When the war ended in 1975, soldiers who’d survived the fighting returned to their homes, hoping to spend the rest of their days farming, raising children, and enjoying grandchildren. After decades of war and natural disasters, life was hard in Vietnam. Millions of bombs, landmines, M-79 projectiles, hand grenades, and other unexploded pieces of ordinance were scattered in rice paddies, fields, forests, and waterways. Children picking up cluster bombs lost arms or legs, sometimes their lives. Farmers walking behind water buffalo tripped mines, leaving them crippled for life, or dead.
No one really knew exactly where these deadly weapons were lying, only that if families were to survive, rice must be planted, fields had to be plowed, crops must be harvested. Desperate to earn a living, people lost limbs or died collecting scrap metal to sell. Vietnam was still very much a war zone.
Dang Van Son’s father lost track of his fellow soldiers, but he did hear that some of them were in poor health and died soon after returning home. I explain that American veterans are also sick, and many die soon after they reach their late fifties or early sixties. I have heard that only thirty percent of the approximately three million US veterans who served in Vietnam are still alive, though I have no way of verifying that figure.
Mr. Son does not know at what age his father’s friends might have gotten ill and died.
Like many Vietnamese, Mr. Son is afraid there will be a third or fourth generation of Agent Orange children. He doesn’t doubt that his own and his daughter’s deformed (boat) feet are the result of his own father’s exposure to herbicides. His daughter, he says, is definitely a victim of chemical warfare.
When asked whether he thinks Agent Orange victims will ever receive compensation for their suffering, he laughs. Yes, he says, he really does hope so. But he can’t imagine how that might happen. He worries that his daughter will marry and have an Agent Orange baby. Many Vietnamese parents worry about Agent Orange affecting future generations, but he does not like to dwell on that.
We ask Mr. Son what he might like us to say to President Obama about the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people, should we ever have the opportunity.
“Please,” he says, smiling, “just tell him the truth. Tell him about what you see in Vietnam. What you hear from the Vietnamese people, the Agent Orange victims. Tell him about the suffering. And please ask him to do as much as he can to alleviate the suffering and pain, to help victims overcome the suffering they are feeling every day.”
Dang Thi Hoa is a beautiful, intelligent young woman whose handicap should not prevent her from attending school, marrying, and having children of her own. But her family cannot afford a motorbike to carry her to and from school each day, and while she might be able to live near the school, she says she would miss her mother too much.
Mr. Son and his shy young daughter do not complain. They do not ask for pity or demand help for themselves. When one first meets Agent Orange families, this lack of anger might seem odd. Why don’t these families blame the United States or the chemical companies for their plight? Why don’t they demand compensation—a new house, a motorbike, private medical care? It takes us awhile to understand that the Vietnamese are not merely polite; they are, in fact, a forgiving people.
We promise that if we ever get the chance to speak with President Obama, we will ask him to help victims of chemical warfare. Mr. Son says he watched the Agent Orange Tribunal hearings in Paris in May 2009, on television, and he hopes that those proceedings will help Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.
“I really hope you do talk with Obama,” he says.
We offer the family small gifts, take more photographs, and walk into the Vietnam oven. Cows meander along the road, stopping to rest, or munch on something green. A water buffalo stands alone in a rice paddy, waiting for a boy to climb upon his back. Leaving the main highway, we meander down narrow roads and park close to a path leading to a house that is, really, a hut. Baby pigs squeal inside of a bamboo corral. The family’s kitchen—a few blackened pans resting upon a wooden stand—is next to the pigs. We leave packages of noodles and a tin of cooking oil, for which the people who live here are very grateful. When the monsoon rains hit, this little camp will be washed away.
China Beach stretches far and away, curving at one point into the sea.
On March 8, 1965, a contingent of US Marines who stormed ashore here were greeted by young Vietnamese women dressed in traditional aio dai. The women held up a “Welcome to the Gallant Marines” sign and presented the marines with garlands of flowers.
Except for a scattering of young men drinking beer or napping in lounge chairs, we are alone. A woman brings “Triple 3”—beer, plastic glasses, and a bowl of ice. She is wearing a thick sweatshirt, a scarf wrapped around her face, and long gloves; a strange fashion statement until we realize that Vietnamese women are willing to dress like Eskimos to protect their skin from the sun.
Close your eyes and it’s easy to imagine adolescent American warriors frolicking in clear warm water. They are tan, hard-muscled, trained to kill, and—they keep assuring themselves—much too young to die. They play volleyball, chug beer, and count the days until they get to go home.
A short distance from their beach, the streets are teeming with prostitutes, drug dealers, junkies, thieves, Vietcong agents, and black market hustlers peddling weapons paid for by American taxpayers, assembled in American factories, and shipped to Vietnam on American freighters.
Day and night, flocks of aircraft lift off from the runways at Danang’s sprawling airbase, some heading to bombing raids, others skimming triple canopy jungles, turning primordial forests into dead zones, leaving behind poisons that will harm Vietnam for generations.
CHAPTER 7
Jurisprudence
In sum, Plaintiffs’ suit challenges how the President, with the support of Congress, chose to prosecute the war in Vietnam, and [it] seek[s] reparations that our Nation has declined to make to the people of Vietnam.
On January 30, 2004, lawyers representing several million Vietnamese citizens file a lawsuit in a Brooklyn Federal Courtroom, charging the wartime manufacturers of Agent Orange with war crimes. Jack Weinstein, the federal judge who handled the 1984 out of court Agent Orange settlement, will preside over and rule on this new case. In early March 2005, Weinstein dismisses the lawsuit, writing a 233-page memorandum in which he attempts to explain why he has chosen, once again, to rule against the plaintiffs in an Agent Orange lawsuit.
In preliminary hearings, Weinstein tells the plaintiffs’ lawyers:
I want to emphasize again I have no view about what the defendants [Dow Chemical, et al.] knew. I have no view as to whether any damage was done. I have no view as to whether the law of war or these other international, human rights laws relied on apply here. But the case has to go forward seriously. We have to address the problems since they are raised. I must say I am dubious at the moment about whether the plaintiffs can make out a case without even getting to the question of causation, but that’s based upon my limited reading.1
In the mid-1980s, when Vietnam veterans clashed with the manufacturers of Agent Orange, people were still looking for someone to blame for the debacle in Southeast Asia. Treated like pariahs when they returned from Southeast Asia, many veterans hunkered down inside feelings of rage, depression, and alienation, unwilling or unable to talk about their experiences in Vietnam.