Scorched Earth

by Fred A. Wilcox

  Scorched Earth

  Fred A. Wilcox

  Scorched Earth is the first book to chronicle the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people and their environment, where, even today, more than 3 million people—including 500,000 children—are sick and dying from birth defects, cancer, and other illnesses that can be directly traced to Agent Orange/dioxin exposure. Weaving first-person accounts with original research, Vietnam War scholar Fred A. Wilcox examines long-term consequences for future generations, laying bare the ongoing monumental tragedy in Vietnam, and calls for the United States government to finally admit its role in chemical warfare in Vietnam. Wilcox also warns readers that unless we stop poisoning our air, food, and water supplies, the cancer epidemic in the United States and other countries will only worsen, and he urgently demands the chemical manufacturers of Agent Orange to compensate the victims of their greed and to stop using the Earth’s rivers, lakes, and oceans as toxic waste dumps. Vietnam has chosen August 10—the day that the US began spraying Agent Orange on Vietnam—as Agent Orange Day, to commemorate all its citizens who were affected by the deadly chemical. Scorched Earth will be released upon the third anniversary of this day, in honor of all those whose families have suffered, and continue to suffer, from this tragedy.

  Review

  “I consider Scorched Earth to be the Silent Spring of chemical warfare in Vietnam, a powerful clarion call [that brings together] scientific evidence, passionate argument, Vietnamese interviews and documentation, review of the class action suits… and new and little known evidence gathered by Vietnamese scholars… to form one coherent argument.”

  —Dr. John Marciano, Vietnam scholar, and professor emeritus, State University of New York–Cortland

  “A fascinating and compelling book on the effects on the Vietnamese people of the Agent Orange defoliation campaign during the Vietnam War, a personal, impassioned account on the part of the victims, a fascinating and at times shocking tale of an important and unresolved episode in American history.”

  —Dr. Michael Viola, director, Medicine for Peace, and retired chair, oncology department, State University of New York–Stonybrook

  Fred A. Wilcox

  SCORCHED EARTH

  Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam

  Introduction

  In the abominable history of war, with the sole exception of nuclear weapons, never has such an inhuman fate ever before been reserved for the survivors.

  —Dr. Ton That Tung, Vietnamese research scientist

  On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks smashed into the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon. Vietnam lay in ruins, its towns and cities bombed to rubble, the countryside seeded with unexploded mines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells. A decade of chemical warfare had reduced majestic triple canopy jungles to toxic graveyards. Mangrove forests, habitats for songbirds and vital to coastal ecosystems, had turned into eerie moonscapes.

  Agent Orange, the most widely used herbicide in Vietnam, was named after the orange stripe painted around the fifty-five-gallon barrels in which it was stored. It was a fifty-fifty combination of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, two commercial herbicides used widely in the United States. The 2,4,5-T in Agent Orange was contaminated with TCDD-dioxin, a carcinogenic, fetus-deforming, and quite possibly mutagenic chemical. Nearly forty years after the last spray mission, scientists continue to find high levels of dioxin in the food and water near abandoned military bases and in the blood, fatty tissue, and mother’s milk of the Vietnamese who live near these installations.

  Making their way through dense jungles, US soldiers heard a cacophony of squawking birds, chattering monkeys, and insects buzzing like high-voltage wires. But after C-123 cargo planes swooped low over the trees, inundating them with Agent Orange, the ground was littered with decaying jungle birds and paralyzed and dying monkeys. Clusters of dead fish shimmered like buttons on the surface of slow-moving streams. “It was,” said one combat veteran with whom I spoke, “like walking through a graveyard.”

  Years later, veterans would recall being soaked like the trees when aircraft jettisoned their herbicides. They’d also remember feeling dizzy, bleeding from the nose and mouth, and suffering from debilitating skin rashes and violent headaches after being exposed to Agent Orange.

  Vietnamese caught in the path of herbicide missions complained that they felt faint, bled from the nose and mouth, vomited, suffered from numbness in their hands and feet, and experienced migraine-like headaches. They said that farm animals grew weak, got sick, and even died after being exposed to defoliants. As the use of herbicides escalated, Saigon newspapers risked publishing stories about babies born with heads shaped like mice, pigs, and sheep, about two-headed babies. Peasants whose families had lived on the same land for generations said they’d never encountered such strange phenomena. Doctors and nurses who delivered these babies could not recall having seen similar birth defects before the American War.

  Scorched Earth is about a tragedy that, unlike earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and wars of limited duration, has been maiming and killing people for decades. It is about the aftermath of a chemical warfare campaign that destroyed the lives of several million Vietnamese adults and children. No one can be sure when, if ever, this calamity will end.

  In 1983, Random House published Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange, the first book to chronicle the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans. I’d spent two years interviewing scientists, doctors, lawyers, and young veterans who were sick and dying from diseases that normally do not attack young men. Many of these illnesses were remarkably similar to those from which laboratory animals suffer when they are exposed to TCDD-dioxin. Moreover, veterans from Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand who’d been exposed to Agent Orange were experiencing illnesses—cancer, numbness in their arms and legs, diabetes, and heart problems—similar to those from which US veterans were suffering.

