SPECTRE ORANGE

By Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy
Saturday March 29, 2003
The Guardian

Hong Hanh is falling to pieces. She has been poisoned by the most
toxic molecule known to science; it was sprayed during a prolonged
military campaign. The contamination persists. No redress has been
offered, no compensation. The superpower that spread the toxin has
done nothing to combat the medical and environmental catastrophe that
is overwhelming her country. This is not northern Iraq, where Saddam
Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds in 1988. Nor the trenches of first world
war France. Hong Hanh's story, and that of many more like her, is
quietly unfolding in Vietnam today. Her declining half-life is spent
unseen, in her home, an unremarkable concrete box in Ho Chi Minh City,
filled with photographs, family plaques and yellow enamel stars, a
place where the best is made of the worst.

Hong Hanh is both surprising and terrifying. Here is a 19-year-old who
lives in a 10-year-old's body. She clatters around with disjointed
spidery strides which leave her soaked in sweat. When she cannot stop
crying, soothing creams and iodine are rubbed into her back, which is
a lunar collage of septic blisters and scabs. "My daughter is dying,"
her mother says. "My youngest daughter is 11 and she has the same
symptoms. What should we do? Their fingers and toes stick together
before they drop off. Their hands wear down to stumps. Every day they
lose a little more skin. And this is not leprosy. The doctors say it
is connected to American chemical weapons we were exposed to during
the Vietnam war."

Agent Orange victim Tran-Minh, 5, waits for his lunch at the Tu Du Women's Hospital
in Ho Chi Minh City, November 2000. Picture REUTERS/Lou Dematteis

There are an estimated 650,000 like Hong Hanh in Vietnam, suffering
from an array of baffling chronic conditions. Another 500,000 have
already died. The thread that weaves through all their case histories
is defoliants deployed by the US military during the war. Some of the
victims are veterans who were doused in these chemicals during the
war, others are farmers who lived off land that was sprayed. The
second generation are the sons and daughters of war veterans, or
children born to parents who lived on contaminated land. Now there is
a third generation, the grandchildren of the war and its victims.
This is a chain of events bitterly denied by the US government.
Millions of litres of defoliants such as Agent Orange were dropped on
Vietnam, but US government scientists claimed that these chemicals
were harmless to humans and short-lived in the environment. US
strategists argue that Agent Orange was a prototype smart weapon, a
benign tactical herbicide that saved many hundreds of thousands of
American lives by denying the North Vietnamese army the jungle cover
that allowed it ruthlessly to strike and feint.

New scientific research, however, confirms what the Vietnamese have
been claiming for years. It also portrays the US government as one
that has illicitly used weapons of mass destruction, stymied all
independent efforts to assess the impact of their deployment, failed
to acknowledge cold, hard evidence of maiming and slaughter, and
pursued a policy of evasion and deception.

Teams of international scientists working in Vietnam have now
discovered that Agent Orange contains one of the most virulent poisons
known to man, a strain of dioxin called TCCD which, 28 years after the
fighting ended, remains in the soil, continuing to destroy the lives
of those exposed to it. Evidence has also emerged that the US
government not only knew that Agent Orange was contaminated, but was
fully aware of the killing power of its contaminant dioxin, and yet
still continued to use the herbicide in Vietnam for 10 years of the
war and in concentrations that exceeded its own guidelines by 25
times. As well as spraying the North Vietnamese, the US doused its own
troops stationed in the jungle, rather than lose tactical advantage by
having them withdraw.

On February 5, addressing the UN Security Council, secretary of state
Colin Powell, now famously, clutched between his fingers a tiny phial
representing concentrated anthrax spores, enough to kill thousands,
and only a tiny fraction of the amount he said Saddam Hussein had at
his disposal. The Vietnamese government has its own symbolic phial
that it, too, flourishes, in scientific conferences that get little
publicity. It contains 80g of TCCD, just enough of the super-toxin
contained in Agent Orange to fill a child-size talcum powder
container. If dropped into the water supply of a city the size of New
York, it would kill the entire population. Ground-breaking research by
Dr Arthur H Westing, former director of the UN Environment Programme,
a leading authority on Agent Orange, reveals that the US sprayed 170kg
of it over Vietnam.

