Vietnam: The Legacy of Agent Orange

Warning: this blog post has no heartwarming stories or happy endings, only scary pictures and lots of questions. Sorry. Next time, cute Sri Lankan children! I promise!

It's Veteran's Day and my thoughts are back in Vietnam, thinking again about the incredible longevity of the devastation that war can cause on a country, its people, and those who serve in it.

First, an aside. My first night in Ho Chi Minh City,an apocalyptic monsoon rain forced me to eat at a lackluster restaurant that also served as a travel agency next door to my hotel. As if this wasn't upsetting enough for a foodie like me, I looked up from my dinner and saw this:

Young tourists firing guns at the Cu Chi Tunnels

The Cu Chi tunnels, the strategically invaluable hideout of the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, are one of the most popular day trips from Ho Chi Minh City. To help you absorb the history of the place, you can visit some of the subterranean bunkers, crawl through dark claustrophobic tunnels, and...fire assault rifles, like these two grinning young (American?) lads. What a pyrrhic victory, to overcome only to turn around and sell the horrific experience as a tour package.

A few days later, I found myself at the War Remnants Museum (whose original name in 1975 was "The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government [of South Vietnam]"). The museum is (SURPRISE!) far from neutral, but it houses an eye-opening (and terrifying) display on the most disturbing legacy of the Vietnam war: dioxin poisoning.

Agent Orange protest flag, War Remnants Museum

During the conflict in Vietnam, the United States sprayed 20 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam (and parts of Laos and Cambodia) as part of "Operation Ranch Hand", a campaign to destroy the Viet Cong's jungle cover and food supplies; over 20% of all forests in Vietnam were sprayed at least once, destroying millions of acres. In addition to causing significant ecological damage, the herbicides immediately caused serious famine throughout the countryside, starving many and forcing more than 5 million rural Vietnamese to move into cities, creating large swathes of slums.

But the long-term effects were even more nightmarish: the herbicides contained high levels of the incredibly toxic compound dioxin. Dangerous at even tiny quantities, dioxin has been found to cause various cancers, skin diseases, and severe birth defects including stunted growth, physical deformities, and mental retardation; in Vietnam, many places have soil or water dioxin levels that are still hundreds of times higher than what the US EPA considers safe. Granted, the US has its own problems with dioxin since most of it was manufactured here, not to mention the huge number of veterans and their families affected by exposure who are STILL fighting for acknowledgment and compensation.

(Warning, the two pictures I took of the dioxin exhibit are pretty disturbing. If you are curious to find out more about dioxin, the Wikipedia article is informative but has even more shocking photos.)

Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese children have been--and continue to be--born with severe deformations due to prenatal exposure to dioxin even though, increasingly, their parents were not even alive during the war. They are a severe economic and psychological burden on their families, and often live in great pain. It's good that governments and big NGOs are throwing money at cleanup efforts and treatments for the disabled, but I can't help but wonder--how many new creative scientific minds are thinking about this problem? Are there smaller ventures aimed at containment, education, removal? And if not, why is it so hard to invite innovation around problems like this one? If you know of an organization or an individual doing excellent work on this issue, the Breadpig would love to know.