ChiTown Lady
27th March 2003, 07:57
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, March 24, 2003
Shadows of Agent Orange Third generation of Vietnam victims
Gail Bensinger, Chronicle Staff Writer
Bac Giang, Vietnam -- Five-year-old Phuong looks
out at the world through huge, sad eyes as she
wiggles her shoulder deeper into her mother's
embrace.
Her attempt to hide is not just shyness. Phuong has
already learned that strangers are less interested in
her sweet face, her gold earrings, her cheerful cotton
dress than in her left arm -- a useless stub that ends
just below the armpit.
Her other arm is normal, if you overlook the hand with
only three fingers. So are her legs and feet, though
she has only nine toes. When her mother tries to
show visitors the deformities, Phuong cries
uncontrollably.
Nearly three decades after the Vietnam War ended,
Agent Orange has reached the third generation, and
Phuong is another casualty.
Fully half of Vietnam's 82 million people were not yet
born when the last U. S. helicopter lifted off from Tan
Son Nhat Air Base in the frantic days of April 1975.
For most of the others, trying to make their way in
this poor but vibrant nation, that time is part of their
past, not an issue in their daily lives.
Tan Son Nhat, once a U.S. military hub, is now a
busy international airport with duty-free merchandise
for sale. Parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply
route that crossed hundreds of miles of mountains
and jungles, have been incorporated into the
north-south highway being constructed down the
western edge of the country. Farmland in central
Vietnam is scarred with huge bomb craters, some
used now to raise catfish.
But if war is just one prism through which the history
of Vietnam can be viewed, it still refracts
occasionally on the present and the future. Agent
Orange continues to claim victims. Land mines pock
swaths of the countryside. A generation of
middle-aged Vietnamese women lack husbands in
this family- oriented culture.
SUFFERING A DAILY REALITY
At the residential treatment center where Phuong
shares a sunny, aqua- painted room with three other
youngsters, Agent Orange is a daily reality. All of the
30 boarders and nearly half of the 100 day students
are suffering from its effects: twisted or stunted
limbs, bodies covered with tumors, some blind or
deaf children, others with faces in perpetual pain.
During the war, Phuong's grandfather was in the
demilitarized zone in central Vietnam when U.S.
planes dumped defoliants on the region in an attempt
to deny cover to North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet
Cong guerrillas. Now, she and the other boarders are
attended by parents learning how to care for their
disabled offspring at home. The least afflicted
children will be taught trades such as embroidery or
handicrafts.
TESTING COST IS PROHIBITIVE
Dr. Nguyen Thi My Hien, a retired pediatrician who
raises money for the center, said it would cost an
unaffordable $2,000 per child for complete batteries of
tests to establish the connection between their
conditions and Agent Orange. But the incidence of
afflictions matches wartime bombing patterns, she
said, even in cases like Phuong's that skipped a
generation.
The government is scrambling to find resources for
dealing with Agent Orange, dioxin and other
defoliants, including medical care and environmental
cleanup. Contributions from abroad, local
businesses, nongovernmental organizations and
some sympathetic governments -- though not the
United States -- finance individual projects.
"The U.S. government is really in denial about Agent
Orange. The official policy is not even to discuss it,"
said Chuck Searcy, the Hanoi representative of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the group that
built the memorial wall on the Mall in Washington,
D.C.
TERATOGENS DUMPED
Many chemicals dumped across much of Vietnam
during the war were teratogens,
which cause birth defects in the offspring of those
affected, said Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, who served
as a battlefield surgeon in Vietnam's successive wars
to oust the French and the Americans.
Nguyen, who lost her own son in January to cancer
she links to Agent Orange, became an obstetrician/gynecologist after the war and began seeing deformed babies in her practice.
Eventually, the affected populations will stop being
able to reproduce, she said, adding that she
suspects the worst is not over: "Many strange
illnesses are continuously arising."
In the former war zones, lives are lost and bodies
shattered to the left- over rubble of war. Between
1975 and 1998, the last year for which figures are
available, an estimated 38,000 people were killed and
67,000 maimed by buried land mines and unexploded
ordnance.
MINE REMOVAL PROJECT
"Everyone says the estimates are quite low," said
Searcy, the memorial fund representative, who also
oversees a pilot mine removal project in Quang Tri
Province under the auspices of Asian Landmine
Solutions, which raised the $249, 000 to launch it.
