Le Van Can doesn’t know whether his wife was exposed to Agent Orange, but since the US destroyed the forests in Cu Chi, she most likely ate food and drank water contaminated with dioxin.
Like all of the former soldiers we meet, our host speaks softly, without the slightest hint of bravado or, most peculiar to our American sensibilities, the tremble of anger in his voice. Perhaps, if I persisted, he might say something about the battles in which he fought, or the final push on April 30, 1975, into Saigon, ending forty years of war against the French colonialists and American armies.
I am well aware that some people still blame Vietnam for the war. They are angry because Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi. They hate anyone who fought against the war, and they call veterans who fraternize with former Vietcong North Vietnamese traitors. They say the Vietnamese are still holding American prisoners of war.
This kind of thinking has been an impediment to finding the missing link that will prove, once and for all, that Agent Orange/dioxin maims and kills human beings. I came to Vietnam to write about that missing link, not to reopen wounds or to engage in futile arguments about a war that tore the heart out of my generation. I do not know, nor do I care to know, what men like Le Van Can might have done in the war. He and his family are living with the legacies of chemical warfare. We are human beings; that is our common bond; that is the only thing that should matter now.
Le Van Can’s son
Is there really any difference between the thirty-one-year-old invalid lying on a bamboo bed in Cu Chi and a personal friend of mine who joined the Marines when he was seventeen years old, was leading reconnaissance missions in the Northern I Corps when he was nineteen, and is now dying, slowly and painfully, from Agent Orange-related illnesses? Do American Agent Orange children deserve more help, more love and kindness, than those who lie twisted, blind, and deaf upon pallets and floors and bamboo beds throughout Vietnam?
Before he left for the war, Le Van Can fathered one normal child. When he returned, his wife carried three of their children. One died before it was born, another lived for several days, and still another survived for three years. Their son has lived for thirty-one years.
This man and his wife have allowed us to visit their home, where we photograph their seriously deformed son, and ask questions that must cause them pain. They survive through help from the Red Cross and donations from others. People come and go, curious to know if the stories they’ve heard about chemical warfare can possibly be true. Shocked by what they see and hear, they return home determined to help victims of Agent Orange. Sometimes these people follow through on promises to write their representatives, to raise money, or to do what they can to persuade the chemical manufacturers of Agent Orange to use some of their profits to help Vietnamese families.
Le Van Can lights a cigarette and we shake hands across the concrete table at which we’ve been sitting. I ask our interpreter to say that I am sorry that Mr. Can and his family are suffering from the effects of chemical warfare. She talks for a long time, the blind man nods once and does not say anything more.
Many years before this trip to Vietnam, I spent an evening with a Vietnam veteran who served with a psychological warfare (PSYOPS) unit.
“We used to play tapes from loudspeakers,” my host told me, “basically saying that the VC were telling the people that herbicides were making them sick and that the spraying was responsible for their miscarriages and illnesses. And the tapes would say that the VC are lying, that they just don’t like the sprays because it makes it hard for them to hide, and that the VC are actually poisoning people’s water so the people will think it’s the herbicides that are making them sick.
“I was young and gung-ho at the time; so I just believed the propaganda we were feeding the people. We heard the Vietnamese complain. They talked about depressions, diarrhea, colds, rashes, and spontaneous abortions. But it was a war zone, and we just figured there were a lot of diseases that we had never heard of.
“Thinking back, I recall being struck by the number of children with cleft palates. And I suffered from the same things over and over, screaming pains in my joints, pains in my gut, blood in my urine, my feet going numb. But the hardest thing to deal with was the sudden depressions that came on you. You just wanted to go out into a field and stick a pistol in your mouth and pull the trigger.”4
Years before the United States launched its scorched earth campaign in Vietnam, scientists for Dow Chemical, one of the principal manufacturers of Agent Orange, were aware that dioxin is teratogenic and fetotoxic in rats and mice. In numerous studies over a period of decades, scientists have repeatedly shown that laboratory animals exposed to minute quantities of dioxin suffer catastrophic consequences.
In an exhaustive research paper, “Association between Agent Orange and Birth Defects: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” the authors write:
Results of this meta-analysis combining data from twenty-two studies support the hypothesis that exposure to Agent Orange is associated with a statistically significant increase in the risk of birth defects, with a significant heterogeneity of effects across study populations. The result complements a previous finding that the risk of spina bifida, a specific birth defect, was elevated with Agent Orange exposure.5
The results of their study were:
consistent with previous animal studies. Indeed, the detrimental effect of dioxin on congenital malformations has been documented in animal studies in which dioxin was shown to act as either a teratogen or mutagen.
For example, maternal exposure to dioxin resulted in cleft palate and hydronephrosis in mice and hamsters, intestinal hemorrhage and renal abnormalities in rats, 61 extra ribs in rabbits, and spontaneous abortions in monkeys.
