NOW Magazine
Sixteen-month-old Huynh Thuong Hoai stares patiently at the window. He'd like to clamber up on the chair and take a look at the birds outside, but he can't move. Huynh was born without legs and a left arm years after his mother was contaminated in one of the worst acts of chemical contamination in wartime. The Vietnam War ended in 1975, but local doctors say it still claims victims among the children of families and soldiers exposed to toxins sprayed by American warplanes. By dumping 12 million gallons of defoliants, including Agent Orange, over South Vietnam, the US Air Force hoped to deprive camouflaged troops of their jungle hideouts. What it did, according to the Hanoi government, is cause up to 500,000 children to be born with congenital defects.
At the Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Thuong Hoai and
many of his young friends are cruel reminders of a war that resolved
nothing. Born with severe genetic abnormalities, some lack arms and legs, while
others have webbed fingers and toes or club feet. Two-year-old Minh Hien has a
head so large she can't lift it off the bed. She was born with hydrocephalus, a
condition known as water on the brain.
And these are the more fortunate ones. Of the 60 to 100 births that take place
every day at the hospital, at least one or two are stillborn.
'More than 10 years ago, when I started to deliver the first of thousands of deformed foetuses, I was afraid and nervous. Most of them were dead,' says Dr Pham Viet Thanh, deputy director of the hospital. 'Now, it's sadly routine.'
Stillborn and aborted babies are quietly taken to a locked storeroom, known as the collection room, where they're preserved in hundreds of glass jars filled with formaldehyde.
Those that do survive are usually abandoned at birth, their parents unable to cope with the guilt of passing the mutated genes to their children.
The newboms are taken to the hospital's Peace Village, a crowded wing built by a German charity, where staff try to care for them as best they can. But no one tries to hide the fact that their future is bleak. 'What can be done?' sighs Dr Le Diem Huong, head of the neonatal department.
'We just have to care for them until they die.' While America maintains that there's no conclusive proof to link Agent Orange to the genetic changes, doctors blame the toxins in it for the wave of cancers and birth defects recorded in Vietnam over the past 25 years.
The number of births of so-called Agent Orange babies peaked in 1985, but there are still more than 300 children born with birth defects at Tu Du Hospital every year.
Little wonder then that doctors worry that the damaged genes are being passed to a second, even third, generation of victims.
It was in 1962 that US planes began spraying the defoliant, named for the orange stripes painted on the 55-gallon containers, over the former South Vietnam.
In an operation lasting nine years, it covered nearly five million acres, turning the lush, tropical vegetation a sickly shade of brown as the powerful herbicide ate away the forests.
US officials say that the campaign was only designed to deny the enemy protective cover and was never intended to harm humans. But it later emerged that Agent Orange, the most widely used herbicide, contained TCDD, one of the most toxic forms of dioxin. This is believed to have entered the food chain and water supply, damaging the genes of the soldiers and families living in the sprayed areas.
To Ttien Hoa, 48, is convinced the herbicide contaminated him. He was hoping to forget the horror of war after serving as an infantryman in the North Vietnamese Army, but he has a permanent reminder.
'My son was born with a missing toe and my nine-month-old grandson To Thanh Nam was born without legs,' he says. 'Dioxin is to blame.'
Amazingly, there's still no proof that Agent Orange is responsible for Vietnam's health problems.
Vietnamese officials carried out only sketchy research into contamination after the war, so statistics on birth defects and cancers are often unreliable. And Western scientists say the dioxins may have come from toxic-waste dumps, wood preservatives and pesticides used by the Vietnamese.
But evidence is mounting that the spraying is at least partly to blame for the birth defects in children. Studies show dioxin can linger in body tissues for years, turning up in mother's milk and triggering liver, bowel and placental cancers.
'The connection is very clear,' says Dr Le Hong Thom, a member of the 10-80 Committee, the Vietnamese government panel investigating the effects of the chemicals used during the war. 'The rate of birth defects in the babies of women who lived in sprayed areas is significantly higher than among those who lived in areas that weren't sprayed.'
Victims of Agent Orange are now demanding to know what are the long-term effects of dioxin contamination and are looking for some form of compensation.
Major General Nguyen Don Tu, formerly of the Vietnamese Army, is calling on America to take responsibility for its actions and fund research to study the contamination. He's had to retire to care for his daughter Nguyen Ha Lan, 26, who is mentally and physically handicapped.
'I was exposed to Agent Orange on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and it damaged my reproductive genes,' he says. 'That's why Ha Lan was born with cerebral palsy. It's too late for her, but there are many other victims who need the help of American doctors and scientists. How many more families need to have several deformed children?' In a country of 75 million people still struggling to recover from decades of warfare and trade embargoes, there's little hope of Vietnam finding the money for research or treatment.
There was hope of progress when a laboratory devoted to studying the effects of dioxin opened in Hanoi three years ago. But the slow pace of research and the government's reluctance to help - fearing the bad publicity could hurt tourism and exports is wearing the patience of many doctors.
'If we wait until every scrap of research is done, many more people will die before they receive any compensation,' says Dr Le Cao Dai, a former North Vietnamese Army combat surgeon. 'At this rate, it will take three to five years to get all the scientific answers.'
But no amount of research or money will compensate victims such as Pham Thai Sen.
Pham remembers seeing the American warplanes swooping above the treetops spewing clouds of Agent Orange, while he was on his last tour of duty. It wasn't until 18 years later that the impact of the spraying hit home - when his son Pham Kieu Phuoc was born with Down's syndrome.
'I was a soldier, so I must suffer from war,' says Pham. 'But my child knows nothing of it. Why must he suffer too?'
Rebecca Fletcher