Vietnam ends silence on issue of wartime exposure to Agent Orange; It has linked herbicide used by U.S. to deformities
in babies; Hanoi is seeking help in finding solution
By David Lamb, Times staff writer
Copyright 1998 Los Angeles Times
September 26, 1998
Not until he was dying did Dao My tell his family his secret of the war. His
voice was faint and raspy, and the gaunt face bore little resemblance to that
of the smiling man who, in a photograph on the bedside table, wore the uniform
of a North Vietnamese colonel and a chestful of medals.
"There is
Agent Orange in my body," his wife remembers him saying.
"And in yours," he added, nodding to his two handicapped sons.
"I have seen doctors. There are no drugs, no cures. It is time you understand
this, and perhaps I should not have waited so many years to tell you."
My was 62 when he died two years ago. He had diabetes, a bad heart, itchy skin,
respiratory problems--the result, his wife believes, of his exposure to
chemical defoliants sprayed by the United States over Vietnam's southern
jungles, where he fought for six years. She cites their five children as
evidence: The three born before My went south are normal; the two after Agent
Orange entered his blood, are severely disabled, mentally and physically.
His wife, Nguyen Thi Nhan, 67, who lives on a $ 14-a-month pension and cares
for her two sons,
now 29 and 27, smiles today, remembering the joy she felt when My, home from
the war, appeared unexpectedly at her door in 1975. She had not seen him or
heard a word about him in three years.
"He said, 'Get some food for a party,'
" she recalled.
"But
all I could manage was crab chowder. No beer. No wine. It was wartime." She sighed quietly.
"In Hanoi, it was always wartime."
Hanoi, basking in a generation of peace, is now a prosperous place, its markets
bountifully supplied. But the legacy of war lingers.
Families in Vietnam search for 300,000 soldiers still listed as missing in
action. Mines laid three decades ago still explode, killing farmers and
children. Deformed, disabled kids known as
"Agent Orange babies" are still born in large numbers. And studies
on the people most affected by chemical defoliants used in the war lag far
behind those done on U.S. servicemen who became victims.
"Agent Orange is our most important problem remaining from the war," said Nguyen Van Hoi, director of the state's
War Aftermath
Division.
"It is a bigger problem than the mines, bigger than the number of handicapped
from the war. It is getting more and more serious, and it is something we need
scientific and financial support to solve."
For a long time Vietnam remained relatively silent about the problems created
by Agent
Orange, a defoliant named for the color of the band around the barrels in which
the chemical was stored. Though Hanoi did study its effects and hold seminars
on the use of herbicides in war, it never directly raised the issue with
visiting groups of U.S. officials or veterans.
"I asked the
foreign affairs ministry a couple of years ago why," a U.S. veteran said,
"and their reply was that relations with the United States were slowly
normalizing, and it wouldn't have been constructive."
But in the last several months, with normal relations realized and a U.S.
ambassador now in residence, Vietnam has
taken Agent Orange out of the closet.
Articles about its continuing effects are printed almost daily in state-run
newspapers, and officials never miss an opportunity to raise the issue with
visiting U.S. delegations--partly as a counterweight to Americans who always
bring up U.S.
MIAs. Vietnam has kept discussions free of political rhetoric and has not
mentioned compensation. What it wants, the government says, is scientific help
to research the precise depth of the problem and to find a solution.
Tran Van Dieu, 47, who served as an artillery gunner near Da Nang and has
two mentally disabled sons, remembers the U.S. C-123 cargo planes that used to
sweep low over the jungle-covered hills, trailing misty plumes of defoliants.
Within a day or two the canopy of leaves would disappear, and in a few weeks a
swath of jungle would be
stripped bare of all living things.
"We thought of it as more a nuisance than a danger," Dieu said.
"Our commanders gave us gas masks, but usually we threw them away. We'd just put
wet scarves over our nose and mouth when the planes came.
"When you are a soldier, you
expect to suffer. Soldiers on both sides suffered. So I don't hold the
Americans responsible, but I wish someone would help solve my difficulties. My
wife and I have to do everything for our boys, and that means I am home all day
and cannot work."
Operation Ranch Hand, carried out from 1962 to 1971, was designed to destroy
the camouflage the jungle provided Communist supply routes and base camps--not
to kill or maim. During that period, the U.S. dumped 12 million gallons of
chemicals on South Vietnam, said to be the most used in
any war. The chemicals destroyed 14% of South Vietnam's forests, according to
official U.S. reports.
Generally the herbicides--the most prominent of which was Agent
Orange--dissipated within weeks but left behind a toxic contaminant,
dioxin, that was inadvertently created during the manufacturing process.
Dioxin, Vietnamese
officials say, remains to this day in the soil of regions that were heavily
sprayed--and in the blood of soldiers and civilians who spent long periods in
the areas.
Vietnam, which runs 11 hospices called
"peace villages" for
"Agent Orange babies," estimates that half a million people have
died or contracted serious illnesses over the years because of the chemical
campaign. It says about 70,000 are still affected.
The United States has no official position on the effects of Agent Orange on
the Vietnamese, with its diplomats saying only that more evidence is needed to
prove a link between the
chemicals and the birth of deformed babies. Vietnam believes that it has
established the link beyond a reasonable doubt but acknowledges that its
findings may fall short of what the international scientific community would
accept as conclusive evidence.
Dioxin is found in people everywhere, in proportion to the industrialization in their
countries, and
scientists say it would be expensive and difficult at this late date to
establish that Agent Orange--not the chemicals that farmers spray on their
crops, or other factors--was responsible for deformities.
"To be frank, some American scientists question our findings," said Dr. Hoan Dinh Cau, chairman of the national
committee researching the effects of Agent Orange.
"But they don't say what we have found is not true. They just say more research
is needed."
In 1978, Washington told Hanoi during talks aimed at mending relations that
there were two subjects that would end the discussion immediately if they were
even brought up.
One was compensation to rebuild the North. The other was Agent Orange.
American servicemen--whose exposure to
dioxin was measured in months, as opposed to years for many North Vietnamese
soldiers--reached an out-of-court settlement in 1984 in their liability suit
over generic effects and illnesses
associated with Agent Orange. The seven manufacturers paid $ 180 million to
establish a fund for the veterans, who number at least 180,000.
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