though not necessarily—peasants, museum and memorial directors, professors, farmers, presidents of associations—but collateral victims of a war which has never ended. In the portraits, the poses are simple, frontal and at times very stiff. It’s not a matter here of bodily pathos associated with the wartime images of the Vietnamese—the young naked girl running with her body burnt by napalm, the face of a man about to explode due to the imminent impact of a bullet, as well as other displays of suffering bodies that we know all too well.

8 See Mathieu Asselin, Monsanto: une enquête photographique, Arles, Actes sud, 2017.

The destruction caused by the spraying of tons of defoliant, including the sadly famous Agent Orange, one of those produced by Monsanto, are one of the common threads leading through these soft-spoken testimonies wherein a certain fatalism lies, despite the repeatedly expressed hope for economic compensation from the American government.8 The road to justice is still long. Various victims’ associations have seen their requests for damages to be paid by American authorities rejected time and time again. In their everyday lives, these victims of war find themselves faced with an all-out denial of the consequences of ecocide by the Vietnamese government and a part of society that prefers to look only to the future: technological progress, economic growth, opening up the country to tourism. Resilience has its price: that of amnesia. Through the personal testimonies of Like Rain, an anamnesis project is reinvented, no longer considered a mere exercise of nostalgia. Like Rain places it at the right distance, questioning the commemorative anesthetized experience that the Vietnamese government today accepts to serve through its museums, mausoleums, and its war tourism, at the service of those American veterans in search of a certain saudade of their youth lost in Vietnam. 11

Topographies of Memory Far from the institutional circuits of commemoration, whatever might a photographer look for by exploring the now peaceful territory of Vietnam where the traces of the conflict which came to an end 45 years ago are ever more faded? A few bullet marks on the walls, some old abandoned military sites, the stages of the massacres of yesteryear: countless desperately silent ruins. Jean Yves Jouannais puts forward a hypothesis: “Photographing a desert, both desertic and deserted, with actual traces of its trauma does not mean hazarding a guess like some medium, but rather believing that war never ends.”9 In Like Rain, the apparent calm of the sites being poisoned with Agent Orange, four decades after the end of hostilities, confirms this statement even more clearly. Hence the enquiry—with testimonies gathered along with a ‘topography’ of the contamination process—endows these mysterious images with all their sense, allowing us to gauge the depth of the ongoing tragedy. On the occasion of her return to Vietnam in 1994, 25 years after having fled from the war as an adolescent, along with her family, An-My Lê 10 comes to terms with her own personal history through a series of blackand-white landscapes of a number of places familiar to her yet which have now changed, and which also feature the traces of the conflict (Viêt-nam, 1994–1998). The documentary distance serves as a form of caution before an intimate and existential path: the return home, guided by memories, after decades of exile. Unlike the Vietnamese photographer, Nicola Bertasi does not reach Vietnam to retrace his own family or a personal saga. And yet, both detective and flâneur, Nicola Bertasi also addresses the intimate nature of his wandering journey around the stages of the Vietnamese conflict, as well as the meanders of his own family history, one also shaped by war.

9 Jean-Yves Jouannais, Diane Dufour (dir.), Topographies de la guerre, exhibition catalog, Paris, Le Bal, 2011, p. 8. 10 Vietnamese-American artist and photographer, born in 1960. Lives and works in New York.

left: archive photo of an agent orange spraying mission. right: Khe Sanh battleground today.

LIKE RAIN FALLING FROM THE SKY

“They were only war casualties,” he said. “It was a pity, but you can’t always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause.” “Would you have said the same if it had been your old nurse with her blueberry pie?” He ignored my facile point. “In a way you could say they died for democracy,” he said. “I wouldn’t know how to translate that into Vietnamese.” I was suddenly very tired. Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1955

The entrance gate of the former Bien Hoa Airbase today. overlayer: a rescue and recovery operation near Bien Hoa during the war.