There is evidence that mutagenic effects of dioxin can take place at the genetic level. Dioxin was found to cause chromosomal anomalies in the bone marrow cells of some specific strains of rats and mice, and stimulate RNA synthesis in rat liver. Evidence from animal studies indicates that the observed association between Agent Orange/dioxin and birth defects in humans seems biologically plausible…. among populations exposed to Agent Orange, an elevated incidence of birth defects may have occurred…. Findings from this meta-analysis support the hypothesis that exposure to Agent Orange is associated with a statistically significant increase in risk of birth defects. The biological mechanism of this association and methodological limitations of Vietnamese studies warrant the consideration of conducting a large-scale and well-designed study in heavily sprayed regions of Vietnam to further elucidate the etiology of the Agent Orange and birth defects relationship. Future studies need to include biological measures of exposure. The long half-life of dioxin makes this possible even now.6
Our interpreter tells the family goodbye and I attempt to thank the woman of the house for the tea, but she has gone into the next room to care for her son.
Walking along a path back to the road, we stop to admire neat rows of bright green vines, perhaps cucumbers, soaking up the sun. It is noon, we are hungry, and have no idea where we might be going next, or how the men who accompany us manage to arrange these meetings with the people who do not have telephones or computers. Brendan stops to adjust his camera.
“Jesus, dad, he’s my age, isn’t he?” he asks.
“Yes, he’s your age,” I say. “Thirty-one years old.”
“Thirty-one years old.”
“And all that time, he’s just been there.”
Mother and child
“Just there.”
The ex-soldiers who accompany us climb into their car and we follow them along the dusty roads of Cu Chi district. Once, wild animals roamed this region’s forests. We pass rice paddies, clumps of trees, heaps of rubbish. A dog. Two water buffalo. Overhead, the ubiquitous electric wires that mar Vietnam’s natural beauty.
Testifying before a US Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Maureen Ryan, whose husband served with the Marines in Vietnam, and whose d
aughter was born with at least sixteen birth defects, lamented the toll the war had taken on veterans’ offspring.
“Just as truly as the bullets and bombs killed on the battlefields in Vietnam,” said Mrs. Ryan, “maiming thousands of our men, Agent Orange has come home from those battlefields with our men. It has come home to maim and kill additional thousands of men who naively thought they had made it home safely. It would be tragic enough if it had ended there.
“But what the United States and what our Vietnam veterans did not know was that they carried home a tremendous legacy with them. They did not know that their children were with them on the battlefield, genetically. So Agent Orange is now reaping an additional harvest of birth defects and cancers in our children and men. We are losing our children through spontaneous abortions, through miscarriages, and perhaps most tragically in the surviving children, with the horrifying birth defects.”7
Angered by the Veterans Administration’s argument that it had not conducted an Agent Orange outreach program because it did not wish to confuse or frighten veterans and their wives, Ryan said, “It is not frightening when you are handed knowledge. It is much more frightening when you are kept in the dark. It is much more frightening to give birth to a child with birth defects. It is more frightening to know your husband is dying of cancer.”8
In July 2009, the Bookworm bookstore in Hanoi invited me to give a public talk, at which I was asked what I thought about conducting more research studies on the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on human beings. I answered that before we do any more studies we should find ways to help victims of the defoliation campaign. This upset one woman who argued that scientists need to crunch more numbers, juggle more statistics, and collect more evidence. But how long will it take to secure funding for these studies? And once this research is complete, exactly how many more years will it take for a panel to peer review the methodology and findings of a particular study? Once a study is deemed credible, how long will it be before scientists working for the chemical companies attempt to discredit the researchers’ findings? After five, ten, fifteen years, will the original study be tossed out or repeated, using altogether new methods for determining correlations between dioxin exposure and birth defects, cancer, and a host of other illnesses?
Meanwhile, the twisted body of a thirty-one-year-old man lies upon a bamboo pallet in Cu Chi district. His mother feeds him, changes his clothing, and massages his limbs to soothe the discomfort and pain he cannot describe. Are there one, two, five million victims of chemical welfare? Do the numbers matter? By the time more studies on the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on human beings are completed, many more Vietnamese children will have died, leaving their parents to grieve and to wonder what their lives might have been like if their country had been allowed to live in peace.
CHAPTER 11
Chemical Children
These Agent Orange births are normal for us…. Every now and then we have what we call a fetal catastrophe—when the number of miscarriages and deformed babies, I am afraid to say, overwhelms us.
—Dr. Pham Viet Than, Tu Du Hospital
Agent Orange children in Tu Du Hospital.
To visitors, the quiet unassuming demeanor of Vietnamese people might be disconcerting. Given the costs of the war—between two and five million Vietnamese dead, several million victims of Agent Orange, including more than 150,000 children, hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, broken promises, a prolonged and punishing trade embargo—one might expect anger, accusations, perhaps even insults. On the contrary, US veterans who return to the sites where they once fought vicious battles meet former enemies who welcome them as friends. The warriors get drunk together, sing, tell stories, and do what they can to heal the wounds of a long cruel war.
