Fallen Leaves, Broken Lives

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While the environmental ruin wrought by this wartime tactic remains a subject of great concern, the Vietnamese are especially haunted by Agent Orange's effect on their physical health. Over the years, heavy rains in Viet Nam have washed much of the defoliant through the ecosystem and out to sea. But according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, dioxin -- which is contained in Agent Orange and is linked to cancer and birth defects -- can get lodged in human DNA and be passed from generation to generation. No one knows when or even if it can ever be cleansed.

From north to south, from Ha Noi to the Delta, families have had to endure Agent Orange's tragic legacy. In Hoi An, on the coast of the South China Sea, Do Thanh Son, a marble worker in his mid-20s, had to quit school to support his elderly parents and his older brother, who developed normally until age 3, then disintegrated until he "became mad." Farther up the coast, in the ancient imperial capital of Hue, famous for the brutal battle portrayed in the movie Full Metal Jacket, Tu Ai, a woman in her 20s, tells her neighbor's story: The family's father was infected by Agent Orange during the war. Later he married and had seven children, all of whom who were "strong, intelligent, and attending school." Each child, upon reaching the mid-teens, "became foolish." One by one they lost their ability to read, speak, and finally to perform everyday functions. The aging, heartbroken parents had to keep these loved ones in wooden cages while desperately struggling to earn a subsistence living and seek "repair."

In Ho Chi Minh City, Da Nang, and all the other major cities and towns of the south, children like these dot the sidewalks, begging as they walk on their hips, crawl, or push themselves on makeshift carts -- their useless limbs dragging, dangling, or slung over their shoulders. In rural villages, where the vast majority of the country's 82 million citizens live, families and neighbors loyally tend to these dependent, impoverished children who, with no medical or rehabilitative resources, often spend their lives on tiny cots, in their mother's arms, or carried in a sling.

In November 2000, the Ha Noi-based Research Center for Gender, Family, and Environment in Development concluded that children in families affected by Agent Orange can suffer "skin rashes, severe personality disorders, memory loss, enlarged head, organ and metabolic dysfunction, missing or abnormal reproductive organs, miscarriages, cancers, numbness, hearing loss, child deaths, birth defects." The center also fears that such effects may "have no time limit" and calls survivors born long after the end of the war "victims of time-delayed violence." The Vietnamese refer to these children, who are scattered across the cities and countryside, as Tre Em Bui Doi: the dust of life.

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