Introduction: a legacy revisited: Agent Orange is still damaging lives in Vietnam. The time has come for America to act.

AuthorIsaacson, Walter
PositionA SPECIAL REPORT

A few years ago, I found myself at the storied Da Nang Airport, once a main U.S. air base in Vietnam, with my colleague from the Aspen Institute, Bill Mayer. Bill had been an Air Force pilot during the war, flying military supplies into Da Nang and bringing back, in the cargo bays of his C-124s, the coffins of fallen American soldiers. At Da Nang we met Bui The Giang, a top Communist Party official who, during the war, had served in a North Vietnamese antiaircraft battalion. Whether Giang had ever taken a shot at one of Bill's planes was a subject of speculation between the two old soldiers. That their conversation was friendly and relaxed was a sign, I thought, of just how far the U.S. and Vietnam have come since the two countries normalized diplomatic relations nearly fifteen years ago.

Bill and I were there as part of the U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/ Dioxin, which I cochair. The aim of our binational and nonpartisan committee is to marshal support for resolving one of the Vietnam War's last legacies and an abiding irritant to an increasingly valuable U.S. ally and trading partner. From 1962 to 1971, America sprayed dose to 20 million gallons of the herbicide Agent Orange across the region, to defoliate dense jungle in order to better detect movement of personnel and equipment from north to south, and to destroy enemy crops. That spraying left behind a residue of dioxin, a persistent and highly toxic chemical that can both shorten the life of humans exposed to it and potentially degrade the health of future generations. At Da Nang, a major storage site for Agent Orange during the war, large quantities of the chemical leaked into the surrounding land and water. As we walked the barren ground with other members of our delegation--former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, the Ford Foundation's then President Susan Berresford, Professor Vo Quy of Hanoi University, and Vietnam National Assembly member Ton Nu Thi Ninh--we stopped by a lake where the locals can no longer fish because of the dioxin pollution. At the very least, we resolved, we should begin by containing and then cleaning up the toxic waste that America left behind on this famous site.

The Vietnamese government claims that several million of its citizens suffer from health effects due to this chemical--from muscular and skeletal disorders to such birth defects as mental retardation. On our trip we witnessed heartbreaking scenes in Thai Binh Province, far from the...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT