ScorchedEarthLegacies Of Chemical Warfare In Vietnam

fred a. wilcox

Photographs by Brendan B. Wilcox

Seven Stories Pressnew york

Copyright © by Fred A.Wilcox

A Seven Stories Press First Edition

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilcox, Fred.Scorched earth : legacies of chemical warfare in Vietnam / Fred A.Wilcox ; photographs by Brendan B.Wilcox. -- A Seven Stories Press sted.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.ISBN ---- (hardcover). Agent Orange--Health aspects--Vietnam. . Agent Orange--Environ-mental aspects--Vietnam. . Chemical warfare--Health aspects--Vietnam.. Chemical warfare--Environmental aspects--Vietnam. . VietnamWar,---Chemical warfare. I.Title.RA.TW .'--dc

Printed in the United States

c o n t e n t s

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Ecocide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Promises . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Sprayed and Betrayed . . . . . . .

Chapter : A Lucky Man . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Generations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Jurisprudence . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : The Last Family . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : The Realm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Free Fire Zone . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Chemical Children . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Evidence Room . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter : Letters Don’t Lie . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendices

. International Laws to whichJack Weinstein Refers in his-page Memorandum . . . . . . . . . . .

. Vietnamese Studies on AgentOrange/dioxin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. Illnesses the United States Departmentof Veterans Affairs Recognizes asRelated to Herbicide Exposure inVietnam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

: Agent Orange: Important Dates . . . . .

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

c h a p t e r 8

The Last FamilyOccasionally I saw these [genetically deformed] children incontaminated villages in the Mekong Delta; and wheneverI asked about them, people pointed to the sky; one manscratched in the dust a good likeness of a bulbous C-130aircraft, spraying.

—John Pilger

On the outskirts of the city of Danang,women in conical hatstend rice paddies, bending in calf-deep water to plant newshoots. Brown cows and steel-gray water buffalo graze thisancient landscape, at peace now after centuries of invasions,uprisings, and war.We cross a narrow bridge, turn into a dirtroad, and walk a short distance to a small, remarkably barrenhouse, its walls scarred by monsoon flooding, and only themost rudimentary furniture—a low glass-covered woodentable, small red plastic chairs, no television or family shrine. Itis the kind of home that one might find in the most destituteareas of Appalachia or on impoverished Indian reservations.Nguyen Thi May sits on the floor, a twelve-year-old boy

sprawled on her lap; her sixteen-year-old daughter,Trinh, leansclose by her side. Until a recent operation on her legs, paid forby World Vision Vietnam, Trinh could not walk; now, hermother explains, she can move about “a little.”The girl’s skin is

wrinkled and dry, like bark that might just peel away whentouched, or catch fire in the Vietnam heat—we would later seea boy with this same condition, called x-linked ichthyosis, at ahospital in Ho Chi Minh City.When her mother bathes her,Trinh’s skin peels off, turns white, and then darkens like redwine. Trinh will never attend school or learn to care for her-self, and while she smiles and waves one hand at her visitors,most of the time she stares about the room, expressionless.Nguyen Thi May’s husband, Pham Xong, confides that his

son’s head is growing larger, while the boy’s body remains thesame. Twelve-year-old Phan Van Truc suffers from seizures,and his parents say they never know when they might occur.Hecannot speak or walk, he requires constant attention, and he willnever get any better.His father worries that the boy appears tobe getting weaker, a condition that defies explanation.The children seem happy to see students from SUNY

Brockport’s study abroad program, and when Brendan takes

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Nguyen Thi May and her children

Father and son

Chapter : e Last Family �

photographs of the boy sitting on his father’s lap, he grins andwiggles his feet. Pham Xong and NguyenThi May do not owna motorbike, and they move their children about on a rough-hewn wooden cart. One parent must be at home at all times,making it difficult for the family to earn money.Doctors haveexamined these children and determined that their birthdefects are symptomatic of exposure to dioxin, but there are nofunds available to examine the father’s sperm, blood, or fattytissue. Pham Xong is forty-seven years old; his wife is forty-two, young enough, when their children were conceived, tohave given birth to healthy offspring.Some years after the last official American spray mission in

the Central Highlands, the children’s father served with the

army in that region. He recalls once when many men in hisunit began choking, and became so ill that they had to bemedivaced to a hospital. Pham Xong also served in Cambodia,close to the border of Vietnam, an area that was heavilysprayed with defoliants. Skeptics might argue that most of thedioxin in these regions had probably washed out of the soil;however, this does not take into account the fact that the half-life of dioxin on surface soil fluctuates between nine andtwenty-five years, and in deeper levels from twenty-five to onehundred years.According to Dr. Alan Schecter, one of the world’s experts

on dioxin, “a person may be found with dioxin in his/her bloodafter years of getting contaminated.”Thirty-five years after the last spray mission in Vietnam,

scientists have found astonishing levels—up to , times thepermissible level in the United States—of dioxin at formermilitary bases like Bien Hoa, Danang. There are no reliablestudies of how many people living near these bases may havebeen heavily exposed to dioxin, or what the future conse-quences for these people and their offspring might be. It isclear that dioxin has entered the food supply of people wholive near bases from which the Air Force flew thousands ofdefoliation missions.In , ArthurW.Galston, a renowned professor of Botany

at Yale University, tried to warn the US against the continued,unbridled use of herbicides in Vietnam:“We are too ignorant of the interplay of forces in ecologi-

cal problems to know how far-reaching and how lasting willbe the changes in ecology brought about by the widespreadspraying of herbicides. The changes may include immediateharm to people in sprayed areas.”Galston’s warning turned out to be prophetic. Just two years

