“Yes, that’s right. A secret.”
Our taxi driver weaves in and out of a sea of motorbikes, honking as he narrowly misses—it seems to us—knocking riders from their seats. Hanoi’s streets twist and turn, so it often feels as though we are going in circles. Sometimes, we are.
We swing by the lake in which 500-year-old tortoises reside, happy to know that they can bask in the sun without worrying about bombs. Every morning at six a.m., Radio Hanoi begins the day with a lyrical song.
Wherever we find ourselves in the four points of the compass
Our hearts are turned to Ha Noi
Ha Noi, the capital city so dear to us,
Once showered with bombs, now in peace
We recall the old dormant streets,
The shade trees, the chorus of cicadas at noon in summer,
The newly built parks where the young grass
Is not yet marked by the traces of your steps
The Sword Lake with its blue waters
Where is mirrored the slanted shadow of the Tortoise Stupa.25
CHAPTER 4
Sprayed and Betrayed
The story of Agent Orange is the story of technology run amok and turned upon its creators.
—Senator John Kerry
MAY 7, 1984, BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Lawyers who represent Vietnam veterans and their families agree to a $180 million out-of-court settlement with the chemical companies that manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the military during the war. Outraged, veterans and their supporters call the settlement a “sellout,” denouncing the attorneys who made the agreement without notifying all of the plaintiffs, and they vow to keep fighting for justice for Agent Orange victims.
With this out-of-court settlement, Dow, Monsanto, et al. win a monumental battle. They have prevented the veterans from arguing—and more importantly from winning—their case in court.
The five companies that continue to manufacture phenoxy herbicides claim that their products are perfectly safe. But if herbicides like 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D do not in fact harm human beings, the US veterans ask, then why are veterans from Korea, New Zealand, and Australia, who were similarly exposed to these chemicals, suffering from serious ailments? Why are so many of their children born with serious birth defects? The Vietnamese people have been complaining for years about the effects of Agent Orange on their farm animals and on their families. One day they too will file a class action lawsuit charging the manufacturers of Agent Orange with war crimes.
Veterans and their families are not asking for government handouts, and—contrary to the media coverage of this case, which is the largest product liability lawsuit in American history—they are not hoping to win large sums of money. What they really want is to show the world what happens to human beings who are exposed to deadly chemicals like dioxin. Veterans want people to know that as soldiers in Vietnam they drank water and ate food contaminated with Agent Orange/dioxin. They crawled through, bathed in, and even slept in water that had been sprayed with Agent Orange. They were doused with it when aircraft returning to base after defoliation missions jettisoned their loads.
Doctors at Veterans Administration hospitals call these veterans crazy and accuse them of being alcoholics, drug addicts, and malingerers, filing false claims in order to secure disability payments. The US government denies that veterans who fought in the rice paddies, mangrove forests, and jungles of Vietnam were significantly exposed to toxic chemicals. It remains a great mystery how officials at the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense are so certain that veterans were not exposed to Agent Orange—or that even if they were, that their exposure was insignificant and that their illnesses are unrelated to herbicides. Veterans, in turn, accuse the government of stonewalling and lying. They are angry, sad, confused, and bitter. Why, they ask, has the nation they served abandoned them? Many will ask this on their deathbeds.
In order to tell their story and to warn people about the dangers of toxic chemicals, Vietnam veterans are willing to appear in courtrooms, on television, or at local and national forums as literal public exhibits. While their lawsuit is on behalf of men, women, and children who are suffering from the effects of Agent Orange, the plaintiffs want their government, and governments throughout the world, to take action to protect future generations from the scourge of toxic chemicals.
But with the settlement, Vietnam veterans and their families never get their day in court.
JUNE 1985
The Brooklyn federal courtroom is packed with reporters, Vietnam veterans and their supporters, lawyers representing the chemical companies, and, oddly enough, beautifully dressed women who seem to be models. Jack Weinstein, the presiding judge, reminds the courtroom that these “fairness hearings” are to ascertain the plaintiffs’ reactions to the out-of-court settlement.