War still flows today, like a river, in our imagination. Death and devastation constitute the mosaic of those news reports that keep following, one after another, in the newspapers, on the web, on television and on the radio. Death and war are the archetypes par excellence of current events. The regime of this 21st century offers just that kind of current events understood only as happening in the present tense. Only now, just for a while. Like a story on Instagram. War thus becomes an abstract, liquid fact that one tends to forget (at least if one is not a historian or a professional memory wiz). One war replaces another, in our collective memory. Facts are linked, they become too numerous or too painful and remain just a blurred idea, perhaps linked to the image of a dying man, of a woman screaming in the middle of the rubble, or of a drowned child. These flashes, these fragmented emotions, tell us about our relationship with war. An unresolved relationship. A relationship based on brevity, fugacity, and erasure. The last modern but not contemporary war was Vietnam. It was after the Nazis, Before the Internet. It was the last conflict to leave a mark on public opinion that is still recognized today. After Vietnam, wars became more abstract, more routinized, more anchored to specific battles. Despite this, interest in the progress of the American conflict in Vietnam has more or less dried up because of its gradual distancing from the keyword of this new century: the present moment. What remains of the conflict then? The dioxin remains in the land, a broken territory, hundreds of weapons in museums, unexploded devices in cultivated fields, bomb holes – all of this remains. Above all, the feeling of what the conflict was, remains. The witnesses remain, the memory of those born after 1975 remains. War is fear. The eyes of a woman who had to “jump over corpses” to save herself remain. It was like rain falling from the sky. This is a sentence uttered by an old farmer from Can Gio, an almost poetic phrase. Like rain. Before realizing what was happening, this country man mistook this ecocide for the most natural event in the world. 17

We cannot possibly imagine what it means to wake up one morning and see your world has been completely destroyed by a substance similar to water, thrown from some military aircraft. We can still find the words, signs, and faces of the war, though, because they are frozen there. Photography can be art and it can document. It has the ability to tell and remember. To report and abstract. Putting together photographs to construct a narrative is something very similar to the elaboration of memory. This is why my work starts from an observation: we have a desperate need to elaborate the memory of the war, because we have to understand it. Here is Vietnam, today. Photographs, documents, graphic elaborations, ideas, and testimonies. A jigsaw puzzle, of which sometimes I still find it hard to decipher the meaning, but which on other occasions seems to me to make sense. A mosaic that feeds on literature and cinema. Of memories and confessions. Of secret documents and ancient myths. The constellation of narratives about Vietnam is boundless. A jigsaw puzzle that I did not want to frame but a moment before hanging it, I decided to feed our imagination with.

Lào Cai

VIETNAM Hanoi

Haiphong

Thanh Hóa

LAOS

Vinh

Quang Tri Citadel

Khe Sanh Hamburger Hill

THAILAND

Hue A Luoi

Dà Nang

A So

My Lai Dak To Kon Tum Pleiku

Phu Cat Qui Nhon

CAMBODIA Nha Trang Da Lat

Former Boi Loi Forest

Ma Da Forest Bien Hoa Ho Chi Minh City

Can Gio

Vūng Tàu

Can Tho Ben Tre U Minh Ha

VIETNAM WAR TIMELINE

1954

1963

1964

1966

1968

1969

may 7

november 2

november 5

march 1

january 30

november 15

Viet Minh troops under Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap overrun the French base at Dien Bien Phu. The stunning victory by Vietnamese forces brings an end to nearly a century of French colonial rule in Indochina.

Ngo Dinh Diem is assassinated by his own generals as part of a coup d’état that is carried out with the tacit support of U.S. officials. Ngo’s autocratic and violent excesses when dealing with South Vietnam’s majority Buddhist population led the U.S. to withdraw its patronage of him. At this point approximately 16,000 U.S. military personnel are in Vietnam, and 200 have been killed.

After commanders reported a North Vietnamese torpedo boat attack on the U.S. destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin, U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson submits the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to Congress. The resolution authorizes the president to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States.” Although the captain of the Maddox urged caution, suggesting that the August 4 attack had been conjured from the imaginations of overeager or inexperienced sonar operators (an assessment that will ultimately prove correct), Congress overwhelmingly passes the resolution. Approximately 23,000 U.S. troops are in Vietnam, and roughly 400 have been killed.