John F Kennedy's presidential victory in 1961 was propelled by an
image of the New Frontier. He called on Americans to "bear the burden
of a long twilight struggle ... against the common enemies of man:
tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." But one of the most
problematic new frontiers, that dividing North and South Vietnam,
flared up immediately after he had taken office, forcing him to
bolster the US-backed regime in Saigon. Kennedy examined "tricks and
gadgets" that might give the South an edge in the jungle, and in
November 1961 sanctioned the use of defoliants in a covert operation
code-named Ranch Hand, every mission flown signed off by the president
himself and managed in Saigon by the secret Committee 202 the call
sign for defoliating forests being "20" and for spraying fields "2".

Ngo Luc, 67, was serving with a North Vietnamese guerrilla unit in the
Central Highlands when he saw planes circling overhead. "We expected
bombs, but a fine yellow mist descended, covering absolutely
everything," he says. "We were soaked in it, but it didn't worry us,
as it smelled good. We continued to crawl through the jungle. The next
day the leaves wilted and within a week the jungle was bald. We felt
just fine at the time." Today, the former captain is the sole survivor
from his unit and lives with his two granddaughters, both born
partially paralysed, near the central Vietnamese city of Hue.

When US troops became directly embroiled in Vietnam in 1964, the
Pentagon signed contracts worth $57m (£36m) with eight US chemical
companies to produce defoliants, including Agent Orange, named after
the coloured band painted around the barrels in which it was shipped.
The US would target the Ho Chi Minh trail - Viet Cong supply lines
made invisible by the jungle canopy along the border with Laos - as
well as the heavily wooded Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separated the
North from the South, and also the Mekong Delta, a maze of overgrown
swamps and inlets that was a haven for communist insurgents.

A reporter for the St Louis Dispatch witnessed a secret spraying
mission and wrote that the US was dropping "poison". Congressman
Robert Kastenmeier demanded that the president abandon "chemical
warfare" because it tainted America's reputation. Instead, William
Bundy, a presidential adviser, flatly denied that the herbicide used
by America was a chemical weapon, and blamed communist propagandists
for a distortion of the facts about the Ranch Hand operation. Only
when the Federation of American Scientists warned that year that
Vietnam was being used as a laboratory experiment did the rumours
become irrefutable. More than 5,000 American scientists, including 17
Nobel laureates and 129 members of the Academy of Sciences, signed a
petition against "chemical and biological weapons used in Vietnam".

Eight years after the military launched Operation Ranch Hand,
scientists from the National Institute of Health warned that
laboratory mice exposed to Agent Orange were giving birth to stillborn
or deformed litters, a conclusion reinforced by research conducted by
the US department of agriculture. These findings coincided with
newspaper reports in Hanoi that blamed Agent Orange for a range of
crippling conditions among troops and their families. Dr Le Ke Son, a
young conscript in Hanoi during the war and now director of Vietnam's
Agent Orange Victims Fund, recalls, "The government proposed that a
line of runners carry blood and tissue samples from the front to
Hanoi. But it was more than 500 miles and took two months, by which
time the samples were spoiled. How could we make the research work?
There was no way to prove what we could see with our own eyes." In
December 1969, President Nixon made a radical and controversial pledge
that America would never use chemical weapons in a first strike. He
made no mention of Vietnam or Agent Orange, and the US government
continued dispatching supplies of herbicides to the South Vietnamese
regime until 1974.

That year, Kiem was born in a one-room hut in Kim Doi, a village just
outside Hue. For her mother, Nguyen, she should have been a
consolation because her husband, a Viet Cong soldier, had been killed
several months earlier. "The last time he came home, he told me about
the spray, how his unit had been doused in a sweet-smelling mist and
all the leaves had fallen from the trees," Nguyen says. It soon became
obvious that Kiem was severely mentally and physically disabled. "She
can eat, she can smile, she sits on the bed. That's it. I have barely
left my home since my daughter was born."

