Greg’s Letter from Vietnam

BoomerCafé Co-Founder and Executive Editor Greg Dobbs has recently returned from Vietnam where he was reporting for HD Net, the cable news network. He found that America’s war in Vietnam is still haunting.

This letter to family and friends is about Vietnam, where we’ve just finished shooting a documentary about the likely and ongoing impact on people’s lives of Agent Orange, the herbicide the U.S. sprayed from the air during the war to defoliate the jungle and deprive the enemy of cover as he moved men and equipment along the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail. Vietnam has been an adventure, with sickening scenes but stunning stories.

Vietnam felt personally profound from the very moment I set foot on the land. I’m hardly the first American to come here in the 35-plus years since the war. Plenty of tourists, investors, Vietnam vets have come before me. But as soon as I got off the plane from Hong Kong, I was overcome by a strange, even depressing feeling about what they call here, “the American War.”

From everything you read about this country today, almost nobody’s bitter any more. In fact it’s halfway fair to say that with one of the younger populations on earth— almost two thirds of the people are under 30— most don’t even remember (although, to be sure, there are “War Remnants” museums in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to remind them).

But still, on that first day after landing in the country, when I looked at workers at the airport, then as my driver carried me fifteen miles into the heart of Hanoi, when I looked at motorists on the road and farmers in the fields and pedestrians on the streets, I couldn’t help but wonder, did the war demolish that man’s house? Or that woman’s father? Or that family’s livelihood? I didn’t fight in Vietnam… and the Americans who did were only doing the job Washington gave them to do… yet I felt a weird sense of guilt.

After all, we didn’t go to war here because we were threatened. Even in the contemporary case of Iraq, although the legitimacy of the menace against us was debatable, lots of Americans did feel threatened. Vietnam was different. Beginning almost fifty years ago, the threat we came here to quell was regional communism, which was seen as an ideological peril to the planet but not a direct and immediate assault on our security. And anyway, we failed. The war in Vietnam ended up as a wasteful misuse of lives and treasure. On both sides.

But evidently the legacy of wasted treasure felt stronger for me than it feels for the Vietnamese I encountered. Here’s an illustration: on our first full day of shooting in Hanoi, I met with two aged veterans who believe they were disabled by Agent Orange; one also has a daughter born “abnormal,” to use his word, 33 years ago. In the partial shade of a half dead tree, I interviewed the two vets, and the one with the “abnormal” daughter told me how he was moving south with his North Vietnamese Army unit through the jungle one day when they heard an airplane overhead, and looked up, and saw white smoke. He didn’t know what it was but it didn’t seem good; he ran for four hours to get away from it. Because many of the men with whom he served now have the same maladies he has, and some also have children born “abnormal,” he believes that the white smoke from American planes was the cause of it. But here’s the thing: as the interview ended, he and his fellow veteran not only warmly welcomed me to this country as a friend, they even invited me back.

Here’s the other part that sticks with me: as we spoke, our “minder” from the Foreign Ministry, standing behind me, was translating. At one point when I asked him to put a particular question to the two vets, he didn’t respond. I turned to look back at him, and he was crying. Serious tears, dripping down his cheeks. After we left, I asked what had moved him. His answer was that these two men had lost so much, and suffered so much because of the war, but were able to speak of it all with a smile. It amazed him, and frankly amazes me, looking back. It moves me too. If I felt any guilt at all for the misery of the war here, it wasn’t them laying it on me.

Sure, there was a small sign or two of distrust when we showed up somewhere, or maybe just doubt about us and our motives. One day in a rural province about three hours from Da Nang, three pencil-thin communal police were waiting for us at the isolated home of a poor woman and her disabled daughter we had gone to see. Having heard that a team from an American television network was coming to visit— people in the province must actually register with the police if they are hosting foreigners— they were there to “protect” the family.

But amicable kindness toward a one-time enemy was the rule. One rainy day in Da Nang (actually, it is monsoon season so every day was a rainy day in Da Nang), we were shooting in a poor busy marketplace. Everyone at whom we pointed our camera — or whose path we blocked in the narrow cluttered alleyway to get our shots— was perfectly friendly; nothing but waves and smiles. Eventually, three little old guys without a full set of teeth between them motioned for me to come over and have my picture taken with them. So I asked Paul, the cameraman with me, to shoot it. There we are, a video postcard, these guys old enough to be war veterans flanking me with broad grins and one of them playfully holding his hands in a “V” for victory sign in front of my face. We all had a good laugh.