  For the next thirty years, I kept track of research on the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on human beings and animals, taught college-level courses on the Vietnam War, wrote extensively about the war, and worked with veterans to persuade the government they’d served to treat them with dignity and respect, and to compensate them for the long list of illnesses they’d contracted due to their exposure to toxic chemicals in Vietnam.

  I have long believed that the missing link that will prove once and for all that Agent Orange destroys human beings would be found in Vietnam. In July 2009, after many long years of preparing to research and write about this link, I flew with my son on the first leg of an arduous investigative journey. On a previous trip to Vietnam, I visited a small base camp that Vietcong soldiers had constructed deep inside of the jungle. Decades after the US Air Force sprayed the area with Agent Orange, this hideaway could easily be spotted from the air. There were no birds and no animals except crocodiles and monkeys with large lumps growing on their skinny bodies. No sign that the jungle would ever return.

  My methodology in writing Scorched Earth was scientifically anecdotal, or anecdotally scientific. I did not set out to gather mountains of statistics or studies jam-packed with incomprehensible charts and graphs. Instead, I wanted to meet Vietnamese people who’d been exposed to Agent Orange; I wanted to listen to their stories and to hear if their accounts were similar to those of American veterans, as well as veterans from the other nations that sent troops to fight in Southeast Asia. Additionally, I hoped to talk with Vietnamese scientists, doctors, community activists, and others who’d dedicated their lives to researching the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on human beings. In short, I set out to listen to Vietnam.

  I wanted to observe what life is like for impoverished victims of chemical warfare in Vietnam and to record what ordinary Vie
tnamese have to say about the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on their families, and how they view their future. In many respects, I was determined to be a kind of medium for people who, as I found, struggle to survive not only their serious illnesses, but the sorrow of knowing that their plight, their destiny, is irrevocable. Their children will never attend school; they will never be able to work, marry, or bear children of their own.

  In the opening pages of this book, I give readers an overview of the massive environmental damage caused by the use of herbicides, Rome Plows, and other methods to destroy Vietnam’s forests. Proponents of the defoliation campaign told those who challenged the attack on Vietnam’s environment that the trees would soon grow back. And while some of the mangrove forests have returned, forty years after the last spray mission wild “American grass” still grows where jungles once stood. Scientists do not know when, if ever, these jungles will return.

  In Ho Chi Minh City, I interviewed the doctor who delivered the first headless baby in a Saigon hospital in 1967, and who spent the next forty years researching the effects of dioxin on pregnant women. Late one afternoon, my son Brendan and I were escorted into a locked chamber of horrors down the hall from the children’s ward in Tu Du Hospital. Inside this room, monsters float in large formaldehyde-filled glass jars. “Skeptics,” said the doctor who accompanied us there, “are more than welcome to visit this room, after which I will be happy to answer their questions.”

  I set out in Scorched Earth to show what happens to human beings who are exposed over long periods to TCDD-dioxin, the most toxic small molecule known to science. Researchers who’ve spent years studying the effects of dioxin on laboratory animals know that pregnant mice given minute doses of this chemical develop cancer and give birth to horribly deformed offspring. They know for certain that dioxin is fetotoxic in pregnant laboratory animals and that it is a human carcinogen. They know that it might well prove to be mutagenic in human beings.

  One chapter of this book is devoted to the Vietnam veterans’ 1984 class action lawsuit filed against Dow Chemical and other wartime manufacturers of Agent Orange. I also examine the Vietnamese lawsuit, filed in 2004, charging these chemical companies with war crimes. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs in these cases had hoped that the American judicial system would provide a forum for the victims of chemical warfare, one that would grant them redress for their injuries.

  This did not happen.

  My goal is to introduce readers to the catastrophe we euphemistically refer to as “the Agent Orange issue.” I wish to expand the dialogue and debate over the repercussions of chemical warfare. Vietnam veterans are dying at a rapid rate, and most of them will not live to see—should this ever happen—the chemical companies concede that they manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the military, fully aware that this defoliant was contaminated with TCDD-dioxin and fully cognizant of a process by which the dioxin levels in herbicides might have been greatly reduced.

  The war in Vietnam was not the first time that a nation resorted to a scorched earth strategy against an enemy in war; however, it was the first time in human history that, in the process of trying to defeat an adversary, a government inadvertently poisoned its own army, then waited for this army to die.

  Vietnam has fought many long and brutal wars against foreign invaders. Its people have survived famine and starvation; they’ve endured prison, torture, massacres, and mass executions. Now, they are enduring the aftermath of a chemical holocaust.

  In the last chapter, readers will find letters that victims of chemical warfare have written to Ken Herrmann, a decorated Vietnam veteran, college professor, director of a college-level study abroad program in Vietnam, and a long-time advocate for victims of Agent Orange.