By the time the war finally ended in 1975, more than 10% of Vietnam
had been intensively sprayed with 72 million litres of chemicals, of
which 66% was Agent Orange, laced with its super-strain of toxic TCCD.
But even these figures, contained in recently declassified US military
records, vastly underestimate the true scale of the spraying. In
confidential statements made to US scientists, former Ranch Hand
pilots allege that, in addition to the recorded missions, there were
26,000 aborted operations during which 260,000 gallons of herbicide
were dumped. US military regulations required all spray planes or
helicopters to return to base empty and one pilot, formerly stationed
at Bien Hoa air base between 1968 and 1969, claims that he regularly
jettisoned his chemical load into the Long Binh reservoir.

"These herbicides should never have been used in the way that they
were used," says the pilot, who has asked not to be identified. Almost
immediately after the war finished, US veterans began reporting
chronic conditions, skin disorders, asthma, cancers, gastrointestinal
diseases. Their babies were born limbless or with Down's syndrome and
spina bifida. But it would be three years before the US department of
veterans' affairs reluctantly agreed to back a medical investigation,
examining 300,000 former servicemen - only a fraction of those who had
complained of being sick - with the government warning all
participants that it was indemnified from lawsuits brought by them.

When rumours began circulating that President Reagan had told
scientists not to make "any link" between Agent Orange and the
deteriorating health of veterans, the victims lost patience with their
government and sued the defoliant manufacturers in an action that was
finally settled out of court in 1984 for $180m (£115m).

It would take the intervention of the former commander of the US Navy
in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, for the government finally to admit
that it had been aware of the potential dangers of the chemicals used
in Vietnam from the start of Ranch Hand. The admiral's involvement
stemmed from a deathbed pledge to his son, a patrol boat captain who
contracted two forms of cancer that he believed had been caused by his
exposure to Agent Orange.

Every day during the war, Captain Elmo Zumwalt Jr had swum in a river
from which he had also eaten fish, in an area that was regularly
sprayed with the herbicide. Two years after his son's death in 1988,
Zumwalt used his leverage within the military establishment to compile
a classified report, which he presented to the secretary of the
department of veterans' affairs and which contained data linking Agent
Orange to 28 life-threatening conditions, including bone cancer, skin
cancer, brain cancer - in fact, almost every cancer known to man - in
addition to chronic skin disorders, birth defects, gastrointestinal
diseases and neurological defects.

Zumwalt also uncovered irrefutable evidence that the US military had
dispensed "Agent Orange in concentrations six to 25 times the
suggested rate" and that "4.2m US soldiers could have made transient
or significant contact with the herbicides because of Operation Ranch
Hand". This speculative figure is twice the official estimate of US
veterans who may have been contaminated with TCCD.

Most damning and politically sensitive of all is a letter, obtained by
Zumwalt, from Dr James Clary, a military scientist who designed the
spray tanks for Ranch Hand. Writing in 1988 to a member of Congress
investigating Agent Orange, Clary admitted: "When we initiated the
herbicide programme in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for
damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even
aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration
than the civilian version, due to the lower cost and speed of
manufacture. However, because the material was to be used on the
enemy, none of us were overly concerned."

The Office of Genetic Counselling and Disabled Children (OGCDC)
operates out of a room little bigger than a broom cupboard. Dr Viet
Nhan and his 21 volunteers share their cramped quarters at Hue Medical
College with cerebral spinal fluid shunt kits donated from Norfolk,
Virginia; children's clothes given by the Rotary Club of Osaka, Japan;
second-hand computers scavenged from banks in Singapore.