Veterans take the stand, some wearing suits, others in combat fatigues or bright orange “Sprayed and Betrayed” tee shirts. They talk about their wives, their deformed children, their friends who are sick and dying, and their fear that Agent Orange will continue to take a heavy toll on their fellow soldiers and their families. Speaker after speaker denounces the settlement as a joke, a fraud, an insult, and yet another example of the government’s contempt for its veterans. Some speakers cry. Others break down, unable to complete their testimony.
Squeezed between beautiful women, men with dark suits and fat briefcases actually laugh as veterans testify.
I am sitting with a group of 9th Marines, “the walking dead,” who’ve formed an organization they call the Vietnam Combat Veterans Coalition. The logo on their stationery reads VCVC. Once, I helped them fill a bright orange coffin with copies of Waiting for an Army to Die (the coalition calls it their Bible) and other materials on Agent Orange. We wheeled the coffin down the main street in Trenton, New Jersey, and lugged it into the State House. An elderly security guard with a six-shooter hanging on his hip confronted the group, and after a brief discussion he agreed to watch the coffin while we addressed the legislature. We gave extemporaneous speeches to the astonished but friendly representatives and, returning to our coffin, opened the lid and handed out information about Agent Orange to government workers, the press, and to the security guard who allowed us to pass inside.
As laughter continues to fill the courtroom, a VCVC veteran sitting next to me leans over and taps a chuckling man on the shoulder.
“Yes, what is it?” the man demands.
“I want to ask you a question,” whispers the marine.
“Question?”
“That’s right, a question.”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
“What are you talking about? What kind of question is that anyway?”
“I said, have you killed anybody?” asks the veteran, leaning until the men’s noses are almost touching.
“No, of course not.”
“Well, I have,” says the marine. “Now shut the fuck up.”
Victor Yannacone, the flamboyant, hot tempered, brilliant lawyer who had filed the Agent Orange class action lawsuit on January 8, 1978, and the only lawyer veterans have ever really trusted, walks to the microphone and begins speaking, but Judge Weinstein cuts him off mid-sentence. Next, it’s my turn to speak. But when I start to question the out-of-court settlement, he interrupts me to say that I should go home and run for Congress. That way, he says, I might actually make a real difference.
I wanted to tell him about the morning, May 7, when veterans first heard about the settlement. I answered a call from the wife of a Vietnam veteran living in the midwest. She was pleading with me to talk to her husband. “He’s locked and loaded,” she said. “And he’s on his way to New York City.”
“To New York?” I asked. “What is he coming here for?”
“To kill the judge,” she said.
She was begging me to talk to a man who’d fought in some of the war’s fiercest battles, who said he’d go back to Southeast Asia and f
ight again if he were asked, a veteran who passionately loved the soldiers with whom he’d served.
I knew this ex-soldier well. His arms and legs were covered with chloracne and his daughter had been born with a serious birth defect.
“Listen, Tommy,” I said. “You’ve suffered enough. You need to think of your kids, your wife, and your fellow veterans. No one wants to see you spend the rest of your life in prison.”
A long silence, and I thought he might have hung up or left the house. Then his wife, sobbing with relief, picked up the phone. Her husband, she said, had agreed to put his M-16 back in the closet.
Yale law professor Peter Schuck will one day hail Weinstein as a “genius” for his adroit maneuvering on the Agent Orange class action lawsuit, but in a room packed with ex-soldiers, the presiding judge demonstrates a remarkable naiveté about how the US military and Veterans Administration actually function. When one former paratrooper complains that the VA has treated him with contempt, refusing to acknowledge his illness or treat his symptoms at a local clinic, the judge appears bewildered and shocked.
“But,” he replies, shaking his head in disbelief, “the government assures me that they are spending $70 million a year to treat people with Agent Orange problems.”
