Scorched Earth

by Fred A. Wilcox

  Destroying large swaths of rice crops, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens causes widespread hunger among Vietnamese civilians. Peasants cultivate their own food, relying on methods of farming that their ancestors had practiced for generations: planting and harvesting rice, keeping chickens and ducks, catching fish and crabs in flooded paddies. There are no supermarkets, convenience stores, or fast food outlets in Vietnam’s war-torn countryside, and even when food is available, families have to choose between eating poisoned crops and dying from hunger.

  Today, when I ask combat veterans how the military managed to distinguish between “enemy” and “friendly” rice paddies, they shrug, as if to say “Come on, now. Nobody can be that stupid.” Ground pounders are always smarter than the politicians who start wars and the generals who send soldiers into battle. It did not take long for GIs to realize that you do not win the hearts and minds of civilians by destroying their food crops. Mothers holding babies whose stomachs bulge with hunger hate the people responsible for killing their children. Fathers who are starving to death will want to hurt the people who are sending them to an early grave. I cannot imagine watching my own children waste away from hunger and, as they expire in my arms, being told that their suffering is for a noble cause.

  No more herbicides in war, “except in a certain, very, very limited number of defense situations where lives can be saved.”

  President Ford did not explain what this caveat meant.

  CHAPTER 2

  Transformations

  If I had my druthers, I would never speak of Vietnam. I’d just stay in my cave, read my books, and take care of my flowers. But I know that’s not the reason I survived.

  —George Mizo, co-founder, Friendship Village, Hanoi, Vietnam

  HANOI, VIETNAM

  We thread through narrow streets, past small shops selling fresh fruits and vegetables. I would like to stop for a Vietnamese iced coffee and talk to people who look so cool, even cheerful, in this brutal heat. Were they living in Hanoi during the war? This city is 1,000 years old. Can these shoppers trace their ancestry that far back?

  We stop to buy bags of candy and other small gifts for the children. Our interpreter sits in the front seat beside the driver. They do not talk.

  We arrived in Hanoi twenty-four hours after our flight lifted off from JFK, so jetlagged that we wandered like punch-drunk boxers about the airport. We were on the ground, in Vietnam, on the first leg of a research trip I’d been hoping to take for more than twenty years. When the taxi that we assumed the hotel would send failed to show, we accepted a ride with a couple of young men who couldn’t understand where we wanted to go. I had expected a small city pockmarked with bomb craters and strewn with bits and pieces of downed American planes. However, Hanoi is a very large city, and there are no visible craters or bombed out buildings; there are no remnants of what the Vietnamese call “the American War.”

  We crossed the Song Hong (Red River), our new friends laughing at our delirium and trying to convince us to stay in “Uncle Dang’s hotel.” “Cheap,” they said. “Very clean.” From past experience, I knew that the Vietnamese are inveterate entrepreneurs, highly skilled at persuading tourists to spend money. “No thank you,” I said. “Nice place. Very good to you.” I did not know the Vietnamese word for “no.” Somehow, they managed to locate our lodgings in the old city.

  Our interpreter directs the taxi driver to stop at a small booth, exchanges a few words with a uniformed man, and we pass through an arch onto the grounds of The Friendship Village. Dang Vu Dung, director of the Village, greets us on the steps of the administration building. Inside, we drink bottled water and chat for a few minutes, but there are many visitors today and he apologizes for rushing off to meet with them.

  On one wall of the main room is a large photograph of George Mizo, the combat veteran who returned to Vietnam to build a village that would care for children and adult victims of chemical warfare.

  George looks uncomfortable in his shirt and tie, and there is a boyish shyness to his smile. I recall an exhibit of Richard Avedon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Huge photographs had been hung high on the walls to give viewers a sense of the subject’s importance. Avedon had a genius for bringing out the worst in his subjects. Rich, famous, powerful people glared, even when attempting to appear cordial, with passionate disdain at the world. We were tempted to feel sorry for these people. We laughed. I’m not sure why.

  Over the years, I’d spoken once or twice with George by phone, but had never gotten to know this man who had survived the killing fields of Southeast Asia and, seriously ill from his own exposure to Agent Orange, returned to Vietnam to create a place of healing, peace, and friendship. “A village,” he said, “where ex-enemies could come together as friends. A living symbol,” he hoped, “of the potential for human transformation.”

  George Mizo didn’t have to fight in Vietnam. Honorably discharged from the United States Army in 1966, he could have stayed home and watched the war on television. But, as the limited conflict in Southeast Asia turned into a full-scale (undeclared) war, Mizo would remember the excitement he felt straddling his father’s shoulders at a rally for presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  “And my father said, ‘These are the men who saved the free world. These are the men who stopped Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese.’”

  Beaming with pride for his country, George dreamed of the day that he would go off to fight for freedom in some foreign land, returning home with a chest full of medals and the thrill of a ticker-tape parade down New York’s 5th Avenue.

