Scorched Earth

by Fred A. Wilcox

  “I hope that when your book is published, the international community will then know what I, as a doctor, have seen all these years—that Agent Orange was used in Vietnam, causing problems for people here, not just for the first generation, but for other generations.”

  Boy with a large head.

  “When Agent Orange was sprayed here,” Dr. Tan continues, “it left a burden until now, so we have so many children suffering from Agent Orange, and it is a burden for the economy and for society. And I want to say that the ones who sprayed the Agent Orange have to be responsible for what they did in Vietnam. They have to compensate, and they have to help us to solve this problem. This is their responsibility.”

  In 1995, friends of Vietnam from the German city of Oberhausen established Peace Village at Tu Du Hospital, a place where Agent Orange children can live in a genuinely loving, supportive community. There are other peace villages in Ho Chi Minh City, Cu Chi, Danang, and Hanoi. In these villages, the staff gives the children love and treats them with kindness and dignity. Vietnam’s Agent Orange children suffer from a variety of physical handicaps and mental disabilities, but this does not keep them from greeting us with laughter and hugs. They pose for pictures, want to be picked up, and show off like ordinary children, except they must scramble about on missing, deformed, and stunted limbs.

  Pals

  Girl born without eyes.

  Duc enters the room in a wheelchair, and we talk briefly about the operation that separated him from Viet. He works as a computer technician at Peace Village and has been married for two years. Does he feel any anger toward the United States government or the chemical companies?

  “No,” he says. “I don’t care about this. Because I know that if I get angry, nothing can change my life. I was born with such a situation, so what I’m doing now is to strive for my life. To try my best to have a good life.”

  Like Dr. Tan, he wants the chemical companies to do something to help people. Most people live in rural areas, and they have a difficult life, he says. So there must be some kind of action taken to help them.

  Duc and his wife plan to have their first child this year. He leaves before we get a chance to ask him what they plan to name their new baby.

  Dr. Tan motions for us to follow her and we do so without hesitation, having learned that the Vietnamese never bother to explain where we might be going. Over the course of our trip, we’ve taken taxis to buildings where we’ve been told to appear at a given time of day. A man gets into the taxi, and we drive through the streets of Danang stopping to pick up other people, most often young women who are not unfriendly, but who never introduce themselves or explain why they are joining us. After a while, you get used to being driven here and there, getting out, getting back in. At first, following Dr. Tan through this hospital feels no different. But at the end of the hall, she opens the door to a room where the monsters are kept.

  Boy missing hands and feet

  CHAPTER 12

  Evidence Room

  As a young intern in Saigon’s Tu Du Hospital, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong loved delivering babies to mothers. The year was 1963, and President Ngo Dinh Diem was mounting a reign of terror in the city and countryside. Buddhist monks were marching through the streets to protest Diem’s brutal attacks on them. In one such action, Thich Quang Duc sat down at a Saigon intersection and clasped his hands in prayer as a fellow monk doused him with gasoline, and another monk touched a lighter to his saffron robe. Duc sat upright, unmoving until his lifeless body collapsed into the street. A photograph of this burning monk appeared on the front page of newspapers throughout the world.

  Asked how she felt about these protests, Madame Nhu, the “dragon lady” wife of Diem’s brother, called the self-immolations “barbecues,” and vowed to clap whenever monks died that way.

  Dr. Phuong continued working in the hospital’s maternity ward, bringing red-faced, wrinkled, crying babies into the world. To Dr. Phuong, this was the natural cycle of life: Mothers give birth to babies; babies grow up, get married, and have families of their own; people grow old and die.

  “I didn’t know anything about the spraying,” says Dr. Phuong, “And nothing about Agent Orange. But one day—it was 1969—I delivered for the first time in my life a severely deformed baby. It had no head or arms. The mother didn’t see her child, and I tried to hide my tears and my fear from her. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what the baby looked like, so I said it was very weak. It died, and I just told her that it had been too weak to live.”