Vietnam's chaotic and underfunded national health service cannot cope
with the demands made upon it. The Vietnamese Red Cross has registered
an estimated one million people disabled by Agent Orange, but has
sufficient funds to help only one fifth of them, paying out an average
of $5 (£3) a month. Dr Nhan established the free OGCDC, having studied
the impact of Agent Orange as a student, to match Vietnamese families
to foreign private financial donors. "It was only when I went out to
the villages looking for case studies that I realised how many
families were affected and how few could afford help," he says. "I
abandoned my research. Children need to run before they die."
The walls of his room are plastered with bewildering photographs of
those he has helped: operations for hernias and cleft palates,
open-heart surgery and kidney transplants. All of the patients come
from isolated districts in central Vietnam, villages whose names will
be unfamiliar, unlike the locations that surround them: Khe Sanh,
Hamburger Hill, Camp Carroll and the Rock Pile. "I am not interested
in apportioning blame," Nhan says. "I don't want to talk to you about
science or politics. What I care about is that I have 60 sick children
needing financial backers. They cannot wait for the US to change its
policy, take its head out of the sand and clear up the mess."

He takes us into an intensive care ward to meet nine-year-old Nguyen
Van Tan, who two weeks before had open-heart surgery to correct a
birth defect thought to be connected to dioxin poisoning. There is no
hard proof of this, but his father, who sits beside the bed, talks of
being sprayed with defoliants when he fought with the Viet Cong. The
area they live in was repeatedly doused during the war. Almost all of
his former battlefield comrades have disabled children, he says. Nhan
ushers us away. "I don't want to tell the family yet, but their boy
will never fully recover. He is already suffering from total
paralysis. The most we can do now is send them home with a little
money."

Back in his tiny office, the doctor gestures to photocopies of US Air
Force maps, sent by a veterans' organisation because the US government
refuses to supply them. These dizzying charts depict the number of
herbicide missions carried out over Quang Tri, a province adjacent to
the DMZ, from where almost all Nhan's patients come. Its topography is
obliterated by spray lines, 741,143 gallons of chemicals dropped here,
more than 600,000 of them being Agent Orange. "I'm just scratching the
surface," he says.

The Vietnamese government is reluctant to let us travel to Quang Tri
province. It does not want us "to poke and prod" already dismal
villagers, treating them as if they are medical exhibits. We attempt
to recruit some high-powered support and arrange a meeting in Hanoi
with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, who until last year was the
vice-president of Vietnam. She receives us at the presidential palace
in a teak-panelled hall beneath an enormous photograph of Ho Chi Minh
in a gold frame writhing with dragons. "Thank you, my young friends,
for your interest in Vietnam," Madame Binh says, straightening her
grey silk ao dai, a traditional flowing trouser suit.

She looks genteel, but old photographs of her in olive fatigues
suggest she is a seasoned campaigner. As minister of foreign affairs
for the Provisional Revolutionary South Vietnamese government, she
negotiated at the Paris peace talks in 1973. "I must warn you, I will
not answer questions about George W Bush," she says, casting a steely
gaze, perhaps conscious of the fact that, since the lifting of the US
economic embargo in 1994, trade with America has grown to £650m a
year.

Madame Binh does, however, want to talk about chemical warfare,
recalling how, when she returned after the war to her home province of
Quang Nam, a lush region south-west of Hue which was drenched in
defoliants, she found "no sign of life, just rubble and grass". She
says: "All of our returning veterans had a burning desire for children
to repopulate our devastated country. When the first child was born
with a birth defect, they tried again and again. So many families now
have four or five disabled children, raising them without any hope."
What should the US do? Madame Binh laughs. "It's very late to do
anything. We put this issue directly on the table with the US. So far
they have not dealt with the problem. If our relationship is ever to
be normal, the US has to accept responsibility. Go and see the
situation for yourself." She sends us back to Hue. Over chilled water
and tangerines, we talk to a suspicious party secretary who asks us
why we have bothered to come after all these years. "There is no
point," he says. "Nothing will come of it."

But he opens his file all the same and reads aloud: "In Hue city there
are 6,633 households affected by Agent Orange and in them 3,708 sick
children under the age of 16." He eventually agrees to take us
north-west, over the Perfume river, beyond the ancient royal tombs
that circle this former imperial city, towards the DMZ. We arrive at a
distant commune where a handyman is sprucing up a bust of Ho Chi Minh
with white gloss paint.

