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AGENT ORANGE
THE LEGACY OF A WEAPON OF MASS DESTRUCTION
BY JEREMY LAURENCE
Thirty-five years after the U.S. sprayed the jungles of
Vietnam with toxic defoliant, thousands of babies are still
being bom with horrific effects. But unlike the American
veterans, no one in the war-ravaged country has received
any compensation.
On a table in the dimly lit room lay a small white bundle,
tied with silver ribbon. With a brilliant smile and a barked order,
Professor Nguyen Thi Phuong directed me to the morgue of the
Tu Du Maternity Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon)
to see the latest evidence of the impact of a war that ended more
than 30 years ago.
Outside on the streets, thronged with motor scooters in
the 30C heat, young men and women stopped to buy roses from
the flower sellers at the hospital gates, preparing to give them to
loved ones. In the morgue, an anonymous block at the back of
this 1,000-bed hospital, love had had an unexpected, tragic out­
come. Somewhere in the hospital, a mother was grieving for the
loss of her son.
A porter donned latex gloves and untied the ribbon.
Carefully unwrapping the bundle, he revealed a tiny corpse,
delivered a few hours earlier, its skin a livid purple, fine black
strands of hair plastered to Its head. He turned the infant over
and there, at the base of the spine where the tissue had failed
to form, like a wound, was the unmistakable sign of spina bifida.
This is the only birth defect recognized by the U.S. as
a legacy of Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed by
American troops from 1965 until 1971 during the Vietnam War.
But there is worse, far worse, in this hospital, the largest in south
Vietnam. Some of the most severely affected babies, abandoned
by their parents, live on two floors in a wing known as the Peace
Village.
Entering it is like stepping back 40 years to the days of
Thalidomide, the morning-sickness pill prescribed in Britain in the
1960s that left babies hideously deformed. In the first room, cots
line the walls. In one, a 4 year old girl rocks on all fours, gently
banging her head against the bars. A nurse turns her round to
reveal a face with no eyes. Under a thick fringe of dark hair,
there are soft indentations in the skin either side of her nose,
where her eyes should be. Above her cot a printed label gives
her name as Tran Sinh, and her date of birth as 27 February
2002. According to the nurses, she was born in an area heavily
sprayed by Agent Orange, where the land is still contaminated
35 years after the spraying stopped.
In the cot next to her, Tran Loan, aged 5 months, has a
head the size of a melon and is whimpering softly. He has hydro­
cephalus— fluid on the brain. Next to him a child wearing a stripy
red T-shirt has stumps for legs.A 3 year old with a crazily pointed
skull and bulging eyes lies on his back staring at the ceiling. But
for his Mickey Mouse T-shirt, he Ipoks as if he belongs in another
world.
A group of less severely affected children are setting
off for school. Minh Phlic, 15, binds himself into his artificial legs
with his one good arm. “I can be taller than you,” he says
proudly, levering himself to his feet.
There were 454 babies with congenital defects born
in the hospital last year, out of 36,000 deliveries. “Those are
just the visible ones, We do not know about defects to internal
organs, or those that only emerge years later,” Professor Phuong
said. The Vietnamese government estimates 500,000 children
have been bom with birth defects caused by contamination with
Agent Orange, and two million suffered cancers and other ill
effects — innocent victims of a chemical intended to harm plant
life, not humans. But unlike the American soldiers who sprayed
the defoliant, they have never received compensation.
They have the best chance in a generation of obtaining
redress: a lawsuit against U.S. manufacturers of Agent Orange
to be heard in the U.S. courts is generating unprecedented
support, nationally and internationally.
Agent Orange, so-called because of the orange stripe
on the drums in which it was stored, contained dioxin, one of the
most toxic chemicals known. An estimated 80 million liters of the
defoliant, containing 386 kilograms of dioxin, were sprayed on
Vietnam. One millionth of a gram per kilo of body weight is
enough to induce cancers, birth defects and other diseases
when exposure persists over a long period — as U.S. veterans
discovered in the years after the war.
Cancers, birth defects and other diseases struck the
returning veterans in unexpected numbers. Those who had had
contact with the chemical sued the manufacturers and in 1984
won what was then the largest ever settlement of $180 million
against seven of the world's biggest chemical companies,
including Dow and Monsanto. But more than 20 years on, while
most of the Americans who did the spraying were compensated,
the Vietnamese who had the toxic chemical sprayed on them are
still waiting for redress.
