Damaged lives: Vietnamese veterans and children

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Damaged lives: Vietnamese veterans and children

While world leaders debate the effects of Agent Orange, a multinational project reaches out to people at the center of the storm

Sunday, November 05, 2000

Story and photographs by Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Staff Photographer

HANOI, Vietnam -- In a sparsely decorated bedroom of a two-story concrete building, Bui Dinh Bi relaxes and takes cover from Vietnam's baking heat in late April.

Bui Dinh Bi remembers the sky being covered with chemicals during the war: "If your skin was exposed, it felt like hot pepper was being put on you." The tumors on his body have grown and multiplied over the years since his wartime service in Quang Tri, where he was exposed to Agent Orange. Bui said his biggest regret is how his wife has suffered. "She didn't know what she was getting into," he says. Of their eight children only two have survived, and both are mentally retarded. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette)

It is the same kind of heat that beat down on Bui and other Vietnamese soldiers during the North-South war. But there was no relief from the sun during his wartime stint below the famed Demilitarized Zone 30 years ago. The jungle canopy -- the soldiers' protection from the sun and their enemies -- had been stripped away by the Americans' relentless spraying of a defoliant called Agent Orange.

The spraying was supposed to leave the enemy with nowhere to hide. It had other results as well.

"The sky would be filled with chemicals," says the 46-year-old veteran of what the North Vietnamese call the "American War." "When your skin was exposed, it felt like chili pepper."

Bui served with communist forces in Quang Tri in the South. In the early '70s, his skin lesions changed from mosquito-bite-like bumps to tumors. Today, his body is still covered with tumors. His only relief is an hourly shower.

Yet there is no relief from history. He and his wife have had eight children. The first was stillborn. The next five died, one by one, in infancy. His two surviving children are mentally retarded.

Bui lives with 29 other veterans and 70 children in Friendship Village, a small but tidy community about seven miles west of Hanoi. The multinational project, financed by six countries, is one of about a dozen of its kind that the Vietnamese government has set up to tend veterans and children believed to be victims of Agent Orange, the herbicide that the U.S. government sprayed over 10 percent of Vietnam, all of it in the South.

Eleven million gallons were dispensed before scientists discovered that the chemical had a potent form of dioxin. President Nixon halted the spraying in 1971, but not before the damage was done.

Since the war ended in 1975, U.S. policy toward Agent Orange has been evolving. Thousands of U.S. veterans receive government compensation for health-related problems linked to the herbicide. In 1996, President Clinton signed a law that expanded disability compensation to American soldiers and their children suffering from spina bifida, the only birth defect that the government says can be linked directly to the dioxin.

But the U.S. government has not acknowledged the effect of Agent Orange on Vietnam, whose leaders estimate that 1 million of its people, including 100,000 to 150,000 children, suffer from exposure to spraying or inherited health problems.

This discrepancy is expected to be among the issues discussed when Clinton visits Vietnam from Nov. 16-20, the first president to visit the country since Richard Nixon toured Saigon, the capital of then-South Vietnam, during the height of the war in 1969.

A State Department spokesman would not comment on whether Agent Orange would be on the agenda during Clinton's visit. He did say, "The U.S. and Vietnamese governments are discussing a plan for joint scientific research on the health and ecological effects of dioxin in Vietnam."

He might have been referring to a meeting coming up later in the month, Nov. 27 to Dec. 1, in Singapore. That's where representatives of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and Vietnamese officials will take a big first step when they gather to discuss a joint study on the effects of Agent Orange.

Nguyen Thi Van Long's father, who served in the war for six years, says his 15-year-old daughter and her sister are mentally retarded and suffer similar physiological problems. Other village residents are, standing, Nguyen Van Luong, 10, and Nguyen Duc Huy, 13. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette)

Many scientists believe it's obvious that Agent Orange continues to plague Vietnam. The Washington Post reported in April that "Canadian researchers have found high levels of dioxins in children that were born long after the spraying ceased in 1971. The lingering contamination is so severe in some areas that if they were in the United States, they would be declared Superfund sites, requiring an immediate cleanup effort."

