“We all served in our Vietnam People’s Army during the war against French aggression. All my brothers were more intelligent than me, and they died. During the war against US aggression, I worked as a doctor in Hanoi. Only in 1976, after the victory on April 30, 1975, did I visit the south.”
At the International Conference of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin, Hanoi, March 2006, Dr. Nhan, acting as vice president of the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange, (VAVA), spoke about Vietnam’s long struggle for independence, the nation’s remarkable recovery and development, and the fact that Vietnam and its people continue to suffer from “severe war wounds left behind by the largest chemical warfare in mankind’s history.”1
Dr. Nhan went on to say that in the early 1970s, “researchers from Harvard University found high levels of dioxin in Vietnamese mothers’ breast milk.” Thirty-five years later, Professor Arnold Schecter and his Vietnamese counterpart, Prof. Le Cao Dai, discovered high levels of dioxin in Vietnamese living near a former military zone and in the fatty tissues of Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.
Most “painful and dangerous,” said Dr. Nhan, “is that dioxin infects not only one generation, but also several. Despite the war already ended [sic] for more than thirty years, we have witnessed severe congenital malformation…. It is worth noting that in the years of the 1990s, the studies done by certain US scientists found the presence of dioxin in the sperm of the Vietnam-American veterans. This explains the toxicities of the male productive cell deformities. During pregnancy and after birth, dioxin in blood and milk continues to harm fetus, and newborn.”2
On August 6, 2004, Dr. Nhan forwarded To The American People, an Open Letter, asking Americans to support the Vietnamese class action lawsuit charging the chemical manufacturers of Agent Orange with war crimes.
“With sincere and friendly sentiments, from a far-away land of the West Pacific Ocean,” the letter opens, “we would like to send this letter to all of you. It is written on the pending day of August 10, when the US aircrafts, in 1961, began the spraying of herbicides in Vietnam with the northern areas of Kontum as their first target.”3
In 2006, the Anthropology Review published a special issue on “Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin in Vietnam,” in which contributor Le Thi writes: “According to statistics of Kontum General Hospital in 1999, there were 12 defect or monstrous births. Popular [most frequent] cases are children born without anus, or chest or belly-linked twins. Some children were born without belly skin and all their intestines and livers are exposed. The highest number of birth defects is seen in the two districts of Sa Thay and Dak To.”
In the same article, Dr. Nguyen Anh Tu, from Kontum Provincial Health Department, discusses the cases he has seen:
Mrs. Nguyen Thi Tra is from Trung Dung village. In 1979, she gave birth to a big bundle containing dust particles. In the same year, Mrs. Nguyen Thi Nho from Hoa Binh village (Sa Nghia Commune) gave birth to a bundle full of eggs…. In the northern province of Thai Binh, there are now 20,000 victims of Agent Orange. In Quynh Phu district alone, 8,000 people are Agent Orange victims, including 129 are from the third generation. Mr. Nguyen Bach Le in Quynh Hoang Commune took part in the battlefields of Quang Tri. He got married after being demobilized. His son, Nguyen Ba Hau, is now 35 years old but he is only 1 meter tall, with very short limbs. Hau is now married. His first son is normal but his second son is defected like him. His second son is now 12 years old but is only eighty cm tall with a distorted face. In Mr. Le’s family, three generations have been affected by Agent Orange.4
Le Thi writes about an ex-soldier whose first child went blind when he was one month old, and who grew up severely retarded; a second child “looks monstrous,” his legs, (one long, one short) shrinking, his hands “very long and thin.” A third child is also a “monster” who looks exactly like his younger brother.
“In my family,” said the children’s father, “there is always a fight with my children screaming all the night. After nearly 30 years since peace has been restored in the country, we have not experienced a single day of peace.”5
Another soldier returned to his native village and got married after the war. In 1977, his wife gave birth to a “7-month headless and limbless foetus whose eyes are on his neck. Her second birth was a piece of pink flesh looked like worms intertwining together. Her third monstrous birth was a hairy monkey and the fourth one was a bundle of tumors.”6
In another case, a soldier’s wife gave birth to a child with two faces. This child died after three months.
Their second child had a pig face and their third child a mouse face. All of them died after birth. The fourth child was born normal, but when it was 8 months old, its face became red and died. Their fifth child, a normal son, but suffering from mental disorder, screaming all the times and tearing everything he can. He even bit his own body to satisfy his craziness. He is 23 years old now with Mrs. Tuu caring for him throughout all those years. She said: “I have nothing in my life, except tears.”7
From the early days of the defoliation campaign, Dr. Nhan explained, scientists tried to warn of the possible consequences of using herbicides in Vietnam. Many prestigious American and world researchers opposed the spraying, including Professor Arthur Galston, a biologist at Harvard, the US Physiobotanist Association, and 5,000 other US scientists, including seventeen Nobel laureates and 129 members of the US National Academy of Sciences.
“The war is over,” writes Dr. Nhan in his Open Letter to the American People, “but while the country has made remarkable progress since the fighting ended, millions of people are suffering from incurable diseases related to exposure to dioxin. Thousands of people have already died in agony with deep indignation towards the perpetrators of crimes. Many women have suffered reproductive complications and even the total loss of the right to be a mother.”8
The letter expresses sorrow that children who had nothing to do with the war will be “born with inherited diseases, and, of course, without the smallest hope of enjoying even a minute of happiness of living like an ordinary being. The victims of Agent Orange/dioxin are the most miserable and tragic people. Many of them, with lots of deformed offspring, have barely survived in poverty.”9
The Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) wants the American people to know that the Vietnamese “thirst for peace and friendship, and have exerted great patience, hoping the United States will cooperate in solving the cruel war consequences, especially those severe evils resulting from horrible chemical warfare.”10
Faced with the US government’s intransigence and apparent indifference to their plight, the Vietnamese people were forced to file a lawsuit against companies that “gained enormous profits from the sufferings of millions of people.”
Agent Orange advocates like Dr. Nhan want people to know that the lawsuit is designed not just to help Vietnamese people, but other victims of Agent Orange as well, including veterans in the United States, Australia, the Republic of South Korea, Thailand, New Zealand, and the Republic of the Philippines.
The Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange concludes its letter by assuring its former adversary that the Vietnamese have “never harbored any sense of hatred for the American people…. The present struggle is directly aimed at the peaceful and happy life of our future generations on this planet.”11