“I can show you on my computer that I have many emails between me and President Clinton. Did he answer my questions? No, he did not.”
“Why didn’t President Clinton answer your questions?” I asked him.
“Can you agree with me to have a frank answer?” he replied.
“That is exactly why we are in Vietnam, to ask questions and to receive frank answers.”
“Okay. President Clinton, when he was the US president, was very afraid. You know, before becoming president of the US, he didn’t enter the army. So, he lifted the embargo and established normal relations with Vietnam, but you see that’s all he could do for this country. You know, the Agent Orange issue is very sensitive. It is a war crime. President Clinton did not want to get involved with a war crime.
“He didn’t understand that Vietnam wants to have good relations with the US. We had already helped the US Army find the remains of soldiers here in Vietnam.”
Dr. Nhan looks at the photographs on his walls, as though hoping that Mr. Clinton might say that he’s sorry to have reneged on his promise. He will order his staff to look into ways that the United States might help Vietnamese Agent Orange victims. He will create a fund specifically for impoverished Agent Orange families. He will…
Iced Vietnamese coffee is delicious. I’d like another. Our translators and other people who accompany us to and from these interviews do not ask for, and will not accept anything but water.
“Missing in action,” says Dr. Nhan, switching to English, then back to Vietnamese. “If the Vietnamese people are willing to help find these war victims, why shouldn’t the US help us with our own war victims? If the US will just accept our proposal to help victims, then there will be no more lawsuits.”
“No more lawsuits?” I ask.
“Yes, no more lawsuits. At the meeting I had with President Clinton in Hanoi, I told him why we want to establish a humanitarian relationship between the US and Vietnam, but the United States did not reply to our demands. They did help us find the remains of some Vietnamese war victims, but they did not help us with Agent Orange. Not at all.”
When he was president of Vietnam’s Red Cross, Dr. Nhan convinced the American Red Cross to help Agent Orange victims and that organization agreed to give Vietnam $1 million.
“And since there are at least three million victims,” he laughs, “that means that each victim would get about thirty cents. You cannot eat very much in Vietnam with that amount of money.
“And yes, some days ago we were informed that the Obama administration is willing to contribute $3 million. So now we have gathered $6 million altogether for cleaning up Vietnam’s environment, and for helping every Agent Orange victim in Vietnam.
Dr. Nhan pauses to make sure that we get the joke. Brendan wanders around the room, taking photographs. The interpreters write in their notebooks.
“That would mean,” he says, speaking in English to emphasize the irony, “that each victim would receive $2.00. Can you visit Vietnam with $2.00? Can you eat breakfast in Hanoi for $2.00?”
“Can’t even get a taxi in Hanoi for $2.00,” I reply, and we all laugh, knowing that taxi drivers in this city are notorious for overcharging their fares.
Dr. Nhan looks at the snow-covered slopes of the Rocky Mountains, so quiet, cool, inviting.
“The Obama administration have very good humor,” he chuckles. “Very good humor. And Obama has not visited Vietnam, so perhaps he thinks Vietnamese are not intelligent people.
“When I was the president of the Red Cross, I promised the victims of Agent Orange that if I can not do anything during that time, in some humanitarian way for them, I will support them all the way to appealing the lawsuit in the United States.
“That’s why in 2004, they asked me to be vice president of VAVA, and to work on behalf of the Agent Orange victims’ fight for justice. Our job is to support the lawsuit, and to mobilize support for victims in our country and abroad.
“In 2005, I went to the United States and traveled to ten of its biggest cities, where I met a lot of American people. And I informed them about the truth of the suffering in Vietnam. I met professors as well as students in many famous cities like Washington, Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco. I don’t remember all of them.”
In October, 2008, the American Studies Association invited Dr. Nhan to address their annual meeting in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Unwilling to make such an arduous trip, he sent the conference a copy of his paper, “Agent Orange and the Conscience of the USA,” which he began by telling the scholars that as a boy he was quite curious about America.
