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In
the 1960s, the United States blanketed
the Mekong River delta with Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant
more devastating than napalm. Thirty years after the end of the
Vietnam War, the poisoned legacy lives on in the children whose
deformities it is said to have caused
VIEW THE JAMES NACHTWEY PHOTO ESSAY
To be writing these words
is, for me, to undergo the severest test of my core belief—that
sentences can be more powerful than pictures. A writer can hope
to do what a photographer cannot: convey how things smelled and
sounded as well as how things looked. I seriously doubt my ability
to perform this task on this occasion. Unless you see the landscape
of ecocide, or meet the eyes of its victims, you will quite simply
have no idea. I am content, just for once—and especially since
it is the work of the brave and tough and undeterrable James Nachtwey—to
be occupying the space between pictures.
The very title of our
joint subject is, I must tell you, a sick joke
to begin with. Perhaps you remember the jaunty names of the callous
brutes in Reservoir Dogs: "Mr. Pink," "Mr. Blue,"
and so on? Well, the tradition of giving pretty names to ugly
things is as old as warfare. In Vietnam, between 1961 and 1971,
the high command of the United States decided that, since a guerrilla
struggle was apparently being protected by tree cover, a useful
first step might be to "defoliate" those same trees.
Famous corporations such as Dow and Monsanto were given the task
of attacking and withering the natural order of a country. The
resulting chemical weaponry was euphemistically graded by color:
Agent Pink, Agent Green (yes, it's true), Agent Purple, Agent
Blue, Agent White, and—spoken often in whispers—Agent Orange.
This shady gang, or gang of shades, all deferred to its ruthless
chief, who proudly bore the color of hectic madness. The key constituent
of Agent Orange is dioxin: a horrifying chemical that makes total
war not just on vegetation but also on the roots and essences
of life itself. The orange, in other words, was clockwork from
the start. If you wonder what the dioxin effect can look like,
recall the ravaged features of Viktor Yushchenko—ironically, the
leader of the Orange Revolution.
The full inventory of
this historic atrocity is still being compiled:
it's no exaggeration to say that about 12 million gallons of lethal
toxin, in Orange form alone, were sprayed on Vietnam, on the Vietnamese,
and on the American forces who were fighting in the same jungles.
A prime use of the chemical was in the delta of the Mekong River,
where the Swift Boats were vulnerable to attack from the luxuriant
undergrowth at the water's edge. Very well, said Admiral Elmo
Zumwalt Jr., we shall kill off this ambush-enabling greenery by
poisoning it from the skies. Zumwalt believes his own son Elmo
III, who was also serving in the delta, died from the effects
of Agent Orange, leaving behind him a son with grave learning
disabilities. The resulting three-generation memoir of the Zumwalt
family—My Father, My Son (1986), written by the first and second
Elmos about themselves and about the grandchild—is one of the
most stoic and affecting family portraits in American history.
You have to go to Vietnam,
though, to see such fallout at first hand. I had naïvely assumed
that it would be relatively easy to speak to knowledgeable physicians
and scientists, if only because a state that is still Communist
(if only in name) would be eager to justify itself by the crimes
of American imperialism. The contrary proved to be the case, and
for two main reasons. The government is too poor to pay much compensation
to victims, and prefers anyway to stress the heroic rather than
the humiliating aspects of the war. And traditional Vietnamese
culture has a tendency to frown on malformed children, whose existence
is often attributed to the sins of a past life. Furthermore, Vietnamese
in general set some store by pride and self-reliance, and do not
like soliciting pity.
I am quite proud of what
I did when I came to appreciate, in every sense
of the word, these obstacles. The first time I ever gave blood
was to a "Medical Aid for Vietnam" clinic, in 1967.
That was also the moment when I discovered that I have a very
rare blood type. So, decades later, seeing a small ad in a paper
in Ho Chi Minh City (invariably still called Saigon in local conversation)
that asked for blood donations for Agent Orange victims, I reported
to the relevant address. I don't think they get many wheezing
and perspiring Anglos at this joint, let alone wheezing and perspiring
Anglos with such exclusive corpuscles; at any rate I was fussed
over a good deal while two units were drawn off, was given a sustaining
bowl of beef noodles and some sweet tea, and was then offered
a tour of the facilities.