The project, in the Triet Phong district, is training
Vietnamese deminers and educating local residents
about danger zones and the risks to "hobby
deminers" looking for scrap to sell.
The Vietnam military is in overall charge of demining,
Searcy said, but it does not have enough trained
deminers or equipment to accomplish a national
cleanup without outside help. If villagers report
possible bomb or mine sites and nothing happens,
he warned, people will stop being vigilant -- but, with
the army's resources overstretched, "there's not
always somebody who can come get it."
So far, the Triet Phong project to set up local
demining teams has been successful, Searcy said.
The hope is to expand the model elsewhere. "The
Vietnamese wisely like to do things in a small way
first," he said. "They like to have a small success
rather than a big failure."
To date, donations for various nonmilitary demining
efforts have come from individuals or international
nongovernmental organizations. Only a trickle of
cash and equipment for demining and ordnance
disposal has been received from the U.S.
government, Searcy said.
He cited a study showing that the three provinces
that comprised the demilitarized zone could be
cleaned up for about $1 billion over five or six years.
"The Vietnamese can do it -- they just need
equipment and training," he said.
'LONG-HAIR ARMY' DAYS
In Hue, a city linked in memory to the January 1968
Tet offensive, a war widow named Nguyen Thi Van
and her friend Le Thi Suong exchanged recollections
of their days in the "long-hair army" -- women who
worked carrying documents, transporting food and
weapons, helping wounded soldiers escape, digging
tunnels, sometimes even fighting.
For them and many of the 30 or so other members of
the Lonely Women's Club - - part social club, part
support group, part micro-credit establishment,
sponsored by the Vietnam Women's Union -- war
marked their lives forever.
In this family-centered society, all are single. Some
are widows, others are stigmatized by the wartime
hardships they endured. Some never found mates
because so many potential husbands died on the
battlefield. Some broke the social taboo against
unwed motherhood.
Nguyen Thi Van supports herself and her son making
brooms and raising animals. She said she is weak,
the result of torture endured when she was
imprisoned for two years by the South Vietnamese
army. Le has headaches and faints often, conditions
she linked to her exposure to Agent Orange. One of
her four adult children is affected by the chemical as
well, she said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...24/MN185770.DTL (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/03/24/MN185770.DTL)
Monday, March 24, 2003
Shadows of Agent Orange Third generation of Vietnam victims
Gail Bensinger, Chronicle Staff Writer
Bac Giang, Vietnam -- Five-year-old Phuong looks
out at the world through huge, sad eyes as she
wiggles her shoulder deeper into her mother's
embrace.
Her attempt to hide is not just shyness. Phuong has
already learned that strangers are less interested in
her sweet face, her gold earrings, her cheerful cotton
dress than in her left arm -- a useless stub that ends
just below the armpit.
Her other arm is normal, if you overlook the hand with
only three fingers. So are her legs and feet, though
she has only nine toes. When her mother tries to
show visitors the deformities, Phuong cries
uncontrollably.
Nearly three decades after the Vietnam War ended,
Agent Orange has reached the third generation, and
Phuong is another casualty.
Fully half of Vietnam's 82 million people were not yet
born when the last U. S. helicopter lifted off from Tan
Son Nhat Air Base in the frantic days of April 1975.
For most of the others, trying to make their way in
this poor but vibrant nation, that time is part of their
past, not an issue in their daily lives.
Tan Son Nhat, once a U.S. military hub, is now a
busy international airport with duty-free merchandise
for sale. Parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply
route that crossed hundreds of miles of mountains
and jungles, have been incorporated into the
north-south highway being constructed down the
western edge of the country. Farmland in central
Vietnam is scarred with huge bomb craters, some
used now to raise catfish.
But if war is just one prism through which the history
of Vietnam can be viewed, it still refracts
occasionally on the present and the future. Agent
Orange continues to claim victims. Land mines pock
swaths of the countryside. A generation of
middle-aged Vietnamese women lack husbands in
this family- oriented culture.
SUFFERING A DAILY REALITY
At the residential treatment center where Phuong
shares a sunny, aqua- painted room with three other
youngsters, Agent Orange is a daily reality. All of the
30 boarders and nearly half of the 100 day students
are suffering from its effects: twisted or stunted
limbs, bodies covered with tumors, some blind or
deaf children, others with faces in perpetual pain.