At that time, like any other little boy, I was not interested in politics, but enjoyed watching American movies like the cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, and cowboy films. We enjoyed American movies not because of the scenes of riding and shooting, but their happy endings, which mean “the good defeats the evil.” And I longed naively to see America! But now the US has come to Vietnam.12
Dr. Nhan told the delegates how, following the Geneva Agreement in 1954 that divided Vietnam along the 17th parallel, the United States decided to mount a campaign to destroy Vietnam’s independence movement. “Ten years later, my boyish, naïve hope was completely broken when the US Air Forces bombed the North of Vietnam, threatening to ‘bring it back to the Stone Age.’”
Herbicides destroyed “more than three million hectares of forest…. As a consequence, erosion, floods and droughts seriously damaged the agriculture—the main means of existence of the majority of the Vietnamese people.”
“Vietnamese women,” he says,
have experienced disorders and complications during pregnancy, including miscarriages, still births, premature births, and severe fetal malformations. These reproductive problems have deprived many women of their right to be a mother….
The most painful fact is that dioxin affects generations. The rate of children who have congenital malformations in Vietnam is higher than that in other countries even thirty years after the war ended…. It’s a pity that American judges have dismissed the claims of Vietnamese Agent Orange victims with very unconvincing reasons. In fact, they don’t respect the truth and justice.13
In January 2006, a Seoul court ordered Dow Chemical and Monsanto to pay $62 million to 6,800 Korean veterans and their families. New Zealand’s government apologized for sending its veterans to Southeast Asia where they were exposed to dioxin. New Zealand’s Vietnam veterans were planning to file a lawsuit against the US chemical companies claiming $3 billion in compensation.
The courageous struggle of the Agent Orange victims in Vietnam and their lawsuit are not only for the sake of their own and their children, but also for the legitimate benefit of the Agent Orange victims in other countries such as America, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.14
Dr. Nhan concluded his talk by asking the scholars whether there is justice and conscience in the USA? And, if so, who might the people be who really respect it?
Dr. Nhan offers me another cup of coffee. “Do you know Admiral Zumwalt and his book, My Father, My Son?” he asks.
“Yes, I do know Admiral Zumwalt.”
As the officer in command of all naval operations in the southern half of Vietnam, Admiral Zumwalt ordered the use of Agent Orange along the banks of rivers and canals. His son, Lieutenant Elmo Zumwalt III, served on one of boats that plied these waterways, searching for Vietcong to kill. During lulls in the fighting, he and his crew swam in the Quang Nam and Ma rivers, ate food from markets along riverbanks, and drank water contaminated with Agent Orange. Lieutenant Zumwalt and I were scheduled to appear together on “Kelly & Company,” a live audience talk show in Detroit. Unfortunately, he was terminally ill and couldn’t fly to Michigan, so he called into the show and we talked together that way. A man sat in a wheelchair in the front row of the studio. He was holding a photograph of a nineteen-year-old soldier. Now in his early thirties, the ex-soldier who’d been exposed to Agent Orange was a trembling, emaciate
d, feeble old man.
Elmo Zumwalt III fathered a son with learning disabilities and, after a long, hard struggle he died of cancer.
Admiral Zumwalt spent the last years of his own life advocating for Agent Orange victims. After an exhaustive study to determine whether “it is as likely as not that there is a statistical association between exposure to Agent Orange and a specific health effect,” Zumwalt concluded that the government and the chemical companies had in fact conspired to deny Vietnam veterans much needed help for their war-related illnesses. Perhaps his most disturbing finding was that some notable “scientific studies” were seriously flawed or falsified, with researchers using bogus statistics to deny any association between exposure to Agent Orange and human illness:
For instance, recent litigation against the Monsanto Corporation revealed conclusive evidence that studies conducted by Monsanto employees to examine the health effects of exposure to dioxin were fraudulent. These same fraudulent studies have been repeatedly cited by government officials to deny the existence of a relationship between health problems and exposure to Agent Orange.15
Even before beginning his research, Admiral Zumwalt knew that Ranch Hand pilots, who flew C-123 aircraft to defoliate Vietnam’s forests and jungles, had been heavily exposed to Agent Orange. He was also aware that based on its Ranch Hand study, the Air Force had concluded that Agent Orange had not adversely affected these pilots. Zumwalt’s research confirmed his suspicions that this study was seriously flawed.