  In these letters, the Vietnamese parents of seriously deformed children, ex-soldiers, and the terminally ill express their grief, their sorrow, and their sincere hope that someone will care enough to help them. They also express their fear that the United States of America may have forgotten about them altogether.

  “We, the AO victims,” writes one man, “really appreciate your concern for us. The war has been over for almost 30 years. The Americans have begun to forget about us while millions of the Vietnamese people are still living with its disastrous effects…. There are many families that are affected into the third generation. We still have no idea when AO will stop affecting the health and safety of my innocent people. It may affect the fourth and fifth generations. The list may be longer.”

  A widow whose child suffers from serious birth defects writes that she has been spiritually devastated by “knowing that my only child is in danger. As a widow, I don’t know what to do to help my daughter. It is most miserable to know that the poisonous water I drank when I was young is the cause of her disease. The poison has passed from my genes to hers.”

  The United States has yet to send teams of epidemiologists to Vietnam to study the effects of toxic chemicals on the Vietnamese people, and US courts have failed to find ways to hold corporations that care more about profits than people responsible for their actions. Historians will write the final verdict on government stonewalling, political chicanery, and scientific fraud in the long, sad saga of Agent Orange.

  Scorched Earth is about a monumental tragedy, but it is also about courage, resilience, determination, love, and what appears to be a remarkable optimism in the face of insurmountable odds.

  In Hanoi, we met Phung Tuu Boi, a forester who exemplifies the indomitable spirit of the Vietnamese people. While the war still raged, he began planting trees in defoliated zones. Asked if he wasn’t afraid that he might step on a mine or an unexploded cluster bomb, he shrugged and laughed. He has organized teams to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, and he intends to plant millions more.

  Dr. Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan, a veteran of the war against France and a prominent Agent Orange activist, insisted that one day the US government and the chemical companies will agree to pay compensation to Agent Orange victims.

  “Remember,” he smiled, “we Vietnamese have lost many battles, but we always win the war.”

  Dr. Nhan was not gloating, just expressing an ancient culture’s infinite patience and unlimited capacity to endure hardship.

  Vietnam is a beautiful, vibrant nation whose citizens are determined to rebuild their country so their children can live in prosperity and peace. All they ask is that the United States government and the corporations that profited from chemical warfare in Vietnam acknowledge the harm they caused and agree to help desperately poor victims of Agent Orange. Until then, they will continue their efforts to show the world the ravages of chemical warfare.

  There must never be another tragedy like the one that began in the White House with the momentous decision to launch chemical warfare in a far-off nation that lacked either the ability or the desire to harm the United States of America.

  During two research trips to Vietnam, I promised the Vietnamese, who so graciously shared their time—translating for hours on end, arranging transportation to and from interviews, answering a thousand questions—that I would write and publish a book on the legacies of chemical warfare in Vietnam. Scorched Earth fulfills that promise.

  CHAPTER 1

  Ecocide

  The destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing and by the large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage that is sometimes referred to as “ecocide.”

  —Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 1972

  LATE NOVEMBER, 1961, WASHINGTON, DC

  President John F. Kennedy is worried. The Vietcong, a pejorative term for those who are fighting against Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime in Saigon, are taking over large swaths of the countryside. American military advisors have failed to turn Diem’s inept and apathetic troops into a hard-charging army. Vietnam is an impossible terrain, cut to pieces by rivers and canals, covered with dense jungles and snake-infested swamps, populated by man-eating tigers. The ene
my knows every inch of this forbidding landscape. Defeating them will require bold new strategies.

  And so the president’s inner circle discusses the pros and cons of using herbicides in Southeast Asia. It seems that the British used chemicals with some success when fighting guerrillas in Malaysia, and the advisors feel it might be worth testing—and possibly using—chemical defoliants in Vietnam. Countries like Sweden might complain that the US is violating some international treaty or other, but the regime in Saigon is doing its best to defeat communist guerrillas and needs greater support, the State Department and the Department of Defense support the use of herbicides, and Congress will undoubtedly go along with any program that helps prevent a communist takeover of Southeast Asia.

  Secretary of State Dean Rusk assures President Kennedy that “successful plant-killing ops in [Vietnam], carefully coordinated with and incidental to larger ops, can be substantial assistance in the control and defeat of the [Vietcong]… the use of defoliant does not violate any rule of international law concerning the conduct of herbicidal warfare and is an accepted tactic of war.”1

  President Kennedy approves the joint recommendation of the State Department and Department of Defense to “initiate a large scale herbicidal/chemical warfare program. Both departments advanced the use of herbicides for defoliation only, apparently recognizing that the destruction of enemy crops was a clear violation of international law and a war crime, and were therefore unwilling to explicitly endorse such a program.”2

  Influential State Department officials such as Roger Hilsman and W. Averell Harriman oppose the use of herbicides in Vietnam, warning that if civilians are harmed, the US might be perceived as a “barbaric imperialist.”3