This is the heart of Agent Orange country. From 1961 to 1971, U.S. warplanes deluged strategic sectors of southern Vietnam from Quang Tri province to the Mekong Delta with more than 20 million gallons of chemical herbicide, of which 60 percent was Agent Orange. The Hanoi government says that as many as 600,000 Vietnamese have fallen victim to serious illnesses from exposure to the defoliants. The chemicals’ manufacturers and the U.S. government dispute any such figure. They say no one has ever produced conclusive scientific proof that the herbicides caused those medical problems. They blame a whole range of other factors such as disease, malnutrition and lack of health care.
Even so, researchers keep piling up unsettling evidence. The Ho Chi Minh Trail region, still not entirely open to foreigners, offers a huge natural lab-oratory. Late last year Hatfield Consultants, an independent environmental-assessment firm based in Canada, published a report summing up a four-year series of medical investigations in the A Luoi valley, some 65 kilometers west of Hue. The study, funded largely by Canadian government agencies and conducted with Vietnamese doctors’ help, found extraordinary levels of TCDD, an extremely toxic form of dioxin that existed as an unwanted contaminant in Agent Orange. The toxin was everywhere: in the soil, in the fish and in the children’s bloodstreams. “We have to get a handle on this problem,” says Chris Hatfield, the company’s president. “If something’s not done, and soon, this problem could haunt Vietnam for another 10, 15, 20 years or longer.”
Just about everyone of war age here has stories of getting caught in the “milky fog,” as it’s often described. Immediate symptoms of exposure included runny nose, weeping eyes, nausea, respiratory difficulty, dizziness and skin rashes. Trees lost their leaves in three to five days, and fruit quickly spoiled. Chemical makers continue to insist that Agent Orange is not toxic to fish, fauna and people. Even so, most elders in A Luoi say after heavy sprayings they would find fish and other animals dead or dying–frogs, rats, snakes, even wild pigs in the forest. Sometimes the villagers would cook and eat the scavenged meat. “When you’re hungry, you’ll eat anything,” says Kan Nghia, 52, a former guerrilla in A Luoi. She gradually lost the use of her legs in 1968 and is now paralyzed from the waist down. Her problem is not uncommon in the valley. Vietnamese researchers suspect that heavy doses of TCDD can cause permanent nerve damage, but they lack the lab resources to test the theory properly.
The Hatfield team was especially disturbed by what they found in the young. Physical deformities and severe mental handicaps are frighteningly common. So are miscarriages and stillborn “monster” fetuses, as locals call them. Even more troubling, in some cases the young had blood levels of dioxin even higher than their elders’. Once it’s in the ground, TCDD can last for decades. The Canadians say it washes down the denuded hillsides in the region’s heavy rains. The dioxin accumulates in the valleys and carp ponds, where fish ingest it. The poison concentrates in their fatty tissues and innards, which thrifty Vietnamese peasants have been cooking and eating for centuries. It has become a recipe for environmental disaster. “Any place in the West or Japan that had such high dioxin readings would immediately be evacuated and a huge chemical cleanup would be launched,” says Hatfield.
The villagers here can’t afford to leave their homes. They can’t afford to incinerate the topsoil, the industrialized world’s standard way of cleaning up such major dioxin hot spots as the notorious 1970s toxic-waste dumping disaster in Times Beach, Missouri. Most of them can’t even afford to stop feeding locally grown fish to their hungry children. For the time being, village officials on Hatfield’s advice are urging people to eat only the flesh of the carp they raise, and to throw away the fat, liver and innards.
Vietnamese officials say they aren’t seeking U.S. war reparations or damages from the chemical industry. The last thing Hanoi wants is to hurt Vietnam’s chances of winning normal trade relations with Washington as soon as possible. Meanwhile the Vietnamese say they need help with their ongoing public-health disaster–especially scientific cooperation to understand it better. “We must save ourselves,” says Nguyen Viet Nhan, a doctor who treats handicapped children in Hue. “But dioxin is the whole world’s problem, not just Vietnam’s.” Maybe so. But it won’t be easy getting the Americans to come back and fight another invisible enemy here.