In 1987, Ranch Hand scientists confirmed to Senator Daschle that an unpublished birth defects report shows that birth defects among Ranch Hand children are double those of children in the control group and not “minor” as originally reported in 1984.16
Ranch Hander pilots “also showed a significant increase in skin cancers unrelated to overexposure to the sun as originally suggested in the 1984 report.”17
And:
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) birth defects study was confined to Vietnam Veterans located in the Atlanta, Georgia region. The study was not an Agent Orange birth defects study since no effort was made to determine whether the veterans had ever been exposed to Agent Orange.18
For the Airforce to have made the statement in 1990 of no evidence of a link between exposure to Agent Orange and the cancer problems experienced by Ranch Handers is, as Senator Daschle notes, “patently false.”19
Admiral Zumwalt chastised the Veterans’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards for its “blanket lack of impartiality. In fact, some members of the Advisory Committee and other VA officials have, even before reviewing the evidence [my italics], publicly denied the existence of a correlation between exposure to dioxin and adverse health effects.”20
Zumwalt concluded that there was ample scientific evidence to demonstrate a connection between Agent Orange exposure and human illness. Regarding the question of birth defects, he wrote:
Any Vietnam Veteran, or Vietnam Veteran’s child who has a birth defect, should be presumed to have a service-connected health effect if that person suffers from the type of health effects considered with dioxin exposure and the Veteran’s health or service record establishes 1) abnormally high TCDD in blood tests; or 2) the veteran’s presence within 20 kilometers and 30 days of a known sprayed area (as shown by HERBs tapes and corresponding company records); or 3) the Veteran’s presence at fire base perimeters or brown water operations where there is reason to believe Agent Orange [spraying] has occurred.21
Admiral Zumwalt confirmed that Vietnam veterans suffering Agent Orange exposure had been right all along.
In his address to American Study scholars in Albuquerque, Dr. Nhan quotes President Clinton:
[Clinton said,] “Today we are showing that America can listen and act. Our country can face up to the consequences of our actions…. We will bear the responsibility for the harm we do, even when the harm is unintended…. Nothing we can do will ever repay the Vietnam veterans for all they gave and all they lost, particularly those who have been damaged by Agent Orange.”22
President Clinton promised to listen to victims of Agent Orange. He did not promise to help them secure quality health care. Nor did he offer them financial assistance. The key word in the president’s speech is “unintended.”
Outside, the honking grows, expands, echoes off buildings, bounces into the room; it is so discordant that a Vietnamese English-language paper publishes an indignant editorial protesting against “Hanoi’s Horny Drivers.”
Our translators check their notes, and Dr. Nhan talks about the Vietnamese lawsuit, which US appellate courts have dismissed and which the Supreme Court refused to even discuss.
“At the beginning, we didn’t think we could win the case. You see, in some wars we lost, but finally we were the winner. So we will have many ways outside of the court to struggle against the chemical companies.”
We’ve been talking a long time and the interpreters must be tired. Sometimes, we have to stop and sort things out because we are attempting to communicate across cultural and linguistic differences. In English, we use “go,” “going,” “gone, “while the Vietnamese speak and write in what we call the present tense. In Vietnamese, a sequence of letters has only one meaning, but depending on the tone a speaker uses, the meaning of these letters changes. There’s no simple use of “you,” and there seems to be no real place, as in English, for “I.”