In the visitors’ room at Tu Du, there’s a display of books and pamphlets on Agent Orange, one with the peculiar title, “Cheer Up, Viet and Duc!” Inside of this book, there’s a black and white photograph of Siamese twin boys connected at the waist, with one pair of legs and one set of genitals protruding from the point where the babies are attached. The twins, Viet and Duc, were born on February 25, 1981, in the Gialai-Kontum area in the Central Highlands, a heavily defoliated region of Vietnam. Terrified that they had given birth to “monsters,” the boy’s parents abandoned them, and the twins were flown to the Vietnam-East German Friendship Hospital, but they were quite ill and could not be separated. When they were twelve months old, they were taken to Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.
“The Tu Du Maternity Hospital,” opens the book,
stands in a beautiful place in Ho Chi Minh City, where red and white tropical flowers and blossoms bloom all the year round.
Inside the hospital, about eight hundred women are suffering, mostly from cancer, and every two days one deformed baby is born. This problem was probably caused by the herbicide containing dioxin, which the US used in the Vietnam War.
Since the US began to use this poison in 1961, more than twenty conjoined babies have been born in Vietnam, but most of them either were born dead or died within one year. Only Viet and Duc have barely survived….
When I returned to my hotel and showed another Japanese a picture of Viet and Duc, he said very disgustedly, “Oh my goodness, why are such children kept alive?” I trembled with uncontrollable anger. Each and every human being has the right to live and develop.
The author decided to build a wheelchair for Viet and Duc, whom he describes as rather ordinary boys, in spite of the fact that they had the same organs in common, had to cooperate when urinating and excreting, and acknowledged that “it was certain that one’s illness could be a great threat to the other’s life.”
Lying unstably, Viet and Duc made fun of each other. Viet was very playful and fond of fruit. Duc liked learning and had a sweet tooth. They both loved cars. Duc was physically weaker and usually lay down while Viet sat up. So Duc’s side hair was worn out.1
When I attempt to return the book to the display case, Dr. Nguyen Thi Phuong Tan, director of rehabilitation of the Hoa Binh Village at Tu Du Hospital, politely insists that I must carry it home. But this book is a rare find, most likely out of print, the hospital’s only copy. Dr. Tan smiles, her cell phone rings, I continue reading.
On October 4, 1988, a team of Japanese and Vietnamese doctors operated for fifteen hours at Tu Du Hospital to separate Viet and Duc. Viet survived twenty more years while Nguyen Duc still lives at the hospital.
Dr. Tan has been working in Tu Du hospital for twenty years, and she’s been in charge of this “Peace Village” for twelve years. There are sixty children here, many with disabilities like missing fingers and toes, mental disabilities, and some with dysfunctions of the spinal cord. Dr. Tan explains that other children suffer from some dysfunction or unusual alteration in their DNA. Most of the children come from Quang Tri Province, the Central Highlands, Kontum, and other defoliated regions.
Dr. Tan thinks that some of the boys and girls in Peace Villages like Hoa Binh are third generation Agent Orange children. Some of them need operations to repair their deformed faces so they can work outside of the village. Those who are capable of learning attend classes in the hospital. If the children’s parents fought in heavily sprayed areas, or if they were farmers there during the war, it’s reasonable to assume, says Dr. Tan, that they were exposed to dioxin.
Critics dismiss this approach to determining the cause of birth defects found in Vietnamese children as “anecdotal.” In one sense, as attorney Dean Kokkoris pointed out, they have a valid argument. Vietnamese researchers are not willing to feed human beings dioxin-laced rice. They have not injected dioxin into the bodies of perfectly healthy men and women. Scientists in other parts of the world refuse to treat human beings like lab rats. Until researchers give up their aversion to testing dioxin on human beings, the lawyers who work for the chemical companies and the judges who preside over Agent Orange lawsuits will refuse to accept the argument that dioxin harms human beings.
S
howing off for visitors.
During our travels, we have seen children with missing fingers, toes, arms, and legs; children with lobster claw hands, twisted feet, large heads, stunted bodies, strange dark blotches on their faces and arms, purple bark-like skin. We’ve heard parents talk about children whose brains seem to develop normally for a few years and then, for some inexplicable reason, this growth stalls, freezing the child’s development at an early age, so that while he might resemble a quite ordinary Vietnamese adolescent, he can not perform simple tasks.
Like all of the Vietnamese doctors, scientists, and community workers with whom we meet, Dr. Tan is fully aware that some people refuse to believe that dioxin is responsible for the blind girl who spends her days banging her face against the slats of her crib; the boy whose watermelon head looks like it might explode; the teenage girl with missing arms who has learned to draw and write by holding a pencil between her toes; the small boy whose body stopped developing just below the waist, so he sits, half of him, huge brown eyes sad beyond sad; the little girl who scoots about the ward on chubby stumps that will never develop into legs.
“People come from all over the world to visit Tu Du’s Peace Village,” says Dr. Tan, “We ask them if they’ve ever seen any cases like the children in Vietnam that we are working with. And some of them say they have never seen a case like this. Others say yes, they have, but it is quite rare. These are doctors from around the world, Australia, Canada, France, and they see these children, and they know that they come from areas that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange.
Scorched Earth Page 12