Eventually, the chairman of the People's Committee of Dang Ha joins
us, and our political charabanc stuffed with seven officials sets out
across the green and gold countryside, along crisscrossing lanes. The
chairman tells us proudly how he was born on January 31 1968, the
night of the Tet offensive, the turning point of the war, when the
Viet Cong launched its assault on US positions. By the time we stop,
we are all the best of friends and, holding hands, he pulls us into
the home of the Pham family, where a wall of neighbours and an
assembly of local dignitaries dressed in shiny, double-breasted
jackets stare grimly at a moaning child.

He lies on a mat on the floor, his matchstick limbs folded uselessly
before him, his parents taking it in turns to mop his mouth, as if
without them he would drown in his own saliva. Hoi, the boy's mother,
tells us how she met her husband when they were assigned to the same
Viet Cong unit in which they fought together for 10 years. But she
alone was ordered to the battle of Troung Hon mountain. "I saw this
powder falling from the sky," she says. "I felt sick, had a headache.
I was sent to a field hospital. I was close to the gates of hell. By
the time I was discharged, I had lost the strength in my legs and they
have never fully recovered. Then Ky was born, our son, with yellow
skin.

Every year his problems get worse." Her husband, Hung, interrupts:
"Sometimes, we have been so desperate for money that we have begged in
the local market. I do not think you can imagine the humiliation of
that." And this family is not alone. All the adults here, cycling past
us or strolling along the dykes, are suffering from skin lesions and
goitres that cling to necks like sagging balloons. The women
spontaneously abort or give birth to genderless squabs that horrify
even the most experienced midwives.

In a yard, Nguyen, a neighbour's child, stares into space. He has a
hydrocephalic head as large as a melon. Two houses down, Tan has
distended eyes that bubble from his face. By the river, Ngoc is
sleeping, so wan he resembles a pressed flower. "They told me the boy
is depressed," his exhausted father tells us. "Of course he's
depressed. He lives with disease and death."

This is not a specially constructed ghetto used to wage a propaganda
war against imperialism. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has long
embraced the free market. This is an ordinary hamlet where, in these
new liberal times, villagers like to argue about the English
Premiership football results over a glass of home-brewed rice beer.
Here live three generations affected by Agent Orange: veterans who
were sprayed during the war and their successors who inherited the
contamination or who still farm on land that was sprayed. Vietnam's
impoverished scientific community is now trying to determine if there
will be a fourth generation. "How long will this go on?" asks Dr Tran
Manh Hung, the ministry of health's leading researcher.

Dr Hung is now working with a team of Canadian environmental
scientists, Hatfield Consultants, and they have made an alarming
discovery. In the Aluoi Valley, adjacent to the Ho Chi Minh trail,
once home to three US Special Forces bases, a region where Agent
Orange was both stored and sprayed, the scientists' analysis has shown
that, rather than naturally disperse, the dioxin has remained in the
ground in concentrations 100 times above the safety levels for
agricultural land in Canada.

It has spread into Aluoi's ponds, rivers and irrigation supplies, from
where it has passed into the food chain, through fish and freshwater
shellfish, chicken and ducks that store TCCD in fatty tissue. Samples
of human blood and breast milk reveal that villagers have ingested the
invisible toxin and that pregnant women pass it through the placenta
to the foetus and then through their breast milk, doubly infecting
newborn babies. Is it, then, a coincidence that in this minuscule
region of Vietnam, more than 15,000 children and adults have already
been registered as suffering from the usual array of chronic
conditions?