During the war, Phuong's grandfather was in the
demilitarized zone in central Vietnam when U.S.
planes dumped defoliants on the region in an attempt
to deny cover to North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet
Cong guerrillas. Now, she and the other boarders are
attended by parents learning how to care for their
disabled offspring at home. The least afflicted
children will be taught trades such as embroidery or
handicrafts.
TESTING COST IS PROHIBITIVE
Dr. Nguyen Thi My Hien, a retired pediatrician who
raises money for the center, said it would cost an
unaffordable $2,000 per child for complete batteries of
tests to establish the connection between their
conditions and Agent Orange. But the incidence of
afflictions matches wartime bombing patterns, she
said, even in cases like Phuong's that skipped a
generation.
The government is scrambling to find resources for
dealing with Agent Orange, dioxin and other
defoliants, including medical care and environmental
cleanup. Contributions from abroad, local
businesses, nongovernmental organizations and
some sympathetic governments -- though not the
United States -- finance individual projects.
"The U.S. government is really in denial about Agent
Orange. The official policy is not even to discuss it,"
said Chuck Searcy, the Hanoi representative of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the group that
built the memorial wall on the Mall in Washington,
D.C.
TERATOGENS DUMPED
Many chemicals dumped across much of Vietnam
during the war were teratogens,
which cause birth defects in the offspring of those
affected, said Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, who served
as a battlefield surgeon in Vietnam's successive wars
to oust the French and the Americans.
Nguyen, who lost her own son in January to cancer
she links to Agent Orange, became an obstetrician/gynecologist after the war and began seeing deformed babies in her practice.
Eventually, the affected populations will stop being
able to reproduce, she said, adding that she
suspects the worst is not over: "Many strange
illnesses are continuously arising."
In the former war zones, lives are lost and bodies
shattered to the left- over rubble of war. Between
1975 and 1998, the last year for which figures are
available, an estimated 38,000 people were killed and
67,000 maimed by buried land mines and unexploded
ordnance.
MINE REMOVAL PROJECT
"Everyone says the estimates are quite low," said
Searcy, the memorial fund representative, who also
oversees a pilot mine removal project in Quang Tri
Province under the auspices of Asian Landmine
Solutions, which raised the $249, 000 to launch it.
The project, in the Triet Phong district, is training
Vietnamese deminers and educating local residents
about danger zones and the risks to "hobby
deminers" looking for scrap to sell.
The Vietnam military is in overall charge of demining,
Searcy said, but it does not have enough trained
deminers or equipment to accomplish a national
cleanup without outside help. If villagers report
possible bomb or mine sites and nothing happens,
he warned, people will stop being vigilant -- but, with
the army's resources overstretched, "there's not
always somebody who can come get it."
So far, the Triet Phong project to set up local
demining teams has been successful, Searcy said.
The hope is to expand the model elsewhere. "The
Vietnamese wisely like to do things in a small way
first," he said. "They like to have a small success
rather than a big failure."
To date, donations for various nonmilitary demining
efforts have come from individuals or international
nongovernmental organizations. Only a trickle of
cash and equipment for demining and ordnance
disposal has been received from the U.S.
government, Searcy said.
He cited a study showing that the three provinces
that comprised the demilitarized zone could be
cleaned up for about $1 billion over five or six years.
"The Vietnamese can do it -- they just need
equipment and training," he said.
'LONG-HAIR ARMY' DAYS
In Hue, a city linked in memory to the January 1968
Tet offensive, a war widow named Nguyen Thi Van
and her friend Le Thi Suong exchanged recollections
of their days in the "long-hair army" -- women who
worked carrying documents, transporting food and
weapons, helping wounded soldiers escape, digging
tunnels, sometimes even fighting.
For them and many of the 30 or so other members of
the Lonely Women's Club - - part social club, part
support group, part micro-credit establishment,
sponsored by the Vietnam Women's Union -- war
marked their lives forever.
In this family-centered society, all are single. Some
are widows, others are stigmatized by the wartime
hardships they endured. Some never found mates
because so many potential husbands died on the
battlefield. Some broke the social taboo against
unwed motherhood.
Nguyen Thi Van supports herself and her son making
brooms and raising animals. She said she is weak,
the result of torture endured when she was
imprisoned for two years by the South Vietnamese
army. Le has headaches and faints often, conditions
she linked to her exposure to Agent Orange. One of
her four adult children is affected by the chemical as
well, she said.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?...24/MN185770.DTL (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/03/24/MN185770.DTL)