Dr. Arnold Schecter is a University of Texas researcher who has studied Agent Orange during 16 visits to Vietnam. He acknowledges that the dioxin most likely caused health problems in certain areas, but he's not convinced that the people in Hanoi's Friendship Village are suffering the effects of the spraying.

Schecter explained that to have any health problem in a child be from Agent Orange's dioxin, there must be elevated levels of dioxin in the mother, father or both. Testing dioxin levels would be an important first step to getting at the truth, he says.

"The laboratory test to measure the dioxins, including the one which contaminated Agent Orange, is complex and complicated, slow and expensive," he added. "It is done with high-resolution gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy. There are not many laboratories worldwide which can do these analyses."

What we do know, says Schecter, is that dioxins from Agent Orange can cause some types of human health defects, among them cancers and lower IQs in children. But without extensive testing, nothing is certain.

Malformed children, such as the ones at Friendship Village, should be very carefully studied before any conclusions about their health problems can be made, he says. To date, the studies performed "have been hypothesis-generating, but not conclusive."

Dr. Le Cao Dai, who worked with Schecter during his research trips, has no such reservations. He says Agent Orange has become part of the food chain for the people of South Vietnam -- affecting their water and food supply -- and remains a problem today. The directors of Friendship Village say all the veterans were exposed and all the children's parents served in South Vietnam during the war.

The finger-pointing and contradictory findings will most likely continue for years.

But people like Dai, a Hanoi physician and executive director of the Agent Orange Victims fund of the Vietnam Red Cross, want both sides to get beyond who should take the blame. He has a much simpler outlook.

"It is a humanitarian issue," he says. "It's the role of humanitarians to address this issue."

Ngo Van Nang, 67, fought in the "American War" in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. He says he was exposed to dioxins from the U.S. military's spraying of Agent Orange during the war, and today he is unable to have children and has problems with his sensory functions (his eyes, ears and nose). Ngo, speaking through a translator, says he tries not to be bitter, but he believes it is important for Americans to look at the affects of their wartime actions on the Vietnamese people. (Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette)

Clinton's visit, Dai suggests, is a step in the right direction, one he hopes will result in the United States setting up a dioxin research center. "He's in a very good position to contribute to healing the wounds of the war," Dai says.

Vietnam veteran and activist George Mizo is the founder of Friendship Village. He did not look to place blame when, in 1988, he returned to the country where he had fought 20 years earlier. He was wounded during his tour, and many of the men who served with him were killed.

"The horrible experiences during the war and the suffering of everybody on all sides inspired me to do something that would be a living symbol of peace, reconciliation and hope," he says.

That trip provided the inspiration for a facility that would serve orphans and the elderly. But Vietnamese officials said a more pressing need was to help victims of Agent Orange.

"I visited many hospitals, orphanages, schools, etc., and talked to many different groups and people in the country to find out about the biggest needs. This is the way Friendship Village was born."

The village is financed by England, France, Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the United States. It operates on an annual budget of $36,000 -- and some of those dollars have been generated here in Pittsburgh.

A meeting sponsored by a French veterans group was held four years ago in Lyon, France, to discuss fund-raising for the village, which was opened two years later, in 1998. The U.S. delegation included members of Veterans for Peace, among them Pittsburgh lawyer Sanford Kelson, then the local chapter president, and Peter Shaw, a retired Penn State physicist.

They learned that other countries were giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to make Friendship Village a reality, while groups back home had raised $10,000 to that point.

Kelson says he was embarrassed by the sum. "It's amazing that the government spends millions of dollars on war. But when it comes to giving a little money for a place like Friendship Village, we're stingy."

Since the meeting, Veterans for Peace has collected $12,000 for the village, with more fund-raisers planned.

Today, Friendship Village operates with 12 full-time staffers and many volunteers. Most of the residents come from families with a limited ability to care for their special needs.

"Our partners in Vietnam are the Vietnamese veterans associations, so we are working directly together with our former enemies, which is important for us," Mizo says. "We want to show that peace, reconciliation and international cooperation are possible."