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Vietnam, US Still in Conflict over Agent Orange Burden
CAM TUYEN, Vietnam — Her children are 21 and 16 years old, but they still cry through the night, tossing and turning in pain, sucking their thumbs for comfort.
Tran Thi Gai’s daughters were born with disabilities in a Vietnamese village where Agent Orange was used. (David Guttenfelder/Associated Press) Tran Thi Gai, who rarely gets any sleep herself, sings them a
mournful lullaby. “Can you feel my love for you? Can you feel my sorrow
for you? Please don’t cry.’’
Gai’s children — both with twisted limbs and in wheelchairs — were born in a village that was drenched with Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. She believes their health problems were caused by dioxin, a highly toxic chemical in the herbicide, which US troops used to strip communist forces of ground cover and food.
Thirty-five years after the end of the Vietnam War, its most contentious legacy is Agent Orange. Eighty-two percent of Vietnamese surveyed in a recent Associated Press-GfK Poll said the United States should be doing more to help people suffering from illnesses associated with the herbicide, including children with birth defects.
After President George W. Bush pledged to work on the issue on a Hanoi visit in 2006, Congress approved $9 million mostly to address environmental cleanup of Agent Orange. But while the United States has provided assistance to Vietnamese with disabilities regardless of their cause, it maintains that there is no clear link between Agent Orange and health problems.
Vietnamese officials say the United States must make a much bigger financial commitment — $6 million has been allocated — to adequately address the problems unleashed by Agent Orange.
“Six million dollars is nothing compared to the consequences left behind by Agent Orange,’’ said Le Ke Son, deputy general administrator of Vietnam’s Environmental Administration. “How much does one Tomahawk missile cost?’’
Between 1962 and 1971, the US military sprayed roughly 11 million gallons of Agent Orange across large swaths of southern Vietnam. Dioxin stays in soil and the sediment at the bottom of lakes and rivers for generations. It can enter the food supply through the fat of fish and other animals.
Vietnam says as many as 4 million of its citizens were exposed to the herbicide and as many as 3 million have suffered illnesses caused by it.
But the US government says Vietnamese are too quick to blame Agent Orange for birth defects that can be caused by malnutrition or other environmental factors.
“Scientists around the world have done a lot of research on dioxin and its possible health effects,’’ said Michael Michalak, the US ambassador in Hanoi. “There is disagreement as to what’s real and what isn’t, about what the possible connections are.’’
13 Comments so far
Show AllEven if the U.S. were to pay six billion, it would hardly begin to scratch the surface of what my country did to the Vietnamese people.
And there's Obama's man-on-point, defending the war crimes of all his predecessors & suggesting that, why, if only the Vietnamese were rich like Americans, they wouldn't have these problems . . .
Agreed, as the first thing I thought when I saw this:
"$6 million has been allocated — to adequately address the problems unleashed by Agent Orange."
was that this number was probably 1/1000th of what is more appropriately required.
hiroshima, vietnam, iraq, korea were all places that the united states used chemical weapons. we went to war against saddam because we were worried about the threat of his chemical weapons, but we have harmed our troops in ways that saddam dared not. while agent orange still ravages a generaton of aging veterans, depleted uranium dust and white phosphorous inhabit the lungs and organs of our young crusaders in the middle east. witness the high incidence of gulf war syndrome among our soldiers who have fought in iraq. we leave radioactive clouds of dust over the battlefields where we destroy the enemy with uranium tipped shells. many returning veterans commit suicide or hallucinate because of the strange chemicals and compounds to which our exotic weaponry exposes them.
of course, the civilians who must stay in the places we poison will endure a lifetime of exposure to our criminal weapons. besides us, the israelis, and saddam, who has used chemical weapons since 1945? at least saddam had the courage to knock on a few doors and make his own investigation of who tried to assassinate him before he gassed the village where it happened. we bombed saddam very thoroughly because agents in those democratic states of saudi arabia and kuwait claimed that saddam had plotted to assassinate the elder bush when he visited kuwait as ex-president. sandy berger told clinton their evidence was a hoax, and sy hersch later proved him to be right. but clinton, quaking before the wall street journal's editorials, levelled more of iraq anyway.
What conflict is there? "The evidence is inconclusive," "scientists do not agree," etc. All that is rubbish.
Agent organge, DU, white phosphorus, etc. etc. are all diabolical weapons and should never have been researched, let alone produced and used.
You want to settle a conflict. Here's a way. Have all the leaders chomping at the bit go it mano-a-mano, and let that decide.