A Program for the Pacification and Long-Term Development of Vietnam (PROVN), a study commissioned by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Harold K. Johnson, is published. Its findings suggest that the strategy of attrition being pursued by U.S. commander Gen. William Westmoreland is counterproductive, and it recommends that more U.S. effort should be directed at ensuring the security and stability of South Vietnam’s rural population. At the time of its publication, PROVN is largely dismissed by U.S. commanders. There are approximately 185,000 U.S. service members in Vietnam, and more than 2,700 have been killed.

During the Vietnamese New Year holiday of Tet, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces begin an offensive that will eventually hurl some 85,000 troops against five major cities, dozens of military installations, and scores of towns and villages throughout South Vietnam. The attacks, which eschew the guerrilla tactics traditionally employed by North Vietnamese forces, play directly to American and South Vietnamese strengths. The North Vietnamese suffer casualty rates approaching 60 percent, and Westmoreland sees the Tet Offensive as a sign of desperation on the part of the North. This view is increasingly at odds with that of the American public. There are approximately 485,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and over 20,000 have been killed.

Millions of people across the United States take to the streets to protest the continued U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The antiwar demonstrations represent the largest public protests in U.S. history to date.

june 1 The Saigon Military Mission, a covert operation to conduct psychological warfare and paramilitary activities in South Vietnam, is launched under the command of U.S. Air Force Col. Edward Lansdale. This marks the beginning of the Vietnam War. Many of the mission’s ongoing efforts are directed at supporting the regime of South Vietnamese Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem. july 21 The Geneva Accords effectively divide Vietnam in two at the 17th parallel. Although the Accords explicitly state that the 17th parallel “should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary,” it is quickly afforded exactly that status.

february 27 CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, who has just returned from Vietnam, tells viewers, “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.” U.S. Pres. Lyndon Johnson is said to respond, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” march 16 As many as 500 unarmed villagers are killed by U.S. Army troops in the hamlet of My Lai. Groups of women, children, and elderly men are shot at close range by elements of Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Infantry Brigade. Attempts to cover up the massacre begin almost before the shooting stops, and only one American, Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon commander, Lieut. William Calley, will be found guilty of any crime in connection with My Lai. In November 1974 Calley will be released on parole after serving just three and a half years under house arrest.

1970

1973

1975

may 4

january 27

april 29

Members of the Ohio National Guard open fire on unarmed college students at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. The incident catalyzes the growing antiwar movement. Roughly 335,000 U.S. troops are in Vietnam, and approximately 50,000 have been killed.

Representatives of South Vietnamese communist forces, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the United States conclude the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in VietNam in Paris. U.S. troops are to be withdrawn within 60 days and the 17th parallel will remain the dividing line until the country can be reunited by “peaceful means.”

Shortly before 11:00 AM, the American Radio Service network begins to broadcast the prerecorded message that the temperature in Saigon is “105 degrees and rising” followed by a 30-second excerpt from the song “White Christmas.” This signals the start of Operation Frequent Wind, the emergency evacuation of Saigon. American personnel begin converging on more than a dozen assembly points throughout the city. Over the next 24 hours, some 7,000 Americans and South Vietnamese are flown to safety. The following morning, North Vietnamese troops enter downtown Saigon and the South Vietnamese government surrenders unconditionally.

march 29 The last U.S. military unit leaves Vietnam. In over a decade of fighting, some 58,000 U.S. troops have been killed. Vietnamese casualties include more than 200,000 South Vietnamese troops and more than 1,000,000 North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong irregulars. Civilian deaths total as many as 2,000,000.

THE CHEMISTRY OF WAR

“It’s a defoliant. We put an order in for it for tomorrow, but it looks like we got a fuckup someplace. Sorry about that. It won’t hurt you. It’s just to kill plants. It’s called Agent Orange. It’s so the trees won’t give any shelter to the enemy. The Air Force has used it a lot, and it won’t bother humans.” “Well, it bothers me.” Mìellas said loudly. Fiitch ignored him. Karl Marlantes, Matternhorn, 2010