  One morning, about a year after he’d been honorably discharged from the army, George walked into a recruiting office, shook hands with the sergeant on duty, and informed him that he wanted to rejoin the army. At the time, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other officials in the Johnson administration were exuding public confidence about the war. Troop morale in Vietnam was high, they said. The military was making progress, and the enemy was on the run. The recruiting sergeant did not tell new enlistees, because he had no way of knowing this, that US pilots were flying about eleven herbicide missions each day, destroying Vietnam’s countryside, poisoning the water and food that US soldiers would consume while they were in the field.

  Girl working on a project in Friendship Village.

  George told the sergeant that before he signed any papers, he had two requests. One, he wanted to be in Vietnam within five days. Two, once he arrived he wanted to be assigned to a unit that was going to see a lot of combat.

  “Well,” George later told a film crew making a documentary about Friendship Village, “I got my wish on both counts.”

  Friendship Village is a cluster of well-kept buildings built upon what was once a rice paddy. There are classrooms, a clinic, and rooms where kids learn practical skills like sewing. We walk to a classroom where children are sitting around a table on which there are boxes of plastic objects like fruits and vegetables. Cinderella sprawls upon one wall, her yellow hair flowing long and beautiful. A small white dog licks the back of her hand, and a prince wearing a red cape stands by her side. A knight holding a large blue ax protects the prince, and a castle looms in the background, waiting for the happy couple to come inside, marry, and live happily ever after.

  A fan whirs. The children do not talk, but some of the boys wrap themselves around Brendan, touching him, fondling his camera. He shakes hands with them, hugs them, takes their picture, and lets them photograph the room’s walls and ceilings.

  Unlike other children we will see on our journey, these kids appear to be fine, but then we notice that they are too quiet, poised, as though waiting to emerge from a trance. They sit upon their little chairs, expressionless, watching but not playing with their toys. Their fathers fought in rice paddies and jungles that were saturated with herbicides. Returning home from the war, they carried bullets and shrapnel in their bodies and the horrors of war in their minds. Surgeons would remove the bullets, time
might help heal their minds, but TCDD-dioxin would remain in their fatty tissues for decades, harming their wives, deforming their offspring, and sending these ex-soldiers to early graves.

  In the late 1960s, while the war still raged, Dr. Ton That Tung, one of the medical field’s most prominent liver specialists, began research on the possible effects of Agent Orange on the North Vietnamese soldiers who served in southern provinces of Vietnam. These soldiers appeared to be fathering an excess number of children born with serious birth defects. Among the birth defects Dr. Tung and his colleagues observed were cleft lips, absence of nose and eyes, shortened limbs, malformed ears, club feet, absence of forearms, hydrocephaly (water on the brain) and anencephaly (a condition in which all or part of the brain is missing), and a variety of heart problems.

  Because Dr. Tung was aware that laboratory research had already proven dioxin to be teratogenic and fetotoxic in female rats and mice, he was careful to inquire whether the wives of former North Vietnamese soldiers had been exposed to herbicides. Through interviews with veterans and their families, Tung’s research team learned that none of the women who had given birth to deformed children were exposed to herbicides; yet in one district where the researchers found a total of nine birth defects out of two hundred and thirty-three births, all nine of the deformed children were fathered by veterans. In another district, where veterans comprised only a small percentage of the population, Dr. Tung found that veterans fathered half of the deformed children born during a four-year period. Six out of the thirty children born with defects were anencephalic, and veterans fathered all six.

  Dr. Tung realized that his findings were extraordinary. In the region he was studying, there should have been:

  One anencephalia in every 2,777 births, whereas we have one anencephalia per 197.7 births among veterans from the south. Furthermore, we must emphasize the great number of cardiac deformities: 15 cases out of 43 defects, i.e., 34.8 percent of the defects. The involvement of the neural tube seems to be in agreement with the studies of Barbara Field, who proved that in Australia there is a linear relationship between the rising rate of spina bifida [a condition where the spine is improperly fused] in newborns in the first generation and the rate of 2,4,5-T utilized each year.1

  Dr. Tung also found that the wives of exposed veterans had an abnormally high rate of miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths, while an unusual number of the veterans suffered from sterility. The fathers of deformed children, writes Dr. Tung, exhibit “signs of direct contact with herbicidal sprays in South Vietnam.”2

  Concluding his paper, Dr. Tung writes:

  By comparing reproductive outcomes of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange and those who were not exposed, there appears to be an excess of birth defects in children of the exposed veterans. This suggests that dioxin may act as a mutagen and thus would represent the first example of teratogenic damage due to male exposure in humans.3

  Unfortunately, Dr. Tung did not live to complete his research on the possible mutagenic effects of dioxin. His early research into the effects of Agent Orange on North Vietnamese soldiers and their offspring is a pioneering effort to determine the effects of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people. If he were alive today, he would undoubtedly see the children in Friendship Village as a sad confirmation of his fear that dioxin might be a mutagenic chemical, and that men exposed to this chemical are likely to father an excessive number of deformed children.

  On January 3, 1968, in an opening salvo of the Tet Offensive, North Vietnamese soldiers launched a furious attack on all three bases in the Que Son Valley. Wounded by one of the first rockets, George kept fighting through the night, and when medivac choppers arrived at dawn to pick up the dead and wounded, he refused to get on board until his commanding officer ordered him to do so.

