By Donald Kirk
The fallout from the Vietnam War endures an ongoing tragedy that no one imagined when I was based in old Saigon as a journalist at the height of the fighting in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
We had a lot of stories to cover from the mountains of northern ``South Vietnam” though the central highlands, down the coast and on to the Mekong Delta. There was the U.S. ``pacification” program, Saigon politics, firefights in isolated regions, diplomatic maneuvering, just about everything. And then, for a break in the routine, you could always go to Cambodia and Laos and cover very different conflicts there while dining in fine restaurants, drinking in some great bars and listening to the Armed Forces Vietnam Network.
There was one story, though, that a lot of us missed, and it may be one of the most significant. Sure, we heard about helicopters and lumbering cargo planes spraying remote jungle regions with a chemical called Agent Orange, but we gave little thought to what this strange chemical was doing. We sometimes flew in helicopters over swaths of bleak countryside laid bare by Agent Orange, but we assumed the damage was done far from towns and villages.
You didn’t hear soldiers complaining about Agent Orange. If some poor peasants didn’t like it, their voices were drowned out by seemingly far more important news on the ebb and flow of a war in which the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were suffering enormous losses as long as the U.S. had half a million troops in the country backed up by plenty of air power _ and such new tricks of modern warfare such as Agent Orange.
Now, four decades after commanders ordered its use, Agent Orange lingers on as perhaps the most deadly long-range consequence of the war. I’ve visited Saigon _ yes, the central area of Ho Chi Minh City still goes by that historic name _ a number of times since the war ended in the annihilation of the U.S.-backed regime in 1975 two years after the last American combat troops had gone home. The countryside is at peace, the streets are jammed with motorcycles, shops and stores glisten with shiny new products and bars and restaurants are flourishing.
Nothing about latter-day Vietnam, however, is more memorable than a visit to a hospital in Saigon where I saw crippled, deformed people wandering the halls or confined to beds, sentenced for life by the effects of Agent Orange. Some could walk with crutches, canes and walkers, others were curled in weird positions, their faces vacant and twisted, their mouths curled in strange patterns. The most saddening were children and infants, born years after the devastation of the war, doomed to halting existences on the fringes of life, the victims of the chemicals passed on by their parents and in some cases their grandparents. Rows of bottles on display showed the deformed fetuses of those who had lived briefly in their mother’s wombs, their tiny heads distended, their limbs askew.
You have to wonder, as you cringe at the sight of the victims of Agent Orange, about those who concocted this chemical defoliant and then ordered its use. It’s fairly obvious that commanders on the ground were assured it was OK, that it wouldn’t harm people, just plants and flowers and trees, but then you have to ask about the great scientific minds that researched and tested the stuff. Were these minds smart enough to make a crippling chemical but too dumb to imagine it would have an equally terrible impact on fauna as well as flora?
It’s easy to imagine that generals and colonels, obsessed with winning battles and defeating the enemy, might have been clueless about the chemical they were told would burn away the jungle redoubts of the bad guys, depriving them of the cover they needed for infiltration and sneak attacks. Can anyone believe, however, that the mad scientists who developed Agent Orange, and another defoliant that I heard about in Vietnam, Agent Blue, did not know the lethal effects of their handiwork? Or, if they told their bosses about it, then what were executives at Dow Chemical and Monsanto Chemical, the two leading manufacturers of the killer liquid, telling their clients in the Pentagon? Were they saying, well, maybe you wouldn’t want to drink the stuff, but actually it’s not all that bad?
All those questions come to mind as we hear that Agent Orange was used in South Korea at the same time it was defoliating jungle regions in Vietnam. The purpose was the same. The idea was to expose the routes that North Korean infiltrators were using to creep into the South long after the end of the Korean War in July 1953. A lot of people have forgotten that period in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes referred to by American GI’s as ``the second Korean War,” in which ambushes and sneak attacks were routine and scores of Americans and South Koreans were killed.
Now we’re hearing how irresponsible were those entrusted with this witch’s brew, tossing some of it into streams, burying some in canisters that will eventually erode, seeping into the earth, infecting new growth. One has to assume that no one at the time comprehended what they were doing. Presumably, no commander would order people to load the stuff onto aircraft and spray it into bushes and forests in full knowledge that those who handled it faced the greatest risks of all. The real blame goes much deeper and higher, to scientists and corporate executives who never made clear the horror of what they were selling at enormous profits to themselves.
Donald Kirk has written a number of books on Vietnam as well as Korea, most recently ``Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.” He can be reached at kirkdon@yahoo.com.