"We theorise that the Aluoi Valley is a microcosm of the country,
where numerous reservoirs of TCCD still exist in the soil of former US
military installations," says Dr Wayne Dwernychuk, vice-president of
Hatfield Consultants. There may be as many as 50 of these "hot spots",
including one at the former US military base of Bien Hoa, where,
according to declassified defence department documents, US forces
spilled 7,500 gallons of Agent Orange on March 1 1970. Dr Arnold
Schecter, a leading expert in dioxin contamination in the US, sampled
the soil there and found it to contain TCCD levels that were 180
million times above the safe level set by the US environmental
protection agency.

It is extremely difficult to decontaminate humans or the soil. A World
Health Organisation briefing paper warns: "Once TCCD has entered the
body it is there to stay due to its uncanny ability to dissolve in
fats and to its rock solid chemical stability." At Aluoi, the
researchers recommended the immediate evacuation of the worst affected
villages, but to be certain of containing this hot spot, the WHO also
recommends searing the land with temperatures of more than 1,000C, or
encasing it in concrete before treating it chemically.

At home, the US takes heed. When a dump at the Robins Air Force Base
in Georgia was found to have stored Agent Orange, it was placed on a
National Priority List, immediately capped in five feet of clay and
sand, and has since been the subject of seven investigations. Dioxin
is now also a major domestic concern, scientists having discovered
that it is a by-product of many ordinary industrial processes,
including smelting, the bleaching of paper pulp and solid waste
incineration. The US environmental protection agency, pressed into a
12-year inquiry, recently concluded that it is a "class-1 human
carcinogen".

The evidence is categoric. Last April, a conference at Yale University
attended by the world's leading environmental scientists, who reviewed
the latest research, concluded that in Vietnam the US had conducted
the "largest chemical warfare campaign in history". And yet no money
is forthcoming, no aid in kind. For the US, there has only ever been
one contemporary incident of note involving weapons of mass
destruction - Colin Powell told the UN Security Council in February
that, "in the history of chemical warfare, no country has had more
battlefield experience with chemical weapons since world war one than
Saddam Hussein's Iraq".

The US government has yet to respond to the Hatfield Consultants'
report, which finally explains why the Vietnamese are still dying so
many years after the war is over, but, last March, it did make its
first contribution to the debate in Vietnam. It signed an agreement
with a reluctant Vietnamese government for an $850,000 (£543,000)
programme to "fill identified data gaps" in the study of Agent Orange.
The conference in Hanoi that announced the decision, according to
Vietnamese Red Cross representatives who attended, ate up a large
slice of this funding. One of the signatories is the same US
environmental protection agency that has already concluded that dioxin
causes cancer.

"Studies can be proposed until hell freezes over," says Dr Dwernychuk
of Hatfield Consultants, "but they are not going to assist the
Vietnamese in a humanitarian sense one iota. We state emphatically
that no additional research on human health is required to facilitate
intervention or to protect the local citizens."

There is cash to be lavished in Vietnam when the US government sees it
as politically expedient. Over the past 10 years, more than $350m
(£223m) has been spent on chasing ghosts. In 1992, the US launched the
Joint Task Force-Full Accounting to locate 2,267 servicemen thought to
be missing in action in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Jerry O'Hara,
spokesman for JTF-FA, which is still searching for the remains of
1,889 of them, told us, "We don't place a monetary value on what we do
and we'll be here until we have brought all of the boys back home."

So it is that America continues to spend considerably more on the dead
than it does on the millions of living and long-suffering - be they
back home or in Vietnam. The science of chemical warfare fills a
silent, white-tiled room at Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Here,
shelves are overburdened with research materials. Behind the locked
door is an iridescent wall of the mutated and misshapen, hundreds of
bell jars and vacuum-sealed bottles in which human foetuses float in
formaldehyde. Some appear to be sleeping, fingers curling their hair,
thumbs pressing at their lips, while others with multiple heads and
mangled limbs are listless and slumped. Thankfully, none of these
dioxin babies ever woke up.

One floor below, it is never quiet. Here are those who have survived
the misery of their births, ravaged infants whom no one has the
ability to understand, babies so traumatised by their own
disabilities, luckless children so enraged and depressed at their
miserable fate, that they are tied to their beds just to keep them
safe from harm.