If that doesn’t seem so remarkable, consider the fact that today, more than sixty years after World War Two, there is still conscious anger towards Japan for the atrocities it committed in places like China and Korea. During the war here, many Vietnamese didn’t think the conduct of the United States was any less atrocious (although, of course, the feeling from our side toward them was mutual). One man told me, for instance, that the most horrifying thing about “the American War” wasn’t the villages we invaded or the chemicals we sprayed; it was the bombs we dropped from B-52s. He explained that their arrival was always a surprise and their devastation was total. From wars I’ve covered I understand the surprise part; since the sound of an aircraft’s engine is pushed to the rear, you don’t know a warplane is headed toward you until it has passed. The boom from the bombs thereafter rudely underscores the announcement.

So, maybe as I came into this country and felt depressed, I was having my “ain’t war a shame” moment. God knows, in my work I’ve seen plenty of wars, and plenty of destruction, and plenty of victims, and while I don’t think all wars are bad, I do think many are futile. Considering the American cost of the war here, especially since the enemy came out on top, this one was.

As I recognized all this though, I also wondered if the Vietnamese who are still around from the war feel the same kind of guilt for their own conduct when they see Americans.

However, in society at large, there is only one issue from the war still outstanding, one legacy in the eyes of the Vietnamese that can’t yet be forgotten, at least not in those areas where our forces loaded and launched aircraft with Agent Orange, or where it was actually sprayed.

An example of that legacy, in their eyes anyway, is an impoverished woman I went to meet at a meager house in Da Nang named Kieu, age 38. She was born with badly mangled legs and also now has cancer. She explained to me how she has lived in this house since she was born, and how all her life she drank water from the well behind her dirt-poor dwelling. The trouble is, it was fed by the runoff from the former U.S. airbase there, the main launching point for aircraft heading out to spray Agent Orange. It is not a thousand feet from the house. Now, her husband has left, she’s no longer strong enough to earn, believe it or not, the nine bucks a month she used to earn, and soon her ten-year-old daughter will be an orphan. As she’s holding her daughter on her lap and telling me the story, she’s crying, the girl’s crying, the translator’s crying.

Or Phuong, a 28-year-old man who has a grotesque stump protruding from his chest in which most of his organs are compressed. He weighs 44 pounds and stands not quite 39 inches tall… although he doesn’t really “stand” much at all, because his knees are equally deformed and his calves are unnaturally thin. His pain is ceaseless. His parents lived in a part of the country that was heavily sprayed.

Maybe you know something, or at least remember about Agent Orange. Maybe not.

It was named for the color-coded barrels in which it was stored. We sprayed it to defoliate the jungle and reveal the enemy as he snuck south, but as it turns out, Agent Orange didn’t stop the enemy, and more devastating, it didn’t just kill the trees.

That’s because one element of Agent Orange is dioxin, which is classified by some as the most toxic chemical compound known to man. Scientists will tell you that dioxin can cause horrific birth defects, severe retardation, deadly cancers. Vietnam says that because of the dioxin we sprayed (allegedly on more than ten percent of their country), there are about three million people here who awaken each day with damaged bodies and damaged brains. In some cases, because they have lived in an area that was sprayed and contaminated during the war. Or because they have lived near the airbases from which the planes took off. Or because they were born to parents exposed to Agent Orange during the ten years we used it— like the abnormal daughter of the veteran in Hanoi. What scientists can’t necessarily tell you though is which defects, which deformities, and which cancers are attributable to dioxin, and which ones aren’t. Dioxin sometimes does its damage, then disappears from the bloodstream.

The documentary we came to shoot for HDNet is about all this. And what the United States is, or isn’t, doing to mitigate the problem. The bottom line of the story is that while we left the battle more than 35 years ago, daily life for many people is still a battle, and Vietnam blames it on us.

Like a 13-year-old girl we saw, whose monstrous head is literally as wide as her shoulders; the condition is called hydrocephalus. Or a six-year-old who simply has no eyes. Or another, age 8, whose huge eyeballs are literally halfway out of their sockets; she too is blind. Or a 5-year-old boy with smiling eyes but the lower half of his face grotesquely deformed. Or a 13-year-old whose skin looks like it was burned top to bottom… but it wasn’t. Or a pair of children whose arms are so withered and their legs so twisted that they eat with their feet. Or a dozen other children with skeletally thin mangled limbs, their hands and feet incompletely formed at birth, fused like claws to render them useless.