This privilege, after
a while, I came almost to regret. In an earlier
age the compassionate term for irredeemably deformed people was
lusus naturae: "a sport of nature," or, if you prefer
a more callous translation, a joke. It was bad enough, in that
spare hospital, to meet the successful half of a Siamese-twin
separation. This was a more or less functional human child, with
some cognition and about half the usual complement of limbs and
organs. But upstairs was the surplus half, which, I defy you not
to have thought if you had been there, would have been more mercifully
thrown away. It wasn't sufficient that this unsuccessful remnant
had no real brain and was a thing of stumps and sutures. ("No
ass!," murmured my stunned translator in that good-bad English
that stays in your mind.) Extra torments had been thrown in. The
little creature was not lying torpid and still. It was jerking
and writhing in blinded, crippled, permanent epilepsy, tethered
by one stump to the bedpost and given no release from endless,
pointless, twitching misery. What nature indulges in such sport?
What creator designs it?
But all evil thoughts
about euthanasia dissolve as soon as you meet,
first, the other children and, second, those who care for them.
In the office of Dr. Nguyen Thi Phuong Tan, a wonderful lady who
is in charge of the equally impossible idea of "rehabilitation,"
I was taking notes when a lively, pretty, but armless 10-year-old
girl ran in and sprang with great agility onto the table. Pham
Thi Thuy Linh's grandfather had been in the South Vietnamese Air
Force, had helped to vent Agent Orange on his Communist foes,
and had suddenly succumbed to leukemia at the age of 42. His curse
has been transmitted down the generations, whether via the food
chain or the chromosomes is unclear. While Pham Thi Thuy Linh
deftly signed her name with her right foot—with which she also
handled a biscuit from the fond nurses—I learned that she had
been listed for some artificial arms, perhaps with modern synthetic
flesh, from an organization in Japan. All this will take is a
wait until she's fully grown, and some $300,000. Money well spent,
I'd say. But there will be no "making whole" for these
children—eerily combining complete innocence with the most sinister
and frightening appearance, ridden and riddled with cleft palate
and spina bifida. One should not run out of vocabulary to the
point where one calls a child a monster, but the temptation is
there. One sees, with an awful pang, why their terrified and shamed
parents abandon them to this overworked clinic. One also realizes
that it isn't nature, or a creator, that is to blame. If only.
This was not a dreadful accident, or a tragedy. It was inflicted,
on purpose, by sophisticated human beings.
I am not an epidemiologist.
And there are professionals who will still tell you that there
is no absolutely proven connection between the spraying of this
poison and the incidence of terrifying illnesses in one generation,
or the persistence of appalling birth defects in the next one
or the next one. Let us submit this to the arbitration of evidence
and reason: what else can possibly explain the systematic convergence?
I left Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon and went down the road and along
the river, by boat, to the delta town of Ben Tre. This is the
very place where Peter Arnett heard the American soldier say in
1968 that "we had to destroy the town to save it." My
ferry churned the big muddy waters that had once been cruised
by the Swift Boats, and I stood out in the pre-monsoon rain to
get a clear look at the riverbanks with vegetation that took so
long to grow back. Ben Tre Province, then called Kien Hoa, was
a kind of "ground zero" for this experiment on human
beings and animals and trees.
Jungles can ostensibly
rise again, but dioxin works its way down through
the roots and into the soil and the water, where it can enter
the food chain. The unforgivable truth is that nobody knew at
the time they were spraying it how long it takes dioxin to leach
out of the natural system. The muttered prayer of many Vietnamese
villagers is that this generation will be the last to feel their
grandparents' war in their bones and their blood and their epidermis,
but the fact is that the town of Ben Tre is home to about 140,000
people, of whom, the Red Cross says, 58,000 are victims of Agent
Orange. (I don't trust Vietnamese statistics, but these were supplied
to me by a woman expert who is not uncritical of the Communist
regime, and whose family had been subjected to forced "re-education"
after the fall of Saigon.)
Once again,
after a tour of some thatched hamlets and some local schools for
the special cases, I experienced an urgent need to be elsewhere
or alone. How many times can one pretend to "interview"
the parents of a child born with bright-yellow skin? The cleft
palates, the deafness, the muteness, the pretzel limbs and lolling
heads … and the terrible expressions on the faces of the parents,
who believe that this horror can sometimes skip a generation.
There is just enough knowledge for agony and remorse, in other
words, but not enough for any "healing process." No
answer, above all, to the inescapable question: When will it stop?
A rain from hell began falling about 40 years ago. Unto how many
unborn generations? At a school full of children who made sign
language to one another or who couldn't sit still (or who couldn't
move much at all), or who couldn't see or couldn't hear, I took
the tour of the workshops where trades such as fishnet weaving
or car repair are taught, and was then asked if I would like to
say a few words, through an interpreter, to the assembly. I quite
like a captive audience, but I didn't trust myself to say a fucking
thing. Several of the children in the front row were so wizened
and shrunken that they looked as if they could be my seniors.