  Dr. Phuong delivered more and more babies with missing limbs, two bodies fused together with one set of internal organs; babies with partial or missing brains, missing heads, babies that didn’t open their eyes, didn’t cry, and died within a few days after delivery. Instead of fully formed fetuses, some women at Tu Du gave birth to formless bloody lumps. In late 1967, following a period of massive use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Saigon newspapers began publishing reports on a new birth abnormality, calling it the “egg bundle-like fetus.” Photographs of this “egg bundle” appeared on the front page of some South Vietnam newspapers. One paper, Dong Nai published an article about women giving birth to stillborn fetuses, with a photograph of a dead baby whose face was that of a duck. A day later, Dong Nai ran a story about a woman giving birth to a baby with “two heads, three arms, and twenty fingers.” Just above the article, the paper posted a photograph of another deformed baby with a head that resembled that of a poodle or a sheep. Still another Saigon newspaper, Tia Sang, on June 26, 1969, printed a picture of a baby with “three legs, a head squeezed in close to the legs, and two arms wrapped around a big bag that replaced the lower section of the face…”1

  Anencephalus (baby born with a substantial part of its brain missing).

  The Saigon government’s counterargument was that these birth defects were caused by something it called “Okinawa bacteria.”2

  Hydrocephalus (babies born with water on the brain).

  I’ve read about Dr. Phuong’s work for many years, and consider it an honor that she has taken the time to talk about what must be, even after all these years, a painful subject. For some people, this would be an opportunity to launch into a monologue about being misunderstood, marginalized, and ridiculed. But the Vietnamese with whom we meet rarely talk about themselves, and they never complain. When they do speak of their efforts to convince skeptics that the Vietnamese have suffered catastrophic injuries as a result of chemical warfare, it is without the slightest hint of self-aggrandizement or self-pity.

  Dr. Phuong wanted people to know about the increasing number of deformed babies she and other staff were seeing in Tu Du Hospital’s delivery room.

  “So I contacted a newspaper,” she smiles. “One that was not part of the regime at the time, but people didn’t really believe me. Not in the South, anyway. Only in Hanoi did I have any real support. People there were far less skeptical about what the spraying was doing to people in Vietnam.”

  Dr. Phuong could not have known that soon after the United States military commenced full-scale use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Dow Chemical, one of the principal manufacturers of this herbicide, invited representatives from other companies to attend an urgent meeting. Once there, Dow revealed that Agent Orange contained TCDD-dioxin, the most toxic chemical company researchers had ever encountered.

  Dow’s scientists believed that TCDD-dioxin was one hundred times as toxic as Parathion, a chemical that Rachel Carson described in Silent Spring as an organic phosphate, “one of the most powerful and dangerous.”3

  Dow called a meeting and advised those present—Hooker Chemical, Hercules, and Diamond Alkali—not to reveal what they might know about the harmful effects of dioxin. If the government found out about the potential dangers of this chemical, it might impose regulations on the production of herbicides.

  While Dr. Phuong struggled with how to console young mothers who’d given birth to hopelessly deformed babies, scientists in the US discovered that even
in the lowest doses given, 2,4,5-T, one of the herbicides in Agent Orange, caused cleft palates, missing and deformed eyes, cystic kidneys, and enlarged livers in the offspring of laboratory animals. The results of this study would be withheld until 1969, the year Dr. Phuong spared a young mother from knowing that she had given birth to a monster.

  In 1971, Thomas Whiteside published The Withering Rain, an early look at the use of herbicides in Vietnam. A careful, scrupulous researcher, Whiteside set out to speak with officials at Dow Chemical and government scientists he assumed would be forthcoming about the effects of herbicides on human beings and the environment.

