The environmental history of the Vietnam War is unique in the twentieth century for the unprecedented scale of aerial bombing and use of incendiaries such as napalm, as well as the United States military’s use of tactical herbicides to destroy forest cover in combat zones. Drawing on recent trends in environmental and military history, this chapter aims to provide a more comprehensive sketch of the environmental legacies of the Vietnam War. Besides the effects of bombing and herbicides, these include inquiries into the footprints of warfare in urban and industrial development, in ethnic and demographic shifts in former warzones, in the dispersion of invasive species, and even in the creation of wilderness or conservation areas.

The epilogue explains that the resilience and stubbornness of Le Duan and other communist leaders hindered the country’s reconstruction and development after the Vietnamese Civil War finally ended. In the decade of life and leadership left for Le Duan, few positive changes took place in Vietnam. The 1978–9 incursion into Cambodia eliminated the Khmer Rouge threat, but the decade-long occupation of that country by Vietnamese forces that followed brought worldwide condemnation. Vietnam contained the Chinese incursion into its own territory in 1979, but anti-Chinese campaigns domestically prompted an exodus of tens of thousands of productive members of society. Through all this, Le Duan’s unwavering adherence to Stalinist principles of economic transformation hampered economic growth. His death in 1986 paved the way for Đổi mới, the “renovation” policy that introduced market reforms. It also set the stage for the normalization of diplomatic relations with the United States – and of life itself for average Vietnamese. Although Vietnam’s American War and Fourth Civil War have been over for nearly fifty years, the struggle for their memory continues.

Chapter 4 examines how veterans responded to the presence and absence of war remnants in Việt Nam. Returning veterans often engaged in battlefield pilgrimage as a way to reflect on the past, encountering or visiting war remnants in the form of battle locations or military bases. However, for the Vietnamese, the remnants of war were not limited to battlefields and military architecture. This chapter takes a broad view of relics and remnants, considering alongside military battlefields and bases the ecological, social, and individual effects of war on those who lived through it and those born in its aftermath. These more subtle remnants were obvious to some returnees, but to others, they were invisible. Exploring veterans’ reactions to the presence or absence of war remnants in these forms illuminates further remnants of war: the biases and other lingering effects of wartime ideologies of the Australians and Americans who returned.