By gawd, boys! We can't let them commies and muslems have nukes and chemicals. They might be as damn evil as us!
With the Gulf oil spill we are finally getting a taste of our own medicine. Frankly, I have no hope for us until we regain our moral compass. Of course, we should pay more for the damage done to generations in Vietnam, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, and...
Then we must collectively resolve to find peaceful ways to live in the world.
The US pays Agent Orange disability payments to US veterans and at the same time denies that Vietnamese were harmed by Agent Orange.
There are 14 diseases the VA will pay disability on for Agent Orange, but if you have Acute or Sub acute Peripheral Neuropathy, Chloraene, or Porphyria Cutanea Tarda, you would have had to apply for disability within one year of exposure. Veterans didn't even know what Agent Orange was back then.
Nurses who served in Vietnam had a high rate of birth defects in their children born after the war. The VA pays for some of those defects, but didn't tell those women of that possibility until almost all were past child bearing age. They also claim men exposed can not pass on any Agent Orange problems to their offspring.
I received the highest payment a veteran could in the Agent Orange lawsuit against the chemical companies who manufactured Agent Orange. I received $4800.00. That was it, the total I was awarded. I don't know what the lawyers in the case received, but it was in the millions.
Chemical warfare is terrible, and a Weapon of Mass Destruction. We went to war in Iraq in part because we claimed Saddam Hussein used a chemical agent on Iran. We told the world what a monster he was for doing that. We did the same, only we sprayed our own troops, too. So, what kind of monster is the United States Government? Are we our government?
Johnny U, You have done your homework...Read of investigative reporter Damon Chappie. Went blind before dying at forty, his father died of Agent Orange. Worked on cleaning airplanes retuning from spraying Vietnamese peoples. Damon's mother suspects her son died of Agent Orange too. How many more mothers need to suffer? BP messing with Mother Earth too. We humans are not ready!!!
And our US Ambassador Micheal Hockey Puck speaks with triple tongue. Sick, sick, sick...
Scream with their pain.
Yawn at the US response.
good replies here ... my shame continues ... we learned nothing, and in fact, marched headlong down the path of hubris to our complete destruction ...
our representatives in government have cost us our honor ... i no longer honor representatives of the government ... our government is only the enabler of profit for the ruling oligarchy ... stop saluting ... stop singing ... stop honoring the fascists ...
Wow, these Agent Orange articles make me tired! What are we on, some sort of every-other-year cycle with these things? I live in Vietnam and I work directly with disabled people here. Back in 2006, with a barrage of publicity, the US in all its benevolence funded a $400,000 rehabilitation wing addition to a privately owned hospital in Da Nang (in a country where the poor folks all go to the public hospitals), but neglected to account for the fact that there are no competent physical therapists in the country. To this day, there's nothing approaching effective physical therapy going on in that facility. In 2008, the big news was that the US had funded a big study of dioxin contamination in one area of the Da Nang airport and was supposedly planning a $14 million dollar "containment" program--forty years after the spill!!! (Does that sound familiar?) This year, Ford Foundation and others are squiring concerned Americans around Vietnam and wining and dining local officials and every one talks about how they're going to go home to the US and "raise awareness."
Give me a break! Who in their right mind thinks that the US government is going to do anything meaningful to care for the generations of Vietnamese who still suffer from the effects of Agent Orange, especially when every single article is accompanied by some disclaimer from the US government such as: "But the US government says Vietnamese are too quick to blame Agent Orange for birth defects that can be caused by malnutrition or other environmental factors."
What do you think? Do you think that the decades of US-led embargo might have contributed to that malnutrition? Did you know that most Vietnamese people are not genetically programed to be short? Young, well-fed high-school kids of well-to-do folks in the cities these days can be amazingly tall. I've met girls who are taller that me and I'm 5'11''! Poor people in the countryside, however, continue to be short and very, very thin.
Or how about the fact that thirty years after polio was eradicated from the US, kids in Vietnam were still contracting it in large numbers and face a life time of disability because polio vaccine was not available to them, even in the 1980's. Do you think that the US might have some culpability there?
I could go on and on (and I do in my blog at: http://www.steadyfootsteps.org/2008/02/being_here_now.html ), but my point is that, if you are really concerned about injustice and suffering in the world, just get busy and DO something about it, even if it's just pitching in on a breakfast-on-the-street program for homeless people in your community. Please, please, please don't wait for the government or some other unaccountable entity to do it--you know, in your heart of hearts, that that's never going to happen.