  “I was hardly surprised,” writes Whiteside,

  to find officials of the Dow Chemical Company, one of the largest manufacturers of 2,4,5-T, uncommunicative. But I was taken aback to encounter plain antagonism from several scientists connected with the government when I raised with them what I thought were reasonable questions about the way in which information on the studies of the teratogenic, or fetus deforming, activity of 2,4,5-T in experimental animals had been handled. They intimated that such matters were beyond the understanding of laymen and comprehensible only to professional biologists.

  “I found this kind of attitude disappointing,” continued Whiteside in characteristic understatement,

  in people who I had supposed were devoted to the search for scientific truth. I formed the suspicion that this professional grandiosity was in part something very like a cover for timidity—a reluctance to discuss even a prima facie case against potentially dangerous compounds for fear of a whipping by professional critics at the next scientific convention.

  Dismayed by the cavalier attitude of an official at the laboratory where scientists discovered that “2,4,5-T exerted clearly teratogenic effects on experimental mice and rats,” Whiteside notes, “what we were talking about was a spray rate of 2,4,5-T that, at least as laid down in Vietnam, could result in a pregnant Vietnamese woman’s ingesting close to an equivalent amount of 2,4,5-T that, in experimental rats, deformed one out of three of the rats’ unborn offspring.”4

  Dr. Phuong sketches a picture of a “mole baby,” a large egg shape, open at one end, containing “bloody liquid.” Inside of the egg shape she draws many small circles, labeling them “frogs legs.” Beside her drawing, she writes: hydatidiform mole, chorio carcinoma.

  “I was very much criticized by my colleagues,” says Dr. Phuong. “I saw the babies, and I knew that sooner or later people would begin to believe me, but it took ten years until they did. I just felt the need to find out what was wrong, and I wanted to do something to help the parents and the children.

  “It was really only after 1975 that we began to know more about the consequences of Agent Orange. It was hard at that time to find a lot of documentation about the effects of herbicides on the environment and people. Bert Pfeiffer and Arthur Westing from the National Academy of Science had conducted research in Vietnam and Cambodia, but most of their work centered on the effects of herbicides on plant life, rather than human beings. In March 2006, at the International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange held in Hanoi, Vietnam, former Marine Daniel J. Shea talked about his son, Casey, who was born with congenital heart disease, a cleft palate, and stomach abnormalities. When Casey was three years old, doctors told the family that he needed a shunt in his heart to help the flow of oxygen, but the child went into a coma during surgery and later died in his father’s arms.

  “What right,” a tearful Daniel Shea asked the audience, “does anyone have to make chemical potions to poison the land and its people?… Is it not criminal, even in times of war, to poison a people’s food crops? The world has condemned chemical warfare because it takes not only enemy soldiers, but innocent men, women, and children alike… and it cripples generation after generation of those exposed to its toxins.”5

  “Our mission was a sad one,” wrote Dr. Westing, after touring defoliated parts of Cambodia,

  A mission whose raison d’être we wish had never occurred. We felt particularly grieved about the innumerable direct and indirect losses suffered by the innocent local populace. We were able to see at first hand how particularly pernicious this type of military action is for people whose very existence is so closely tied to the land. And now that since the time of our visit the whole area we came to know has been utterly destroyed by the full impact of the spreading air and ground war, our sadness has turned to a feeling of despair.6

  Long before Daniel Shea’s moving testimony, Dr. Phuong delivered for the first time in her life a baby that had no head or limbs. After that, she witnessed terrible birth defects every few days. She watched new mothers go into shock when they saw their babies. She listened to them cry, sometimes for days, and heard them lament that they must have committed some terrible mistake for which God was punishing them.

  “It took ten years for people to believe me,” says Dr. Phuong.

  After the war ended in 1975, veterans began visiting the hospital to ask about birth defects and cancers related to herbicide spraying. She learned a lot from them, and they formed a bond that helped her continue working on behalf of Agent Orange children.