I swear to you that Jim Nachtwey has taken photographs, as one
of his few rivals, Philip Jones Griffiths, also took photographs,
that simply cannot be printed in this magazine, because they would
poison your sleep, as they have poisoned mine.
"After such knowledge,"
as T. S. Eliot asked in "Gerontion," "what forgiveness?"
That's easy. The question of forgiveness just doesn't come up.
The world had barely assimilated the new term "genocide,"
which was coined only in the 1940s, before the United States government
added the fresh hell of "ecocide," or mass destruction
of the web of nature that connects human and animal and herbal
life. I think we may owe the word's distinction to my friend Orville
Schell, who wrote a near-faultless essay of coolheaded and warmhearted
prose in the old Look magazine in March 1971. At that time, even
in a picture magazine, there weren't enough photographs of the
crime, so his terse, mordant words had to suffice, which makes
me faintly proud to be in the same profession. And at some points,
being naturally scrupulous about the evidence, he could only speculate:
"There are even reports of women giving birth to monsters,
though most occurrences are not reported because of nonexistent
procedures for compiling statistics."
Well, we know now, or at least we know better. Out of a population
of perhaps 84 million Vietnamese, itself reduced by several million
during the war, there are as many as one million cases of Agent
Orange affliction still on the books. Of these, the hardest to
look at are the monstrous births. But we agree to forgive ourselves
for this, and to watch real monsters such as Robert McNamara and
Henry Kissinger, who calmly gave the orders and the instructions,
as they posture on chat shows and cash in with their "memoirs."
But, hey, forget it. Forget it if you can.
No more Latin after this, I promise, but there is an old tag
from the poet Horace that says, Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur.
"Change only the name and this story is also about you."
The Vietnam War came home, and so did many men who had been exposed
to Agent Orange, either from handling it and loading it or from
being underneath it. If you desire even a faint idea of the distance
between justice and a Vietnamese peasant family, take a look at
how long it took for the American victims of this evil substance
to get a hearing. The chemical assault on Vietnam began in 1961,
in the early days of the Kennedy administration, and it kept on
in spite of many protests for another 10 years. The first effective
legal proceeding brought in any American court was in 1984, in
New York. This class action, settled out of court, was so broadly
defined, in point of American victims and their stricken children,
that almost nobody got more than $5,000 out of it, and there was
a sharp (or do I mean blunt?) cutoff point beyond which no claim
could be asserted. Six million acres of Vietnam had been exposed
to the deadly stuff, and, as is the way with protracted litigation,
the statistics began to improve and harden. It was established
that there was a "match" between those who had been
exposed and those who were subject, or whose offspring were subject,
to alarming disorders. Admiral Zumwalt, who had first used the
phrase "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" in connection
with Vietnam, took a hand in forwarding the legal cause and might
have added that his grandson should not be (or do I mean should
be?) the last one to suffer for a mistake. More than a mistake.
A crime.
Long after both senior male Zumwalts had died—or in 2003, to
be precise—the Supreme Court ruled that the issue had not been
completely put to rest by the 1984 settlement. The way now lies
open for a full accounting of this nightmarish affair. A report,
written by Professor Jeanne Stellman, of Columbia University,
as part of a U.S. government study, has concluded that nearly
two million more gallons of herbicide were disseminated than has
yet been admitted, and that the dioxin content of each gallon
was much higher than had been officially confessed. (It has been
calculated from tests on some Vietnamese that their dioxin levels
are 200 times higher than "normal.") The implications
are extraordinary, because it is now possible that thousands of
Americans may join a million of their former, Vietnamese adversaries
in having a standing to sue.
'Doesn't it ever end?
When will Agent Orange become history?" These were the words
of Kenneth Feinberg, who figured as the court's "special
master" in the 1984 suit, and who has more recently run the
Victim Compensation Fund for the families of those who died in
the attacks of September 11, 2001. One should not leave him to
answer his own question all by himself. Agent Orange will "become
history" in a different way from the trauma of September
11. Of that event, it's fairly safe to say, there will be no lapse
of memory at least until everybody who lived through it has died.
Of this Vietnam syndrome, some of us have sworn, there will likewise
be no forgetting, let alone forgiving, while we can still draw
breath. But some of the victims of Agent Orange haven't even been
born yet, and if that reflection doesn't shake you, then my words
have been feeble and not even the photographs will do.
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