The courtroom bursts into laughter. “With all due respect,” says the veteran, “I think you’ve been lied to.”1
“Your honor,” says the wife of a Vietnam veteran, “I have helped bury lifelong friends who were ripped from their families at twenty-eight years old by an old age cancer. I have watched people I care about in excruciating pain caused by a combination of disorders not to be believed. I have watched good, strong men stripped of their youth, health, jobs, pensions, wives, children, and finally, their identities. I have watched good friends turn their anger on the people who care about them the most. I have held deformed and deathly ill children… I found out last week that the wives and children were taken out of this settlement…. Is this another strange and mysterious twist in this case?”2
Another veteran’s wife strides to the front of the courtroom and, shaking with rage, tells Weinstein that she thinks the fairness hearings are nothing but a circus, a sleight of hand designed to trick veterans and their supporters into believing that the judge might reconsider the settlement, perhaps even reject it altogether. The settlement, she says, will be approved; the chemical companies will continue to make lots of money; lawyers will collect large fees and strut their hour of fame. Meanwhile, Vietnam veterans will continue to bury their brothers in arms. The fairness hearings, says this enraged woman, are a big fraud, an attempt to appease Vietnam veterans and their families, a very bad joke played on victims of Agent Orange.
Five years later, a decision is reached on how the $189 million, ballooned $9 million by interest, will be distributed. The payment plan merely confirms all of the fears and bitterness expressed at the fairness hearings. A totally disabled Vietnam veteran will receive $12,000, but this will be spread out over a period of ten years, and even these meager payments could render the recipients ineligible for supplements like food stamps, public assistance, and government pensions. Widows of Vietnam veterans who can prove their husbands died from Agent Orange exposure will receive $3,700, but the children of Vietnam veterans are entirely excluded.
Meanwhile, the financiers who subsidized the plaintiffs’ attorneys receive, as a group, $750,000. An attorney who’d been a “passive investor” will receive $1,700 an hour for his services. One law firm collects over $1.3 million while another receives more than $1.8 million. The court awards a total of more than $13 million in attorneys’ fees.3
The Vietnam War was not the first time that young men were sent off to kill and die for what their government and their fellow citizens considered a noble cause. Nor was it the first time that young men who’d been sent to war by flag-waving crowds returned home to find that they were expected to keep quiet about the horrors they had seen, were expected to marry, find a job, start a family, and get on with their lives. Men and women who have experienced combat would like to do these things, but they carry scars, memories, and terrors, that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Vietnam veterans did not want to believe that their government would expose them to chemicals that, years later, would devastate their immune systems, making them susceptible to a host of diseases like kidney failure, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s Disease, brain tumors, and various kinds of cancer. They did not want to believe that corporations that profited from manufacturing and selling deadly chemicals would choose to deny their products’ toxicity, and that these corporations would refuse to offer to help veterans of what, at the time, was our nation’s longest, second most expensive, and most divisive conflict since the Civil War.
Twenty years after the original class action lawsuit is settled out of court, Vietnamese victims of chemical warfare file their own lawsuit, charging the chemical companies with war crimes. By this time, thousands of US veterans have succumbed to the effects of Agent Orange, leaving widows and children to grieve and wonder why the nation chose to ignore the pleas of their loved ones. Lawyers for the Vietnamese plaintiffs believe—with good reason—that they can call on two decades of research to convince a court to rule on behalf of Vietnamese victims of the decade-long defoliation campaign in Southeast Asia. They travel to Vietnam to see at first hand the legacies of chemical warfare in that nation. They study voluminous reports from around the world on the effects of dioxin on animals and human beings, and they consult with Vietnamese doctors and scientists who have devoted their lives to the study of dioxin and to helping victims of Agent Orange. Perhaps most importantly, they visit “peace villages” where they meet children with missing legs and arms, with huge heads, and with scaly burned-bark skin. They build what they believe to be an irrefutable case that will prove, once and for all, that human beings who are exposed to dioxin get sick and die.
