“We were safe. We were going home. We had survived the hell known as the Vietnam War. Over time, I realized it was not the nation I had fled at all. It was the war. I had never left the nation at all. It had stayed with me.”
Professor Herrmann’s staff and the students he asked to help out could not keep up with the avalanche of letters from all over Vietnam. If only these letters could be read on the floor of the US House of Representatives, to members of the British Parliament, to the French Assembly, to people throughout the world who would, if they just knew the circumstances, be willing to help victims of Agent Orange.
Ken Herrmann is not the type to tell war stories. Ask him a question and he will answer, directly, not at all concerned whether you might appreciate his answer. Until I asked about his own exposure to Agent Orange, he didn’t mention the endless fixed-wing and helicopter spray missions over the Que Son and Hiep Duc valleys.
“Yeah, they sprayed the valleys and they sprayed us. I had two heart attacks in the 1980s and 1990s, and suffer from ischemia, a heart disease, a recent addition to the VA’s list of related Agent Orange disorders. I filed a claim last week, and expect the VA to approve it whenever they get around to doing that.”
After more than twenty-five years of waiting, American veterans are being compensated for a wide variety of illnesses related to their exposure to Agent Orange. This only happened because young soldiers who went off to the killing fields of Southeast Asia refused, years later, to give up trying to tell the world what Agent Orange/dioxin does to human beings. Vietnam veterans would not allow the government they served to ridicule their complaints as symptoms of drug abuse, alcoholism, or combat stress.
Year after year, decade after decade, these veterans, their families, and their supporters attended meetings, started organizations, conducted research, created websites, wrote letters, and testified at local and national hearings, demanding that their government stop treating them as throwaway soldiers. There are no records of how many veterans have died premature, painful deaths, their cries for help drowned out by a chorus of stonewalling, denial, political chicanery, and scientific deceit. It’s impossible to know how many children have died in their mothers’ wombs or shortly after birth from monstrous birth defects. There were no ceremonies to honor these Agent Orange children. Grieving parents were not invited to the White House, nor were they asked to share their stories on national television and radio programs. Fathers and mothers laid their children to rest in lonely cemeteries, knowing these small caskets held victims of chemical warfare.
It appears that at long last our nation has stopped blaming and trying to punish its own veterans for the catastrophe in Vietnam. Sadly, that is not the case when it comes to Vietnamese victims of the defoliation campaign. The fear of communism and the political expediency and hubris that drove the United States to wage scorched earth warfare in Vietnam have not given way to compassion for the survivors of that terrible destruction.
In many ways, controversy over Agent Orange is like a mass murder case in which the presiding judge refuses to see the victims, even though he allows them to appear in court. Those who wish to hold the perpetrator(s) accountable are allowed to speak, even though their testimony will not influence the court’s decision. Asked to consider this most peculiar situation, the Supreme Court demurs. Why bother to hear arguments in a case when it’s already been established, time and again, that there are no verifiable victims?
Scientists from many parts of the world have gone to Vietnam to ascertain the effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people. Their findings indicate that dioxin poses a danger not only to those who were exposed to Agent Orange during and after the war, but quite possibly to future generations of Vietnamese children.
Those who still doubt that our world is inundated with toxic chemicals and that these chemicals lodge in our bodies—undermining our immune systems, destroying our health, and killing our friends and families—might want to pay a visit to Vietnam. There, community workers, doctors, nurses, ex-soldiers, scientists, and others do not just talk about the dangers of carcinogenic, fetus deforming, and mutagenic chemicals; they show visitors what Agent Orange/dioxin has done, and is doing, to millions of human beings.
Vietnam is the toxic mirror into which avaricious corporations do not want ordinary people throughout the world to look. Inside of this mirror, we see polluted rivers and streams, dying lakes, poisoned oceans, and contaminated food and water. Inside of this mirror, we discover studies warning us that:
At present, one-third of all Americans will develop cancer over a lifetime and one in four Americans are likely to die from cancer…. The proximate source of almost all dioxin intake in the general population is from food. Using our data for daily dietary dioxin exposure and the EPA’s proposed risk specific does, we estimate that over a lifetime a maximum of 30 to 300 excess cancers per million could result from the ingestion of dioxin-containing food products.1
Inside of this mirror we find studies with titles like, “More Kids are Getting Brain Cancer. Why?”
But evidence suggests the rise in these childhood cancers, as well as in cancers like non-Hodgkins’ lymphoma and multiple myeloma among adults, may also be partially explained by exposure to chemicals in the environment…. Recent epidemiologic studies have shown that as children’s exposures to home and garden pesticides increase, so does their risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, brain cancer, and leukemia. Yet right now, you can go to your hardware store and buy lawn pesticides, pain thinner and weed killers, all containing toxic chemicals linked to these diseases.
In both children and adults, the incidence rate for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma has increased thirty percent since 1950. The disease has been linked to industrial chemicals, chemicals found in agricultural, home, and garden pesticides, as well as dark hair dyes.2
It’s easy to understand why we are reluctant to look into a mirror that displays the faces of our loved ones, friends, neighbors and colleagues who’ve died from cancer and other diseases linked to toxic chemicals like dioxin. We want to believe that no sane person would deliberately poison their own children’s air, water, and food supplies. Yes, something terrible might have happened in Vietnam; however, that was an accident. That was war. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and state and local laws protect citizens from a domestic form of chemical warfare.
Skeptics, doubters, those who believe the Agent Orange tragedy is a communist conspiracy, and even representatives from corporations that profit from pain and suffering are invited to visit Friendship Village in Hanoi, the Peace Villages in Danang, and the children’s ward in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tu Du Hospital. The Vietnamese offer visitors bottled water, green tea, biscuits, and fresh fruit. They answer questions in a calm, polite, friendly manner, and they will take you on a tour of the legacies of chemical warfare. There’s no reason to fear the Vietnamese people. They will tell you about the toxic holocaust that befell their nation, then allow you to decide whether or not this tragedy happened.
For decades, the United States government appeared to be waiting for Vietnam veterans to die. Now, the chemical companies and the government are waiting for the Vietnamese to give up their campaign to secure justice for the victims of chemical warfare. This will never happen. We ignore their suffering at our own peril.