  George had seen many young men lose arms and legs or get carried away from firefights in body bags, and as the killing escalated and casualties mounted, he began to question the war.

  “In the first few months, most of our battles centered around recapturing large plantations from the Vietcong. And I had no idea, none, that the United States had financial interests in Vietnam. I mean, I didn’t know anything about Vietnam before I came there. None of us did. The American people didn’t either.

  “But I’d also come to realize that the Vietnamese are incredible people, very peaceful, with an ancient culture. And I couldn’t understand why we were killing the very people and destroying the country I thought I’d come over to protect.”

  In spite of his doubts and serious injuries, Sergeant Mizo had insisted on remaining behind with his fellow soldiers: “I didn’t want to leave. We came together. They were more than my men. They were my friends. My brothers.”4

  Yet at the height of the all-night battle, George experienced an epiphany: “For the first time I saw clearly. Everything stopped. It was like a movie. This isn’t about democracy versus communism. This isn’t about God’s will. This is bullshit. This is a horror created by men, for whatever reason—politics or greed. We were killing the people and destroying the country we’d come to save. And at that moment, I knew that I would survive.”

  Later, recovering in a military hospital, George learned that the North Vietnamese had overrun his unit, killing his entire platoon.

  “And that’s when I made a conscious decision to stop being a soldier, and to actively oppose the war in Vietnam.”5

  In 1974, six years after he’d returned from Vietnam, George’s skin broke out in a terrible rash, his temperature soared to 105°F, and he was delirious. He did not know it at the time, but like many of his brothers-in-arms, and like many of the soldiers they’d fought against, he was at the beginning of a long struggle to survive the ravages of Agent Orange/dioxin.

  Boys in a classroom, Friendship Village.

  George heard stories about veterans whose wives were experiencing miscarriages, giving birth to lifeless babies, and to children with serious, sometimes horrific, birth defects. These ex-soldiers, still young, were suffering from cancer, debilitating skin rashes, growths that doctors diagnosed as precancerous, loss of sex drive, low sperm count, and other illnesses. When they’d gone off to fight in Vietnam, most still in their teens, they were in superb health; now, they seemed to be locked inside of a science fiction scenario, watching themselves turn, mysteriously, into old men.

  These men served in different branches of the military, in different years (1961–73), and in different regions within the southern half of Vietnam. Most know nothing about Agent Orange, but do know that when they attempt to approach the Veterans Administration for help, officials there insist that very few US soldiers were exposed to toxic chemicals in Vietnam. Moreover, those who may have spent brief periods inside of spray zones have nothing to fear. There is absolutely no evidence, the Administration insists, that Agent Orange harms human beings.

  The Department of Defense (DOD) informed veterans who asked for their service records that many had been lost during the chaotic evacuation of Saigon. Other records were destroyed in a fire in St. Louis, Missouri. Not to worry, said officials at the Veterans Administration. The Air Force kept computer-generated “Herb Tapes” of Ranch Hand missions and if veterans couldn’t track their units’ movements inside these grids, then they probably weren’t exposed to Agent Orange. Soldiers who spent their tour of duty inside base camps would be fine; combat soldiers, said the DOD, did not enter jungles until six weeks after the trees were sprayed, so they had nothing to worry about.

  Veterans who complained about illnesses—colon cancer, testicular cancer, liver and heart problems, and kidney disease—that normally do not affect men their age were told that they were alcoholics, drug addicts, malingerers, and suffering from combat stress.

  Young women stitch beautiful scenes onto circles of white cloth. When you first see these children, you feel sad and empty, as though something true and good were turned upside down, shaken out of you. In the little shop you buy white hankies sti
tched with blue flowers, bookmarks with scenes from the countryside, perhaps a scarf or a tee shirt. You want to think that you are doing your part to care for these children, helping to heal the wounds of war.

  According to Vietnamese officials, three million Vietnamese, including 500,000 children, are suffering from the effects of toxic chemicals used during the war. The exact number of retarded, blind, limbless, and paralyzed Vietnamese children isn’t so important. What matters is that you will find these children in hospitals, community-run centers, and poor rural homes. You will be surprised, then amazed, then shocked by the abundance of Agent Orange children.

  During the war years, or after, one or both of each Agent Orange child’s parents were exposed to TCDD-dioxin, a chemical that Dr. Jacqueline Verrett of the Food and Drug Administration called “100,000 times more potent than thalidomide as a cause of birth defects in some species.”6

  One or both parents carry this deadly chemical in their fatty tissues.

  In the study “Genetic Damage in New Zealand Vietnam War Veterans,” researchers from Masey University in New Zealand write:

  Exposure to Agent Orange also has major effects on the reproductive system of humans; TCDD is an endocrine-disrupting chemical with a highly toxic effect on the human reproductive system.

  Even at low doses TCDD can seriously disrupt normal reproduction in humans; it can lower fertility, increasing antenatal mortality and the risk of endometriosis, and can also cause many birth defects.7

  The New Zealand study concludes that a group of New Zealand veterans who served in Vietnam “has been exposed to harmful substance(s) (TCDD-dioxin) which can cause genetic damage.”8

  Children in a playroom, Friendship Village.