  “What happened in Vietnam,” says Dr. Phuong, “was the first time in human history that a country has used chemical weapons, for so many years, on such a massive scale. This must never be allowed to happen again. Ever. We conducted many studies at Tu Du Hospital on the effects of Agent Orange, and scientists in other countries have conducted studies as well. We know that Dr. Arnold Schecter found high levels of dioxin in Vietnamese mothers’ milk, and that dioxin, like other toxic chemicals, can move from the mother’s body, through the placenta, into the developing fetus. We know that there are ‘hot spots’ in Vietnam, where high levels of dioxin have been found, and where dioxin has gotten into the food chain, so that people have been eating ducks and fish contaminated with dioxin.”

  Does she invite manufacturers of Agent Orange to visit Tu Du Hospital, and to examine the extensive research she and other Vietnamese doctors and scientists have done into the effects of dioxin on animals and human beings?

  “Oh yes,” she smiles, “I’ve invited them many times to visit. But they don’t come. They don’t talk. They hide. I always think that they do believe me. And that some day the United States government and the chemical companies will agree to help victims of Agent Orange. But if the companies refuse to pay, then people should not buy their products. All over the world, people should boycott those companies.”

  It is late afternoon, and our interpreter looks tired. For the past three days, Miss Minh has accompanied us to homes in Cu Chi district, to Peace Village 2 in Ho Chi Minh City, and now to the Ngoc Tam Hospital where Dr. Phuong is general director. Witnessing the legacies of chemical warfare—handicapped children, poverty-stricken families, and jars containing horribly deformed fetuses—can be exhausting, indeed overwhelming, not only because of what we’ve seen, but because of the emotional roller coaster on which we’ve been riding, descending into a deep sadness, roiling in despair, rising to a rage that collapses into sullen confusion and a feeling of helplessness.

  If you happen to visit Friendship Village in Hanoi, and the Peace Villages in Danang and Ho Chi Minh City, you will probably want to call your elected representatives, your prime minister or president, the heads of chemical companies to demand that they drop whatever they may be doing and come, quickly, to Vietnam. You will want to take one, or all, of these children home.

  Dr. Phuong has testified at many international conferences on dioxin, she has published numerous scientific papers, and spoken to members of Congress about the need to help victims of chemical warfare. She does not believe that more studies are necessary to prove that dioxin harms human beings.

  We descend the stairs to a small entranceway. Dr. Phuong is delighted to find her granddaughter waiting, and as they prepare to ride a motorbike into the chaotic Ho Chi Minh traffic, she calls out:

  “I’m sixty years old. And still deliveri
ng babies.”

  If the monsters in the Evidence Room could speak, what might they say? Would they want to know who poisoned their mothers and fathers? Did their mothers manage to give birth to normal babies, or, like so many Vietnamese women, did their children stop eating, grow listless, and—like Dr. McNulty’s rhesus monkeys—just lie down and die? Are their fathers still alive? Men who came home from the war in seemingly good health, wishing only to put the war behind them, and then one day started to feel weak, chronically exhausted, hammers driving nails into their brains, mole-like growths erupting over their limbs, chests, and backs. Sometimes their bodies itch, not just their skin, but like swarms of insects gnawing at their insides. Unable to work, these men become invalids, confined to bed. Doctors tell ex-soldiers that their bodies are diseased; they have weak hearts, cancer, and other ailments for which there is no cure. They will die from having been exposed for many years to Agent Orange.

  Dr. Phuong has met many doubters. She’s listened to their arguments, and she understands that the adage, “seeing is believing,” does not always hold true. She also knows that reputable scientists in many countries now share her views about the deadly effects of dioxin. The chemical companies may try to discredit Dr. Phuong’s work, and that of other researchers like her, but she does not intend to give up her decades-long struggle to convince doubters that Agent Orange/dioxin has mutilated and killed many thousands of babies inside of their mothers’ wombs.

  CHAPTER 13

  Letters Don’t Lie

  War reverberates for years afterward, spinning lives into a dark oblivion of pain and suffering.