We met these children, and more I haven’t even bothered to describe, at a special ward at the main hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Some have parents who visit. Others were dumped there and forgotten and now, no one comes. After three previous stops further north in Vietnam, we thought we had seen the worst of it. We hadn’t. Meeting these children was horrifying. If they are victims of Agent Orange, they are the third generation.

The ward director, a kindly 65-year-old English-speaking doctor originally trained as an OBGYN, explained genuinely that they can’t trace all these birth defects to dioxin, but pointed out that almost two thirds of these kids come from “Agent Orange hotspots,” which both Vietnam and the U.S. now designate as either former American airbases where aircraft were loaded with the herbicide, or parts of the country where spraying was frequent and concentrated. It makes things seem pretty obvious. When I walked through the ward with the director, she picked up the little girl with no eyes and began to cry hard herself. She told me through her tears, “We can’t do anything for her. Anything.”

Thanks to a persistent producer named Kira who’s been working on this all year, we got onto the airbase at Da Nang. This was no small thing; we are the first western journalists ever allowed in since the U.S. pulled out. From the standpoint of our story, it’s what I’d call Ground Zero. This is where Agent Orange was stored, and mixed, and loaded onto planes, then where the barrels that held it and the planes that dropped it were washed off after missions, evidently without much awareness about the long term effects of the residue.

We got to go to three different sections: first, I walked around the part of the tarmac where the barrels were used; from the sloping concrete, the residue poured into a canal… and probably from there it infected the food chain. Second, we paced an expanse of cracked discolored earth where empty barrels finally were discarded, and to this day there’s hardly a blade of grass growing; you can easily see how the residue would seep down into the groundwater. (Did I give my shoes a good washing that night? You better believe it!) Finally, we stepped through a couple of hundred yards of swamp to a lake, called Lotus Lake, in which people actually fished until only a couple of years ago when tests showed it was toxic with dioxin.

This is not the only “hotspot” in the country; there are several. The Vietnamese attribute many of their cancers and birth defects to them, because where there’s a hotspot, everything in the area— fish, plants, poultry, meat, or the water itself— evidently was contaminated. Now there’s a guard tower at the edge of Lotus Lake, manned 24/7, to keep people away. But if Agent Orange is the culprit, it’s too late for some.

We met two more of them out in the countryside, but this time, with tragedy came triumph. We were taken to Quang Nhai province, one of the most heavily sprayed spots during the war. We went to two farm homes, reaching one of them only by trudging on foot down a long muddy jungle road that our van couldn’t negotiate, sharing space with water buffalo and toothless barefoot old women and little old men who looked like Ho Chi Minh. On either side, peasants were knee deep in water, working the rice paddies out in the distance. Our Vietnamese escorts were from a foundation called East Meets West, which is mostly funded by private U.S. donors, many of them American veterans of the war. It was created largely (but not only) to help victims of Agent Orange.

At one home we met a 13-year-old girl named Chi, who appears to have cerebral palsy. East Meets West has been providing therapy and tutoring, and has radically changed her life. Eight months ago when they found her, she just lay all day and night on the family’s simple bed in their two room cement home because her illiterate and isolated mother didn’t know she could do more. Now, Chi can lift a spoon of rice to her mouth and roughly voice single syllable words and do simple math with pen and paper and even take slow but certain steps, and that’s the part that was wonderfully dramatic. As we stood watching (with half the commune standing behind us in the muddy little corral, sharing the space with roosters, pigs, and a filthy smelly buffalo), Chi would grip a plastic stool with both hands on the cement porch, conjure up the control to kind of throw it forward and advance it about six inches, then lean hard on the stool and drag her mangled feet those six inches… then do it all again. Each step required about ten seconds to take. But she took it. Each was a huge struggle, but also produced a huge smile.

At the other home in Quang Nhai, we met a 23-year-old named Toan. The foundation funded corrective surgery for legs that were fused together at birth. He also has no left arm. Bizarre as it may sound, the purpose of the surgery was to amputate the legs about six inches below the knees, which obviously seems pretty radical (and I’m not sure it went so well because he lifted a dirty bandage and showed me holes in one stump from which puss is always escaping). But they amputated to allow him to walk on prosthetic legs and as we watched, with the help of a village health worker, he protected his stumps with bandages, attached the prostheses, and stood on a single crutch to take his first step. Then, with a bag slung over his shoulder, he walked with palpable pride all the way down the muddy path away from his home. This time, it was my turn to cry. I later asked and he told me, until he got these artificial legs, he had never stood before. Still, each step produces pain, apparently because the blood in the stumps isn’t circulating and, for good measure, Toan has a cancer at the base of his backbone which presses on the nerves. But from the smile on his face, those hard-won steps also produce supreme satisfaction.

