An epidemic of bubonic plague engulfed Vietnam during the 1960s. Strikingly, it has all but vanished from historical accounts of the Vietnam War. By reading US military medical sources with and against writings by critics of the war and placing both in relation to scholarship in environmental history, this article seeks to recover a narrative of the bubonic plague epidemic in Vietnam. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on more familiar stories of defoliation, deforestation, and warfare, illustrating not only how these histories crisscross and overlap in vital ways that have remained barely legible in extant scholarship but also how a plague epidemic can evaporate into “nature” when it is politically expedient for it to do so. The disappearance of the epidemic in our histories of the Vietnam War reflects what can happen when the very terms for how to make sense of a medical crisis become politicized and the existence and extent of that crisis are disputed. The consequences of such a contest over meaning fit a long-standing pattern in histories of social medicine and public health in the United States, especially when those histories intersect with histories of race and racism.
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