Once, I was telling some Vietnamese friends about the time a policeman in Washington, DC broke my leg, shattering my kneecap with his nightstick, and—as I lay curled into a ball of agony—he threatened to kill me. Everyone laughed. I laughed as well, assuming that the translator’s intonation had turned my sad tale into an amusing one. On another occasion in Ho Chi Minh City, across from the Continental Hotel, a bedraggled young man offered to shine my sneakers. He complained that he did not have any money, he was hungry, and he wanted to return home to Hanoi. When I handed him 50,000 ng, he grew tense. “Why do you give me ng?” he demanded. “Because I wanted to,” I said. He walked away in a huff.
Dr. Nhan has lived through decades of colonialism and war. His hopes soared when Ho Chi Minh, speaking before a massive crowd in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, quoted from the United States Declaration of Independence. Surely, the Americans would support Uncle Ho’s new government. Instead, the French launched a violent campaign to recolonize Vietnam. Before France was finally forced to leave Vietnam for good, the United States was paying for eighty percent of its campaign to remain in Vietnam.23
After the Geneva Agreement in 1954, it seemed that the Vietnamese would soon choose their own president and live in peace in a united Vietnam. But the Eisenhower administration, convinced that Ho Chi Minh was a communist and fearing the loss of valuable assets in Indochina, sent General Edward Lansdale to Saigon to set up a “dirty tricks” squad—covert action teams that would seek to sabotage transportation networks in the north, counterfeit Vietminh documents, and spread rumors that there would be terrible massacres if Ho Chi Minh became president.
Lansdale helped Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic Mandarin, return to power in Saigon, and he set up the Saigon Military Mission to train Diem’s army. The American War had begun. It would last for twenty years.
During the American War, Dr. Nhan worked as a surgeon in Hanoi. One day, while operating on a patient, he looked out the window to see bombs falling. Children and the elderly had been evacuated from Hanoi, but hospital staff kept working while B-52S rained death upon the city.
“I can not say if it’s a short or long time for the US side or the chemical companies to admit this matter,” says Dr. Nhan, “but I think they have to admit their responsibility for what they did in Vietnam, and the consequences for the Vietnamese people.
“The Vietnamese people want to close the past. You know, even US veterans, when they come to visit Vietnam, they receive a warm welcome from Vietnamese people. And they have a good time in Vietnam.
“And you know that in the past, the Japanese com
mitted crimes in Vietnam. During World War II, after the Japanese invasion, about two million Vietnamese were suffering from hunger. But we don’t talk about that story. Up to now, Japan is one country that has helped us a lot.”
Dr. Nhan is convinced that the $180 million out of court settlement benefited US veterans. It’s difficult to imagine that such a large sum of money would not assure that veterans, their families, and their widows would be taken care of. But when a reporter for Thanh Nien News asked attorney Gerson H. Smoger how the chemical companies could “get away with compensating Americans but not Vietnamese,” he replied:
I would not say that they “got away with compensating,” because I can assure you that the responsible chemical companies had no interest in compensating anyone. Also, unfortunately, the chemical companies have never really compensated the vast majority of American veterans either. While there was a settlement entered into in 1984, the money ran out in 1994. Of the 2.4 million Americans who served in Vietnam, only about 60,000 ever received anything from the companies…. Given how long it takes to get cancer from the chemicals, virtually none of the veterans who got cancer have received any compensation from the companies.24
When American courts dismissed the Vietnamese lawsuit, says Dr. Nhan, many people in other countries such as Australia, Korea, and New Zealand also lost. In New Zealand, Agent Orange victims asked for compensation of $3 billion. And the number of Agent Orange victims is much smaller than in Vietnam.
“When I was in the United States, I met a lot of Vietnam veterans. They were angry at their government because it did not recognize the effects of dioxin on their children and their wives. But the United States knows more about the consequences of dioxin on people. They keep it a secret.”
“A secret?” I ask him.
Scorched Earth Page 5