For years now, as our relationship has improved and the war has receded in the minds of many on both sides, Vietnam has pressed the United States to help clean up the mess we made. Not just with compensation, but with enough money to finally contain the spread of dioxin, and eventually remove it from the ecosystem. The thinking is, some problems can’t be fixed— like Chi and Toan and the others we met— but for those that can, we should help.

Yet for years the U.S. has resisted, and here’s why: while the defects we saw seem pretty obvious, they might not be due to dioxin. Cerebral palsy, retardation, hydrocephalus, spina bifida, blindness, twisted limbs— they look the same, whether or not a war has been fought on the land where the victims live. As the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam told me in an interview, we want verifiable scientific proof that the suffering of three million people, whose problems Vietnam blames on us, is really our fault.

Vietnam cannot provide it. All they can show is what the Vietnamese Red Cross points out: that the closer you get to an airbase where Agent Orange was stored and mixed and loaded onto aircraft, the more cases of crippled, cancerous bodies and diminished minds you’ll find. Or they can make the statistical link, as the director did in the children’s ward in Ho Chi Minh City, between birth defects and hotspots.

We still are not accepting legal responsibility for any byproducts of Agent Orange, but we are doing something. We are finally giving Vietnam money for unspecified “humanitarian” help. At the urging of President Bush, Congress appropriated $3 million for both humanitarian aid and chemical mitigation. The Ford Foundation is kicking in even more. It’s only a small start, and it won’t perform miracles; it might not even prevent Agent Orange from infecting a fourth generation of victims. I say that because when I finished my interview with Kieu, the crippled woman now dying from cancer, she hobbled into her rudimentary kitchen to prepare lunch. After filling a pot with good clean bottled water to boil over a fire, she put some greens in a sieve, went behind the house, and washed them with water… from the well.

That’s what our program (scheduled to air in late January) will be about. Agent Orange, and the people in Vietnam who believe it’s responsible for their misfortunes. Do I believe it is? In some cases, no, people’s maladies probably are something that would have happened anyway. But in many cases, absolutely.

Now, let me turn a bit to Vietnam itself, because however hard the subject is, the country is fascinating.

First, food. And let me put it this way. We had some downright great meals— including probably the best sandwich I ever ate at an outdoor corner shop in Ho Chi Minh City. Actually, sandwiches, plural; they were so good, the cameraman and I went back a second time. But most days as we drove from place to place, we stopped midday at what we Americans would call some hole in the wall restaurant, where they’d bring heaping bowls of rice and scrawny pieces of chicken and lettuce and onions and mint. I almost always subscribe to the theory of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But one day outside Hanoi, I went to the toilet behind the kitchen, and because it was occupied, I just stood in the kitchen and watched. I shouldn’t have. Women were squatting, cleaning out dead chickens, on the dirty wet tile floor. I don’t think it would pass the health inspector’s test. Every other questionable restaurant we went to probably is the same.

It reminded me of an experience I once had with a camera crew in Sudan, when an American diplomat reluctantly gave the crew and me a list of the three best places to eat in Khartoum (after first trying to convince us to keep eating in the hotel because there were no “best” places to eat in Khartoum). When the cameraman, who speaks Arabic, told the taxi driver to take the three of us westerners to the first place, the driver looked at the list, then turned to look at us and wagged his finger in the air and said, “La la la la la,” which means “No no no no no.” The cameraman asked us if we wanted to go ahead anyway, and for the sheer adventure of it all, we said yes. When we got to the first place on the list and took one look, the cameraman told the other two of us to stay in the taxi while he’d go check out the kitchen. When he came back, the only thing he said was, “The fish are green.” So we did the same drill when we got to the second place, and the cameraman returned with the same report. Only one place left. What we decided to do was, just take a seat (on the outdoor packed dirt floor) without inspecting the kitchen first. We had a great meal— no utensils, but tasty food— and no illnesses afterwards.

Anyway, I survived the food, and maybe more miraculously, the traffic. Paul, the cameraman, is Australian but lives in Thailand and knows Southeast Asia quite well. So he speaks with authority when he says, no place else has motorbikes like they have in Vietnam. Maybe the best way to draw the picture is, envision a sidewalk at rush hour in New York, jammed with pedestrians. Now, in your mind’s eye, turn all the people into motorbikes. The streets here are that full, and that crowded. Our government escort told us that in this nation of close to 85 million people, there are 25 million motorbikes. When you’re stuck in a traffic jam, the only thing you’re thinking is, thank goodness they’re not all cars.

