One chapter of this book is devoted to the Vietnam veterans’ 1984 class action lawsuit filed against Dow Chemical and other wartime manufacturers of Agent Orange. I also examine the Vietnamese lawsuit, filed in 2004, charging these chemical companies with war crimes. Lawyers representing the plaintiffs in these cases had hoped that the American judicial system would provide a forum for the victims of chemical warfare, one that would grant them redress for their injuries.
This did not happen.
My goal is to introduce readers to the catastrophe we euphemistically refer to as “the Agent Orange issue.” I wish to expand the dialogue and debate over the repercussions of chemical warfare. Vietnam veterans are dying at a rapid rate, and most of them will not live to see—should this ever happen—the chemical companies concede that they manufactured and sold Agent Orange to the military, fully aware that this defoliant was contaminated with TCDD-dioxin and fully cognizant of a process by which the dioxin levels in herbicides might have been greatly reduced.
The war in Vietnam was not the first time that a nation resorted to a scorched earth strategy against an enemy in war; however, it was the first time in human history that, in the process of trying to defeat an adversary, a government inadvertently poisoned its own army, then waited for this army to die.
Vietnam has fought many long and brutal wars against foreign invaders. Its people have survived famine and starvation; they’ve endured prison, torture, massacres, and mass executions. Now, they are enduring the aftermath of a chemical holocaust.
In the last chapter, readers will find letters that victims of chemical warfare have written to Ken Herrmann, a decorated Vietnam veteran, college professor, director of a college-level study abroad program in Vietnam, and a long-time advocate for victims of Agent Orange.
In these letters, the Vietnamese parents of seriously deformed children, ex-soldiers, and the terminally ill express their grief, their sorrow, and their sincere hope that someone will care enough to help them. They also express their fear that the United States of America may have forgotten about them altogether.
“We, the AO victims,” writes one man, “really appreciate your concern for us. The war has been over for almost 30 years. The Americans have begun to forget about us while millions of the Vietnamese people are still living with its disastrous effects…. There are many families that are affected into the third generation. We still have no idea when AO will stop affecting the health and safety of my innocent people. It may affect the fourth and fifth generations. The list may be longer.”
A widow whose child suffers from serious birth defects writes that she has been spiritually devastated by “knowing that my only child is in danger. As a widow, I don’t know what to do to help my daughter. It is most miserable to know that the poisonous water I drank when I was young is the cause of her disease. The poison has passed from my genes to hers.”
The United States has yet to send teams of epidemiologists to Vietnam to study the effects of toxic chemicals on the Vietnamese people, and US courts have failed to find ways to hold corporations that care more about profits than people responsible for their actions. Historians will write the final verdict on government stonewalling, political chicanery, and scientific fraud in the long, sad saga of Agent Orange.
Scorched Earth is about a monumental tragedy, but it is also about courage, resilience, determination, love, and what appears to be a remarkable optimism in the face of insurmountable odds.
In Hanoi, we met Phung Tuu Boi, a forester who exemplifies the indomitable spirit of the Vietnamese people. While the war still raged, he began planting trees in defoliated zones. Asked if he wasn’t afraid that he might step on a mine or an unexploded cluster bomb, he shrugged and laughed. He has organized teams to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, and he intends to plant millions more.
Dr. Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan, a veteran of the war against France and a prominent Agent Orange activist, insisted that one day the US government and the chemical companies will agree to pay compensation to Agent Orange victims.
“Remember,” he smiled, “we Vietnamese have lost many battles, but we always win the war.”
Dr. Nhan was not gloating, just expressing an ancient culture’s infinite patience and unlimited capacity to endure hardship.
Vietnam is a beautiful, vibrant nation whose citizens are determined to rebuild their country so their children can live in prosperity and peace. All they ask is that the United States government and the corporations that profited from chemical warfare in Vietnam acknowledge the harm they caused and agree to help desperately poor victims of Agent Orange. Until then, they will continue their efforts to show the world the ravages of chemical warfare.
There must never be another tragedy like the one that began in the White House with the momentous decision to launch chemical warfare in a far-off nation that lacked either the ability or the desire to harm the United States of America.
During two research trips to Vietnam, I promised the Vietnamese, who so graciously shared their time—translating for hours on end, arranging transportation to and from interviews, answering a thousand questions—that I would write and publish a book on the legacies of chemical warfare in Vietnam. Scorched Earth fulfills that promise.
CHAPTER 1
Ecocide
The destruction brought about by indiscriminate bombing and by the large-scale use of bulldozers and herbicides is an outrage that is sometimes referred to as “ecocide.”
LATE NOVEMBER, 1961, WASHINGTON, DC
President John F. Kennedy is worried. The Vietcong, a pejorative term for those who are fighting against Ngo Dinh Diem’s regime in Saigon, are taking over large swaths of the countryside. American military advisors have failed to turn Diem’s inept and apathetic troops into a hard-charging army. Vietnam is an impossible terrain, cut to pieces by rivers and canals, covered with dense jungles and snake-infested swamps, populated by man-eating tigers. The enemy knows every inch of this forbidding landscape. Defeating them will require bold new strategies.
And so the president’s inner circle discusses the pros and cons of using herbicides in Southeast Asia. It seems that the British used chemicals with some success when fighting guerrillas in Malaysia, and the advisors feel it might be worth testing—and possibly using—chemical defoliants in Vietnam. Countries like Sweden might complain that the US is violating some international treaty or other, but the regime in Saigon is doing its best to defeat communist guerrillas and needs greater support, the State Department and the Department of Defense support the use of herbicides, and Congress will undoubtedly go along with any program that helps prevent a communist takeover of Southeast Asia.
Secretary of State Dean Rusk assures President Kennedy that “successful plant-killing ops in [Vietnam], carefully coordinated with and incidental to larger ops, can be substantial assistance in the control and defeat of the [Vietcong]… the use of defoliant does not violate any rule of international law concerning the conduct of herbicidal warfare and is an accepted tactic of war.”1
President Kennedy approves the joint recommendation of the State Department and Department of Defense to “initiate a large scale herbicidal/chemical warfare program. Both departments advanced the use of herbicides for defoliation only, apparently recognizing that the destruction of enemy crops was a clear violation of international law and a war crime, and were therefore unwilling to explicitly endorse such a program.”2