The dioxin contained in Agent Orange (which also existed in blue, red, white and pink versions) can be found in the rivers and lakes, thus devastating agriculture and intoxicating animals and crops. Ma Da, Can Gio, U Minh Ha, the valley of A Luoi, Kon Tum. Names that evoke exotic and distant places. Impervious places lost in the East. Places that were probably quite exotic to the eyes of a nineteenth-century European explorer, covered by a dense and interweaving vegetation. Places of war that, because of their wild, labyrinthine and impregnable nature, were chosen for shelters by the Vietcong fighters. Places that have radically changed appearance since the US government decided to use the defoliant to better identify the enemy, unleashing the biggest ecocide in the history of the world. In the interrupted landscape, hills reminiscent of Chianti, a sweetness that turns out to be an artifice, showing a broken agricultural landscape, lives and suspended memories. Here, the dioxin continues to exist. It is the trace of violated nature. Phu Cat, Bien Hoa, Da Nang. Other names. Other places. Old American bases that nowadays are property of the Vietnamese government. Defoliating bombs were stored here. These are hotspots that nobody knows how to clean up today. Here war exists, here it thrives. Professor Phung Tuu Boi is an elderly gentleman I met in a small restaurant near Hanoi Literature Temple. He comes to the appointment with a huge book under his arm. He works as a volunteer in the countryside of A Luoi Valley, with a view to sensitizing and informing the inhabitants of the region. Phung Tuu Boi builds fences, diverts waterways and delimits the areas where the soil is contaminated by dioxin so as to prevent the animals from grazing, allowing the deadly cycle to continue its course: dioxin--> soil--> infected plants--> animals that feed on dioxin--> contaminated animal meat--> disease. Phung Tuu Boi shows me a book that looks like an autobiography. It contains documents but also photographs that testify his lifelong passion for ecological restoration. We see his collaboration with countless researchers all over the planet, his attempt to engage the world beyond the injustices of a chemical war, in the hope of saving the natural environment and its inhabitants. The book is the kind of righteous memory that the writer Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about, a memory that seems to become the witness of a brutally attacked nature, of men and women victims of ecocide. A memory that witnesses, but without accusing. The right memory of those who forget to celebrate their belonging to a nation and declare themselves willing, despite everything, to listen. This is the only antidote we know to war.

In almost all medium-sized or large Vietnamese cities, there is a War Museum. The discolored documents are shown in yellow cases. The memory of suffering is a matter of state.

A sign inside the perimeter of the old American base of Phu Cat. Taking photographs is forbidden. Large quantities of Agent Orange were been stored here. Today the soil remains contaminated.

Nature near the village of A So at the border with Laos. With the help of farmers, the botanist Phung Tuu Boi delimited the most contaminated areas in order to prevent animals from feeding from the polluted soil. Despite his efforts, the situation remains precarious.

A So What remains of an abandoned house. The government evacuated this part of the village, located right next to the old dioxin deposit. Today in this area of A So, only a tiny war museum survives. The museum is open every day like a solitary witness of the past.

Prof. Phung Tuu Boi on the right with his memoir in his hands. The American grass, technically called Pennisetum polystachyon, a weed species which has appeared in Vietnam since the American bombings.

A man takes a swim in a lake in the Ma Da forest. A reforestation program has been launched, as the plants had lost their ability to regenerate themselves. The level of dioxin in the soil is currently being analyzed.

Two boys after a swim in the river of the town of A Luoi. Agent Orange spills were particularly violent here: the village and its surroundings were very close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail which was a strategic objective of the American army.

Monkeys in the new mangrove forest of Can Gio, a unique example of regeneration of a natural environment which was devastated by the war. Mangroves are fast-growing plants. According to some, because of the homogeneous size of the plants that make up the new forest, the sun could have difficulty reaching the ground. This problem could, in the future, cause disease in plants.

Da Nang. A man and a boy during a fishing day in the pond next to the military base of Da Nang. The level of dioxin in the soil and in the water remains very high in the area. The Vietnamese government banned fishing but this does not seem to deter the inhabitants much.

The forest of U Minh Ha, seen from above. In 1967, the United States launched the HELL operation to hit what was has been named the forest of darkness, a hiding place for numerous Vietcongs. It will take hundreds of years for this forest to return to its original state.

A breeder with his cows in the vicinity of A Luoi. Behind, the signs of interrupted natural space may be seen.