The motorbikes are a sign of prosperity and by that measure, Vietnam has surely gotten prosperous. But the people will only stay prosperous if they live long enough! There are still lots of bikes on the streets too, and between the bikes and the motorbikes careening in their chaotic choreography (which means going both ways on both sides of every road), you have to weave your way through them everywhere you go.

A special feature of the motorbike culture here is the size of the loads they carry. You’ll see a motorbike with a platform across the back fender, with six full cases of beer or bottled water stacked on top. Or cases of live chickens. Or my favorite, a guy sitting behind the driver holding a piece of glass probably six feet high and four feet wide; pity the adjacent motorbike that doesn’t see it. It’s even more interesting when the driver is balancing loads like this on the motorbike’s diagonal frame between him and the handlebars.

And while in our own country you usually just see a driver on a motorbike, or maybe a driver with one passenger behind him, that’s child’s play in Vietnam. Literally! You’ll see loads of motorbikes with a child up front, standing on the floorboard or sitting on the driver’s lap as he holds the handlebars, with the mother squeezed in against the driver’s back. Even better, and not at all uncommon, add a fourth passenger, a second child, sometimes a very small baby, scrunched between the father’s back and the mother’s chest. That’s four human beings on the seat of one small motorbike. And a few times I saw five.

So the streets of Vietnam are not for the faint of heart. Neither when driving, or walking. My first night in Hanoi, I watched how pedestrians cross the street through nonstop waves of motorbikes and believe it or not, they just step out and let the bikes weave around them. What I mean is, what you don’t do is try to negotiate your way across. Do that and you’re dead. Rather, you just take each step with a wary eye but forward motion. They don’t so much go around you as past you; you’ll literally feel either the wind, or occasionally the very edge of the handlebar, brush by you.

By the way, in Vietnam the law requires helmets and just about everyone seems to observe it; I’m told there are strict fines if they don’t. But there’s something else many wear: masks, to keep the bad air out. Vietnam is in its own version of an industrial revolution, and when you’re growing and mechanizing so fast, one thing (progress) has to be a priority and another (cleanliness) has to go.

That doesn’t mean Vietnam is becoming a mini-America. For one thing, the minimum wage under the Communist government is the equivalent of about $70 a week. The hotel where we stayed in Da Nang paid its employees 80, plus whatever tips they get. But to acquire a qualified and relatively sophisticated staff, the hotel has to provide a few perks I don’t think they do in western hotels. For one thing, nice new shoes because otherwise, just about everyone only has plastic or rubber sandals. For another, fresh shirts. English classes too. But employees at the hotel pay a price for their clean cushy jobs: they’re searched coming in every day to work and anything of value— phones, jewelry, cash— is confiscated until they leave at the end of the shift…after being searched again.

We spent three days at that particular hotel— the longest I stayed anywhere on this long trip. And although at this time last year they had 100% occupancy because the hotel is right on Da Nang’s famous China Beach, right now they’re at just 15%. Russian and European tourists who used to come in droves are staying home. The economy strikes again.

What that meant at the hotel was, it was easy to notice who the other guests were. The whole time I was there, I saw three different youngish (it’s getting to the point where anyone alive looks “youngish” to me) American couples. On the last night there, when we returned from our shoot, I went to my wing of the hotel and stepped through a door that separates it from the stairway. All three couples were out in the hallway… holding brand new adopted Vietnamese babies. Two boys— Brendan and Troy— and one girl newly named Madison. I guess as she gets older in the United States she’ll grow into it.

It turns out all three couples were working with the same adoption agency, and had come about ten days earlier to choose the babies they’d bring into their families. Once they picked up their babies that day, they still had to stay ten days more to get visas to take the babies back to their new homes. But they didn’t seem to mind; you never saw happier people. Or prouder, as if those babies had just come right out of the women’s wombs.

One couple’s room was right next to mine, and their baby, one of the boys, cried all night. Normally that might be irritating (make that “would be irritating”), but I could only rejoice for the new parents and, even more so, the baby. He has a family now. And a hopeful future. Vietnam might be getting better and might be fully recovered from the war… but the U.S. is still a richer, healthier, superior place to grow up.

May your holidays be rich and healthy. And if you own any stock, may it rise as fast as mine had better do!

Greg

Tags: Greg Dobbs, HD Net, Vietnam

Category: Baby Boomers, Greg Dobbs, Vietnam