In 1995, President Clinton announced that the United States was resuming diplomatic relations with Vietnam and, thus, ending our post-war trade embargo and a suite of punishing maneuvers that cut Vietnam off from international aid and economic development. This period of starving Vietnam economically, after our failure to defeat them militarily, has been characterized the Second American War in Vietnam.
The diplomatic opening to Vietnam followed on the heels of a domestic decision made in 1991, namely, to give health-related care and disability benefits to veterans suffering a select set of illnesses and birth defects in their children associated with their service in the U.S. war in Vietnam. For nearly 20 years after the war’s end in January 1973, the Veterans Administration (VA) and other related parts of government had treated veterans of this politically fraught war as pariahs, blaming their illnesses on drugs, alcohol, PTSD—everything but the chemical warfare we conducted in Vietnam from 1961-1971. Further, the VA held Vietnam veterans to a more rigorous standard of proof for disability than veterans of previous wars. Veterans won some meager justice only through organizing national networks, public protests, press conferences, legal challenges against chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange and the government, which approved its use. Ultimately, it was the support of Congress in passing the Agent Orange Act of 1991 that won some lasting justice in medical treatment and disability for Vietnam veterans.
If our veterans were treated so callously by our government, what of the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange?
During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, U.S. warplanes sprayed more than 20 million gallons of herbicide defoliants, chief among them Agent Orange, named for the orange stripe on its 55-gallon container. The defoliant was used to destroy the Vietnamese forest cover and food crops for National Liberation Front (pejoratively named Viet Cong) forces; by 1965 it was sprayed on populated Vietnamese villages in increased volumes. Extensive loss of forest cover, rubber plantations, mangroves, wildlife, crops, animals and freshwater fish ensued. Rural midwives and urban obstetricians began reporting newborns with animal-like faces and hydrocephalic heads, missing limbs, missing facial parts, conjoined twins and many other deformities.
In 1968, a young obstetrician in Saigon’s Tu Du Hospital, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, reported delivering grossly deformed fetuses and infants with increasing frequency, some so horrific she could not show them to their parents. Given the denial on the part of the South Vietnam and U.S. governments about the negative health effects of Agent Orange, she preserved dozens of deformed fetuses in formaldehyde, which remain today as chilling evidence of the teratogenic effects of Agent Orange.
Dr. Phuong created a residential nursery and home in Tu Du Hospital for handicapped babies whose parents lacked resources and capacity to care for them at home. The Tu Du Hospital Peace Village, as it is called, has sheltered, provided medical and rehabilitative services, raised and educated hundreds of Agent Orange victims.
Agent Orange was also truck-and hand-sprayed to clear vegetation around U.S. military bases. Former U.S. pilots later disclosed that they dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons from their planes into forests, rivers and drinking water reservoirs because military regulations required that herbicide spray planes return to base empty. In this methodical ecocide, up to one-fourth of South Vietnam was sprayed and nearly one-half of coastal mangrove forests—nurseries for marine life that fed South Vietnam—were destroyed. By the end of the war, an estimated five million Vietnamese had been exposed to Agent Orange, an exposure which has resulted in “400,000 deaths and disabilities and a half million children born with birth defects,” according to the 2008-2009 President’s Cancer Panel Report.
Today a third and fourth generation of children, born with horrific birth defects and mental retardation, continues to suffer the legacy of our chemical warfare in Vietnam. Why ongoing toxicity after decades of the war’s end? The best studies to date have found that the extremely virulent strain of dioxin in Agent Orange, known as TCDD, persists in the environment of Vietnam, particularly in areas most heavily sprayed and on former U.S. air bases where Agent Orange was stored, loaded into spraying equipment, spilled, and also used liberally to clear the periphery of the bases. Washed into local ponds during tropical rain storms, dioxin in pond sediment is long-lived and bioaccumulates in the food chain, contaminating the fish, duck and freshwater mollusks harvested by people living on or near the former bases. Recent studies by the Canadian firm Hatfield Associates have found levels of dioxin in breast milk of women living on these bases greatly exceed World Health Organization standards for breastfeeding infants. This dioxin, as on-going research has found, is a carcinogen; a teratogen resulting in birth defects; and an endocrine-disrupting compound, with the potential to damage the functions of the body’s entire hormone system.
Did the federal government, Monsanto, Dow Chemical, Diamond Shamrock, and other manufacturers of Agent Orange know about its human toxicity?
