George looks uncomfortable in his shirt and tie, and there is a boyish shyness to his smile. I recall an exhibit of Richard Avedon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Huge photographs had been hung high on the walls to give viewers a sense of the subject’s importance. Avedon had a genius for bringing out the worst in his subjects. Rich, famous, powerful people glared, even when attempting to appear cordial, with passionate disdain at the world. We were tempted to feel sorry for these people. We laughed. I’m not sure why.
Over the years, I’d spoken once or twice with George by phone, but had never gotten to know this man who had survived the killing fields of Southeast Asia and, seriously ill from his own exposure to Agent Orange, returned to Vietnam to create a place of healing, peace, and friendship. “A village,” he said, “where ex-enemies could come together as friends. A living symbol,” he hoped, “of the potential for human transformation.”
George Mizo didn’t have to fight in Vietnam. Honorably discharged from the United States Army in 1966, he could have stayed home and watched the war on television. But, as the limited conflict in Southeast Asia turned into a full-scale (undeclared) war, Mizo would remember the excitement he felt straddling his father’s shoulders at a rally for presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower.
“And my father said, ‘These are the men who saved the free world. These are the men who stopped Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese.’”
Beaming with pride for his country, George dreamed of the day that he would go off to fight for freedom in some foreign land, returning home with a chest full of medals and the thrill of a ticker-tape parade down New York’s 5th Avenue.
One morning, about a year after he’d been honorably discharged from the army, George walked into a recruiting office, shook hands with the sergeant on duty, and informed him that he wanted to rejoin the army. At the time, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other officials in the Johnson administration were exuding public confidence about the war. Troop morale in Vietnam was high, they said. The military was making progress, and the enemy was on the run. The recruiting sergeant did not tell new enlistees, because he had no way of knowing this, that US pilots were flying about eleven herbicide missions each day, destroying Vietnam’s countryside, poisoning the water and food that US soldiers would consume while they were in the field.
George told the sergeant that before he signed any papers, he had two requests. One, he wanted to be in Vietnam within five days. Two, once he arrived he wanted to be assigned to a unit that was going to see a lot of combat.
“Well,” George later told a film crew making a documentary about Friendship Village, “I got my wish on both counts.”
Friendship Village is a cluster of well-kept buildings built upon what was once a rice paddy. There are classrooms, a clinic, and rooms where kids learn practical skills like sewing. We walk to a classroom where children are sitting around a table on which there are boxes of plastic objects like fruits and vegetables. Cinderella sprawls upon one wall, her yellow hair flowing long and beautiful. A small white dog licks the back of her hand, and a prince wearing a red cape stands by her side. A knight holding a large blue ax protects the prince, and a castle looms in the background, waiting for the happy couple to come inside, marry, and live happily ever after.
A fan whirs. The children do not talk, but some of the boys wrap themselves around Brendan, touching him, fondling his camera. He shakes hands with them, hugs them, takes their picture, and lets them photograph the room’s walls and ceilings.
Unlike other children we will see on our journey, these kids appear to be fine, but then we notice that they are too quiet, poised, as though waiting to emerge from a trance. They sit upon their little chairs, expressionless, watching but not playing with their toys. Their fathers fought in rice paddies and jungles that were saturated with herbicides. Returning home from the war, they carried bullets and shrapnel in their bodies and the horrors of war in their minds. Surgeons would remove the bullets, time might help heal their minds, but TCDD-dioxin would remain in their fatty tissues for decades, harming their wives, deforming their offspring, and sending these ex-soldiers to early graves.
In the late 1960s, while the war still raged, Dr. Ton That Tung, one of the medical field’s most prominent liver specialists, began research on the possible effects of Agent Orange on the North Vietnamese soldiers who served in southern provinces of Vietnam. These soldiers appeared to be fathering an excess number of children born with serious birth defects. Among the birth defects Dr. Tung and his colleagues observed were cleft lips, absence of nose and eyes, shortened limbs, malformed ears, club feet, absence of forearms, hydrocephaly (water on the brain) and anencephaly (a condition in which all or part of the brain is missing), and a variety of heart problems.
Because Dr. Tung was aware that laboratory research had already proven dioxin to be teratogenic and fetotoxic in female rats and mice, he was careful to inquire whether the wives of former North Vietnamese soldiers had been exposed to herbicides. Through interviews with veterans and their families, Tung’s research team learned that none of the women who had given birth to deformed children were exposed to herbicides; yet in one district where the researchers found a total of nine birth defects out of two hundred and thirty-three births, all nine of the deformed children were fathered by veterans. In another district, where veterans comprised only a small percentage of the population, Dr. Tung found that veterans fathered half of the deformed children born during a four-year period. Six out of the thirty children born with defects were anencephalic, and veterans fathered all six.
Dr. Tung realized that his findings were extraordinary. In the region he was studying, there should have been:
One anencephalia in every 2,777 births, whereas we have one anencephalia per 197.7 births among veterans from the south. Furthermore, we must emphasize the great number of cardiac deformities: 15 cases out of 43 defects, i.e., 34.8 percent of the defects. The involvement of the neural tube seems to be in agreement with the studies of Barbara Field, who proved that in Australia there is a linear relationship between the rising rate of spina bifida [a condition where the spine is improperly fused] in newborns in the first generation and the rate of 2,4,5-T utilized each year.1
Dr. Tung also found that the wives of exposed veterans had an abnormally high rate of miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths, while an unusual number of the veterans suffered from sterility. The fathers of deformed children, writes Dr. Tung, exhibit “signs of direct contact with herbicidal sprays in South Vietnam.”2
Concluding his paper, Dr. Tung writes:
By comparing reproductive outcomes of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange and those who were not exposed, there appears to be an excess of birth defects in children of the exposed veterans. This suggests that dioxin may act as a mutagen and thus would represent the first example of teratogenic damage due to male exposure in humans.3
Unfortunately, Dr. Tung did not live to complete his research on the possible mutagenic effects of dioxin. His early research into the effects of Agent Orange on North Vietnamese soldiers and their offspring is a pioneering effort to determine the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people. If he were alive today, he would undoubtedly see the children in Friendship Village as a sad confirmation of his fear that dioxin might be a mutagenic chemical, and that men exposed to this chemical are likely to father an excessive number of deformed children.