The out of court settlement on May 7, 1984, seemed to have ended all hope of securing justice for victims of chemical warfare. But on January 30, 2004, lawyers for the Vietnamese will appear in a Brooklyn federal courtroom to argue their case. The presiding judge will be Jack Weinstein.
CHAPTER 5
A Lucky Man
DANANG, VIETNAM
Nguyen Dinh An has lived through attacks that smashed giant trees into splinters and turned living things to smoking dust. The aircraft that rained bombs upon his unit flew so high that no one could hear them coming. He heard the cries of wounded soldiers, and he watched men die. Low flying planes flew over almost daily, spewing chemicals that killed trees and animals, poisoned the soldiers’ food, and made them terribly ill. It was difficult to find safe haven from the bombing raids and impossible to escape the effects of chemical warfare.
For a time during the American War, Mr. An ran a Vietcong propaganda program from the basement of a Marine officers’ barracks without being discovered.
Now, Mr. An is Chairman of the Fatherland Front, an organization that is responsible for coordinating charities, NGOs, and other types of organizations in Danang. He is also Chairman of the Danang Union of Friendship Organization.
We thank Chairman An and his staff for meeting with us, and we try our best to display the proper etiquette for this occasion. In Vietnam, you are expected to arrive on time for meetings, properly dressed, and fully prepared not to waste your own or anyone else’s time. The Vietnamese workday starts around six a.m. and it ends twelve hours later, with a two-hour midday informal break during which the hustle and bustle of larger towns and cities slows down. Once, I entered a bank during the break to use an ATM. There were no tellers, and the security guard was sleeping on a bench. I felt almost guilty. Another day, forgetting that it was midday break, I walked into a Vietnamese airline (Dragon Air) office, only to find it deserted, except for a woman sleeping on the floor behind the counter. Startled, she was not at all happy to see a sweat-drenched customer.
Our interpreter signals that it is time to start th
e interview, but my recorder squeaks, stalls, and unravels. A new tape, and Mr. An begins by recalling living in the mountains when planes flew over, dousing the trees with defoliants.
“When the Agent Orange fell,” he says, “we took a towel, got it wet and covered our nose, and after that, we went to the waterfall to take a bath. You know cassava? It is like a potato, and it was our major food, but we were told that cassava was very sensitive to Agent Orange, so that’s why we tried to chop up all of the cassava we’d planted before.
“So we protected ourselves by taking a bath, and then we chopped all of the cassava. Traditionally, we used green beans, because we believed that green beans would clean up all of the poison from the chemicals. So that’s why we cooked green beans with sugar.
“After that we tried to cook all of the cassava, but when it was cooked it had a different color, it turned yellow and tasted different than it had before. But we had to eat that. We knew that the cassava was poisoned, but it was our major source of food and we had no choice but to eat it.
“I don’t know how the chemical went into our bodies, but several friends of mine at that time, when we were stationed in the same place, had cancer at a very early age, and they died. The most popular [common] one was liver cancer.
“So I always presume that I am a lucky person. I don’t know when my good fortune will be over. I got married after the war ended, and I was very happy with my very first child. She was a normal kid, so I was very happy. Many friends of mine got married after the war ended, they had children, and many of those children had birth defects. So, I had only one child, and didn’t want to have a second one because I didn’t want to take the chance. We didn’t know what it would be like.
“I have seen many families with children, and some of them have birth defects, but others are normal kids. I’ve seen mental and physical disabilities. In some kids, a part of their face gets a dark complexion. And they have several diseases. Many of them have no arms. There are really a variety of disabilities in Agent Orange kids. Why are some normal? We wonder now if the second generation is affected, and maybe the third generation will also be affected. My experience was very common in Vietnam. Many people experienced Agent Orange in different ways in their life.
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