Investigations of court and National Archives documents have uncovered that the Dow Chemical Company learned as early as 1965, and possibly 1955, from a German manufacturer that the dioxin contaminant in Agent Orange, TCDD, was “one of the most toxic materials known causing not only skin lesions, but also liver damage.” In 1965 Dow wrote a confidential memo to other manufacturers regarding the exceptionally toxic dioxin in Agent Orange and expressed concern about government regulating and limiting production—and thus profits—if the information went public. In turn, the U.S. government consistently claimed ignorance about the human toxicity potential of Agent Orange throughout the 1970s and 1980s. However, in 1988 a conscience-stricken former senior scientist at the U.S. Air Force Chemical Weapons Branch, Dr. James Clary, put into writing this incriminatory statement: “When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned. We never considered a scenario in which our own personnel would become contaminated with the herbicide.”
Even in the face of new evidence, neither the industry nor the government will acknowledge what they knew about Agent Orange toxicity at the time of its manufacture and use. Both take cover behind the callous claim that there is no adequate scientific evidence proving adverse health effects in war veterans from Agent Orange/dioxin exposure. Limited evidence, suggestive evidence, and statistical correlation at best, but not definitive proof. Further, the industry is handily protected by the government contractor immunity clause. In retrospect, both industry and government sinned by omission. They failed to conduct rigorous human health studies on workers exposed occupationally and on exposed veterans during and after the war, because they did not want to face the potential consequences.
In March of 2014, I traveled through Vietnam from Hanoi to Da Nang in central Vietnam to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). The purpose of my journey was to investigate the plight of third generation Agent Orange-dioxin victims, the fate of dioxin-contaminated sites, the extent of ecological restoration needed, and what is being done to overcome these wounds of war. I visited models of community-based care for Agent Orange victims that rival our best ones for handicapped children, staffed by people who spoke of the children they cared for as their family. I found that those working to rid Agent Orange from the Vietnam environment harbor no antipathy to American citizens, while they clamor for justice from the United States government to pay for the health and environmental costs from our 10 years of chemical warfare. Were Richard Nixon’s 1973 peace negotiations’ pledge of $3.25 billion for reconstruction (a pledge spurned by Presidents Ford and Carter and rejected by Congress) honored in today’s dollars, the inflation-adjusted pledge of $17 billion would support all the costs of health, housing and educational services for Agent Orange victims. It would also support ecological restoration of forests and mangroves and the remediation costs of remaining dioxin hotspots.
More than a dozen “Peace Villages,” some with organic gardens, orchards, and animals, have been built for children and, in some cases, for Vietnamese veterans who have severe mental and/or physical challenges. Here residents receive rehabilitative care and physical therapy and those able to learn are prepared for higher education or taught vocational skills, such as sewing, flower-making, fabricating incense sticks, etc. to help support themselves and their families. Hundreds more Peace Villages are needed for the estimated tens of thousands of multigenerational victims.
The Peace Villages are organized and built by the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) with funds from the Vietnam government and international supporters. Many staff and administrators are retired Vietnamese war veterans; and some staff are themselves physically handicapped from their parents’ exposure to Agent Orange. Some pioneers in this effort to undo the ongoing harm of the Vietnam War and to heal their own spiritual wounds of war are American veterans, who raise funds for the Peace Villages, volunteer their services, and bring other veterans in the spirit of reconciliation. When I asked about their striking commitment to the Peace Villages, the retired Vietnamese veterans spoke of having lost so many friends in the war that, having lived, they want to give back to war victims. One former general likened his iron-willed commitment to his country’s 2000-year-old history of success against invaders and colonizers: “We beat the Chinese, we beat the French, we beat the Americans, now I want to beat Agent Orange.” A young university student working in the VAVA Ho Chi Minh City office, said quietly, “Look at me,” pointing to his head shaped like a light bulb. “I hope my passion will contribute to other Agent Orange victims’ happiness and freedom.” A medical doctor responsible for rehabilitative care of children at the Tu Du Hospital Peace Village responded: “My life is bound to the Agent Orange babies and I am passionate about their right to be treated humanely.”
Like many U.S. visitors to Vietnam before me, I found in Vietnam a people who are forward-looking and forgiving; a poor country (rendered more so by the 25-year US embargo which ended in 2000) doggedly lifting itself out of poverty; and a country determined not to leave their victims of Agent Orange behind. Perhaps most telling of their spirit is the response of a Vietnamese veteran when asked by U.S. veteran James Zumwalt, why Vietnamese are not bitter towards Americans. “We Vietnamese have small bodies,” he replied. “If we fill them with hate, there is no room for love.” A well of wisdom from which Americans could draw.
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