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Chapter : e Last Family �

later, reports of birth defects in the offspring of Vietnamesewomen began to appear in Saigon newspapers.At the New YorkTemporary Commission on Dioxin Expo-

sure hearings in , a Vietnam veteran testified that “beforemy son was ten and a half months old, he had to have twooperations because he had bilateral inguinal hernia, whichmeans his scrotum didn’t close, and his intestine was where hisscrotum was, and his scrotum was the size of a grapefruit. Healso has deformed feet . . .My oldest daughter has a heart mur-mur and a bad heart.Once she becomes active, you can see herheart beat through her chest as though the chest cavity is noteven there, as though you were looking at the heart.”At the same hearings, a Vietnam veteran’s wife testified that

she was married to a Vietnam veteran who was in combat in and .“We have two sons,” she said, “a four-year-old and one who

is four months.Our first son was born with his bladder on theoutside of the body, a sprung pelvis, a double hernia, a splitpenis, and perforated anus.“We have met other veterans,” she continued, “and their

families.We have met their children.We have seen and heardabout the deformities, limb and bone deformities, heartdefects, dwarfism, and other diseases for which there is nodiagnosis. . . .There are hundreds of children with basically thesame problem, but in groups; so many bifidas, so many bonedeformities, urological, neurological. But it is in groups of hun-dreds, not ones or twos.”In a study, “Genetic Damage In New Zealand VietnamWar

Veterans,” Louise Edwards writes:

Tuyet and Johansson () conducted a study onVietnamese women and their husbands who were

exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.The authors found that percent of all children hadsome type of major health problem.Thirty-seven per-cent of these children were born with some visiblemalformation or disability while percent had devel-oped a disability during the first year of life.Of the children suffering from health problems, wereunable to attend school but were able to help withagricultural work and domestic chores. Twenty chil-dren were disabled very severely physically andmentally, and required -hour care needing to beattended to by their parents for every need.There wereno cases of congenital malformation nor other dis-abilities among unexposed siblings of the husbandsand wives, nor among the children of their siblings.

Addressing the concerns of New Zealand veterans whoworried about the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on theirown children and future generations, the report stated:

The results from the SCE study show a highly signif-icant difference between the mean of the experimentalgroup and the mean of the control group (p < ..)This result suggests, within the strictures of interpret-ing the SCE assay, that this particular group of NewZealand VietnamWar veterans has been exposed to aharmful substance(s) which can cause genetic damage.Comparison with a matched control group would sug-gest that this can be attributed to their service inVietnam. The result is strong and indicates that fur-ther scientific research on New Zealand Vietnamveterans is required..

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Chapter : e Last Family �

Pham Xong and his wife realized early on that their daugh-ter was suffering from serious birth defects; however, theyhoped to have at least one child who could live a normal lifeand help them in their old age. Instead, their son could neitherwalk nor talk, had seizures, and would never outgrow his hand-icaps. That’s when they decided not to have any more children.They are aware that there is no cure for dioxin exposure, yetthey do not blame anyone for their plight.Preparing to leave, I hesitate, trying to think of something

we might do to ease this family’s burden. It’s difficult to saygoodbye to families like this one.We walk into their barren lit-tle houses, produce a tape recorder, and ask painful questions.Then, we take photographs, and we leave an envelope con-taining , Dong, the equivalent of about $, for whichthe recipients are genuinely grateful.I could apologize for our government’s indifference to the

plight of Agent Orange victims, but that feels rather self-indul-gent, and might embarrass this gentle family. I could promiseto return with a shaman who will give their son the power ofspeech and their daughter the ability to walk, but I don’t knowanyone who possesses powers like that. The families we visitwill never sit in an air-conditioned theater,munching butteredpopcorn while beautiful actors make them feel happy andfrightened and safe and wonderfully sad. They won’t joinfriends in a cheerful restaurant, drinking wine and eating untilthey’re pleasantly stuffed. Their children will not spend hourstalking on the cell phone, planning weekend parties, beingyoung and strong and full of optimism.All we can do is promise that we will tell people about the

extraordinary families we meet, the beautiful children, thedetermination, the courage, and the terrible suffering weencounter in Vietnam.We must hope, as the Vietnamese do,

that this will be the last generation of children to suffer fromthe effects of chemical warfare.Pham Xong and his wife pose with their children for pho-

tographs as a loving family, which they most certainly are.During the monsoon rains last year, water poured into this

tiny house, climbing so high (water marks on their green walls)that the family was in peril of drowning. A charitable organi-zation will build the family a balcony, so that when the rainsflood their living room this year, they won’t die.

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