Last year, Vietnam veterans sued the same U.S. chemi­
cal companies claiming they knew Agent Orange contained a
poison — dioxin — and their action in supplying it to the U.S.
government breached international law and constituted a war
crime. They lost in the first round but they are pinning their hopes
on an appeal.
Dioxin is a by-product of the manufacturing process
of Agent Orange and a key issue in the case is how much the
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manufacturers knew about their product, and at what stage. If
the appeal fails, the veterans have pledged to take their fight
to the Supreme Court. In the run-up to the hearing, they have
turned up the pressure on the U.S. government with a tour of
U S. cities last December, and an international petition coordin­
ated from London. An motion put down by Labor Member of
Parliament Robert Marshall-Andrews in the House of Commons
calls for the Vietnamese to be “similarly compensated” to the
Americans 20 years ago.
The veterans’ long campaign for justice has seized the
public imagination in Vietnam, according to British diplomats in
Hanoi, with fund-raising parties and newspaper campaigns back­
ing the fight. The veterans are ageing — many have died — and
there is a sense that time is running out. But there is also anger
at the continuing effects of the toxin on current generations.
The mother of the spina bifida baby whose body lay in
the morgue of the Tu Du Hospital had not been born when the
Vietnam War ended. Yet high levels of dioxin remain in the soil in
hotspots across southern Vietnam, taken up by plants and crops
and leaching into the water to contaminate new generations.
Professor Phuong, 63, consultant obstetrician and until
last November medical director of the Tu Du Hospital, has spent
much of her 40-year career researching the effects of Agent
Orange and has watched the rate of birth defects rise. But she
admits that obtaining hard evidence linking individual cases to
the poison is difficult. “The U S. soldiers have diaries of where
they were sent and what they were doing. We have no data.
So how can we have proof?"
Vast areas of Vietnam were stripped bare of vegetation
by the defoliant. One of the most contaminated is at Cu Chi, 25
miles outside Ho Chi Minh City, where tourists crawl through the
famous network of Viet Cong tunnels. Visitors are shown a film
of women picking fruit in what was once known as the Garden
of Cu Chi, where office workers came to picnic at weekends and
watch the harvest.
Today the picnickers are gone. Slender saplings, no
thicker than a man’s arm, have grown up in the past 20 years to
shade the tourists — but there are no fruit trees and no harvest.
In a speech to the U S. Senate in August 1970, displayed in the
War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, Senator Gaylord
Nelson said: “Never in human history have people witnessed
one country’s making war on the living environment of another."
Bien Hoa, two hours, drive to the west along narrow
roads jammed with scooters, bicycles and carts, Is the site of
an old U.S. military base where 7,000 gallons of Agent Orange
were spilt during the war. People who live in the town have
among the highest levels of dioxin in the country — 413 parts per
trillion, 207 times higher than in unsprayed areas. But research
on the health effects has never been done and pledges of
support from America have come to nothing.
Soldiers standing guard at the base, now operated by
the Vietnamese military, turn away unauthorized visitors. As
darkness fell at the Quinh Lanh Café opposite the gate, where
workers were settling down to watch the TV, I bought a bottle of
mineral water. It was sourced from the mountains in the north.
The water in nearby Lake Bien Hung is so heavily contaminated
with dioxin, more than 30 years since the spraying stopped, that
fishing is still banned.
In Hanoi, Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan, former minister
of health and vice president of the Vietnam Association of Agent
Orange Victims, says international support is growing for what
he calls Vietnam’s “great social and humanitarian problem." Last
January, a South Korean court ordered U.S. chemical compan­
ies to pay $63 million compensation to 6,800 South Korean
soldiers (and Marines) who fought in Vietnam. “No one can
tell how many more generations will be affected. We think the
compensation (for Vietnam) must be large. People's lives and
health are severely affected. Unfortunately, the Americans have
avoided their responsibility,” he says.
Aged 76, and a veteran of the war against the French
in which he lost his two brothers, he points to a picture of himself
meeting Bill Clinton. The former U.S. President in 1996 formally
accepted a recommendation from the American Institutes of
Medicine that 13 conditions ranging from prostate cancer to
peripheral neuropathy (numbness in the hands and feet), should
be recognized as likely to have been caused by Agent Orange.
That decision led to American veterans with the conditions
receiving payments worth thousands of dollars a year while the
Vietnamese get nothing. “It is a battle even more difficult than the
battle with weapons. We must have confidence that we will win,"
said Professor Nhan.
There is one major to success. The Vietnamese govern­
ment is anxious to join the World Trade Organization to open up
new markets for its booming economy, and the Americans are a
big obstacle in their way. Embarrassing the U.S. government at
this point could sink Vietnam's hopes.
Portraying their country as poisoned is also not the best
way to boost trade.Vietnam is the world’s second largest export­
er of shrimp to the European Union. Any suggestion of contam­
ination could wipe out this lucrative market. President Tran Due
Luong is thus caught on the horns of a dilemma. During a visit
to the U.S. last year, he raised the matter of Agent Orange but
did not make an issues of it. The American embassy in Hanoi
declined (my) request for an interview.
The Americans hoped that concern in Vietnam about
Agent Orange would gradually die, along with the ageing war
veterans. Instead, the sense of injustice has grown. In Tu Du
Hospital, and in the 10 Peace Villages across the country where
the children with the worst birth defects live, they are pinning
their hopes on the outcome of the veterans’ court case.
With a shake of her head, Professor Phuong says,
“Please ask for justice for the Vietnamese victims. Time is
running out.”
Jeremy Laurance wrote this article for the British
publication, The Independent/UK.
AN ISSUE OF CONCERN
BY DAVID CLINE
Severe health problems associated with the U.S.
military’s use of a chemical defoliant during the Vietnam War
have long been an issue of concern for the veterans’ community.
Popularly known as Agent Orange, this herbicide was heavily
contaminated with tetrachlorodibenzoparadioxin (TCDD).’ one
of the most deadly carcinogens known.
Over many years, Vietnam veterans began to get sick
and have children with birth defects, and many died. Veterans
have struggled to have the Veterans Administration provide
testing, treatment and compensation for those affected
This struggle began in the 1970s and went through
many twists and turns as the chemical companies that
manufactured Agent Orange — and the U.S. government
that ordered and deployed it — tried to deny any responsibility
and even claimed it was harmless.
In 1984, the chemical companies that manufactured
Agent Orange agreed to pay $180 million in damages to
veterans. In 1991, Congress passed the Agent Orange Act,
recognizing the negative health effects of this defoliant and
acknowledging certain conditions for VA medical treatment
and disability compensation. Since that time, more conditions
have been acknowledged, but many others are still not
recognized Veterans who served in the South Korean,
Australian and New Zealand militaries under U.S. command
have also brought lawsuits.
But the largest group of people affected by Agent
Orange have never received any form of justice. They are
the people of Vietnam, both North Vietnam Army/Viet Cong
and ARVN (South Vietnamese) soldiers and many times
more civilians who were trapped in the war zones
In 2004, the suffering Vietnamese formed the Vietnam
Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA) and
initiated a lawsuit in U S. courts against the companies that
manufactured the chemical poison. The case is scheduled to
be heard in a federal appellate court in New York City this fall.
In support of the Vietnamese victims, U.S. Vietnam
veterans have formed the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief &
Responsibility Campaign and are working with them and other
Agent Orange victims throughout the world to continue this
struggle until all those affected receive some justice.
At the end of March, I took a delegation of four other
U.S. veterans who are Agent Orange victims (Joan Duffy,
Ralph Steele, Dan Shea and Frank Corcoran) to Hanoi for
an international conference on Agent Orange that included
participants from Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and
Canada, along with support groups from France, England,
and several other European countries.
After that, we traveled to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon),
Cu Chi, and Hue, where we were hosted by VAVA chapters,
met with victims and visited hospices and friendship villages
where some of the many thousands of the most seriously
deformed Agent Orange children are tended They are run
by the support of international veterans, the Catholic church,
or local governments and hospitals.
This issue is an ongoing and unresolved legacy of
the U.S war in Vietnam and is something that needs to be
addressed and resolved if we are ever going to heal the wounds
of that period in our nation's history
To find out more and to get involved in the campaign in
the United States, contact the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief &
Responsibility Campaign, P O. Box 303, Prince Station, New
York, NY10012 or visit the website at www vn-agentorange.org.
David Cline is a disabled combat veteran who served
with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam during 1967. Upon his
return, he joined the Gl antiwar movement and helped publish
the underground ‘Fatigue Press’ at Fort Hood, Texas. In 1970,
he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and has been a
member ever since He is currently president o f Vets for Peace
His article is reprinted from the VVAW newspaper, ‘The Veteran'.