FEATURE: Chemical warfare

Half a century has passed since US forces first entered the Vietnam War, but a deadly legacy lingers on the former battleground.

Bill Bainbridge

Last Updated: Thu, 5 Jan 2012 17:06:00 +1100

During the war, the US sprayed chemical defoliants over the landscape to expose communist forces sheltering in the forest.

The dioxin is alleged to have caused defects in about 500,000 children - including those born long after the war ended.

The US launched its first clean-up project in 2011.

But critics say these clean-up efforts are too late for those already suffering from the long-lasting affects.

Poisoned

The extent of Agent Orange's health and environmental side effects are so great they have reached post-war generations.

Paralysed, epileptic, blind, deaf and dumb, Phung Thuy gently writhes on a day bed in the corner of her family's small Hanoi home. She needs constant care from her father, Nguyen Thanh Son and his wife.

Mr Son, whose other child Nguyen Thanh Tung lost his sight at 12 years of age, says he is certain of the culprit.

"I saw the US helicopters spray the white powder," Nguyen Thanh Son recalls.

"We had to use the mask for protection and some people became ill and found it very difficult to breathe. We all became contaminated."

Nguyen Thanh Son was a soldier based in Vietnam's Qang Tri province in 1970, catching the tail end of the US military's herbicide spraying campaign.

He says he and other soldiers were unafraid of being exposed to the defoliant, being unaware of the detrimental health effects it would cause.

"It just made us feel ill, but we were not as frightened as we were of the bombs," he said.

"But now we know that Agent Orange lasts so long and even now it still exists in our lives, so it really was worse than the bombs after all."

Critics

War veterans in the US have also spoken out against Operation Ranch Hand which saw more than 70 million litres of defoliant - two thirds of which was Agent Orange - sprayed on Southern Vietnam.

The operation aimed to deprive Viet Cong fighters of food crops and forest cover but Agent Orange - named after the orange stripes painted on the barrels in which it was stored - poisoned the streams and the rice fields and contaminated young soldiers.

Chuck Searcy, a US army volunteer stationed in Saigon in 1968, said he was disillusioned by the war and even more so upon learning about the Operation long after the war ended.

He says the US government - which maintains there is not enough scientific evidence to link Agent Orange exposure with birth defects - is open to the charges of hypocrisy

Mr Searcy returned to Vietnam in 1995 to work on humanitarian programs.

Too late

US funded clean-up programs of the so-called "hot spot" areas have only begun operations in the last year after Agent Orange has had decades to inflict harm on humans and the environment.

Much of Vietnam's forest, and forested areas of neighbouring Laos and Cambodia that were also sprayed, remains dead.

Vietnamese Forestry Service Director Phung Tuu Boi says both time and monsoonal rains have eased the impact on sprayed areas, encouraging reforestation and safety for crops, livestock and people.

But war veterans exposed to the toxic defoliant have been denied the same recovery process.

It is still difficult to say with any scientific certainty how the dioxin affected the soldiers and how it was passed on to their children. The proper detailed study simply hasn't been done, according to Professor Tuan Nguyen, a Senior Research Fellow; at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney.

But it is hard to ignore the hardships inflicted on residents at the Friendship Village, a centre outside Hanoi established by US war veterans to help their former combatants and their families.

Residents suffer from life-long ailment such as cancers, skin complaints and rotting teeth.

A teacher at the centre says all the children, whose fathers fought in the heavily sprayed south, are mentally retarded.

Responsibility

The US embassy in Hanoi declined an interview but Deputy Chief of Mission Virginia Palmer did speak to the media at the ribbon cutting ceremony earlier this year, saying the Danang clean-up is hugely important with positive repercussions for the rest of the bi-lateral relationship..

The clean-up is not the first attempt to seek redress from the herbicide campaign.

Although the US government has been granted sovereign immunity from being sued, this didn't stop the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange from launching class action against chemical companies in 2004.

Victim's lawyers argued the companies, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, were in "violation of international law, and under the common law for products liability negligent. They also accused them of civil conspiracy, public nuisance and unjust enrichment".

But the case and subsequent appeals failed because the judge ruled Agent Orange was not considered a poison under international law at the time of its use.

Mr Son says, although he has long suffered health problems he blames on dioxin exposure, he doesn't care about compensation for himself.

"We need from the US some compensation - not for us, the soldiers, but for our sons and daughters or even grandsons and grandaughters - for the next generation because they can't manage by themselves," he said.

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