AGENT ORANGE

Please click on ‘AGENT ORANGE’ to follow me on a visit to the present day Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. Scroll down below the photos to read the full historical account of the infamous ‘Operation Ranchhand’.

Thai Binh is the province in the North, who sent the most soldiers to the South. Thang fought in the war for 10 years, before he was reunited with his family. Thang is one out of thousands of veterans, who brought Agent Orange home with him…

Teo and her husband Uyen fought in the South for almost 15 years in the contaminated the war zones. Uyen has gradually lost his mobility. But that’s not the worst of it.

Their daughter Gam, 35, is blind and severely retarded. She is living outside the house like a wild animal. Gam is very strong and sometimes agressive. She is always very dirty from crawling around sometimes eating soil. Gam is a victim of a war, which ended before she was born.

Grandfather Tran is taking care of his handcapped son Ha, 27 as well as his 6 year old granddaughter Lam. Lam is born without an anus and severely deformed. Neither Ha nor Lam can speak. A family with 2nd and 3rd generation victims of Agent Orange.

Tran: ”My nightmare has been going on for almost 30 years. I do not have any strength left.”

During the war Nhan worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail filling bomb craters. ”We were sprayed many times with a sticky substance by the American airplanes. We could taste in the water and food sometimes.” 27 years ago her daughter Huong was born.

Hang, 35, has spent her whole life in a small room next to the family house. She suffers from a very painful skin disease.

Her mom can’t stop the tears. She tells the story of her life, with long breaks of silence. The only sound is the click-click of my camera shutter.

Still today, Vietnam has some 20 dioxin hotspots. One of them is the area around the old US Airbase in Da Nang, with dixon concentrations more than 100 times about the safety level. It is a heavily populated area….

Toan, 18, is 100% invalid. Year by year he is becoming weaker. Now he cannot even sit in a wheelchair. His biggest dream is to become a graphic designer….

Toans younger brother Nhien, 16, was able to move around only two years ago. Now he cannot even brush his own teeth.

Nhan has the body and mind of a baby, but his is 10 years old…

Nhan’s dead sister has her spot on the family altar.

Duc Tu, 21, has spent his whole life in bed..

Bouts of pain makes Duc Tu scream wildly. A comforting hand does not help much.

Tri, 15, is happily welcoming his rare guests.

Tri and his younger brother Hau, 14 were born heavily retarded and deformed. Their father is dead, and the mother has to care of them by herself.

Trinh, 15, loves her Barbie-doll, given to her by a visiting American NGO-representative. She is born with monkey-like arms and legs. She is suffering from a strange skin disease and severely retarded.

Trinh, and her younger brother Truc, 14, will never be able to take care of themselves. “What will happen to them, when I die,” their mother Hoa asks. Now one has an answer.

When we arrived, Van, 10, hid under a blanket. But curiosity finally made her come out.

Many kids are scared of Van because of her monstrous face. Van knows well that she is not like others. She speaks only a few words.

Kontum province is among the heavily sprayed areas in Vietnam. This is also the home of some of Vietnam’s etnic minorities, many of them christians. “You must be coming from God,” and old woman says, when we hand over a few milk cartons to the family.

Byus, 9, belongs to the Bahna people, one of the poorest etnic minorities in the Central Highlands.

Byus’ aunt cannot stop crying, when she talks about the daily life in the family. .

Cong, 35, er is the son of a relatively wealthy coffee farmer in Kontum. He is one of the less unfortunate Agent Orange victims.

Hoan, 21, lives at the Agent Orange-section on the Tu Du hospital in HCMC. She sent a letter to US President Obama four years ago, appealing for assistance to the Vietnamese Agent Orange victims. She is still waiting…

Hoan is defying her handicaps every day, running around on her deformed legs. Her dream is to become a doctor one day.

Hoan’s stepmother, doctor Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, has now retired from Tu Du Hospital. I met her there the first time in 1984. She has spent most of her life caring for the patients and lobbying for assistance. She is still working tirelessly as a lobbyist for the Agent Orange victims.

American, Australian, Canidan and Korean veterans have struggled for decades to get assistance for Agent Orange affected soldiers and their families. Several court cases have been rejected due to legal technicalities. After years of lobbying, US veterans now have limited access to medical assistance through a US Defence Department programme.

THE DEADLY LEGACY OF AGENT ORANGE

Vietnam and I go back quite some time. I have come to know and admire this country after dealing with Vietnam and its people for almost 40 years.

As for many others in my generation, it was the prolonged tragedy of the Vietnam War that caught my attention on a country so far away from my own. More specifically it was a legacy of war – so unimaginable in its sheer horror – that brought me to Vietnam for the first time in 1984. The legacy of ‘Agent Orange’.

The journey

The  legacy took me on a 2 year journey ranging from the inner workings of scientific warfare and senior policy making in the White House to the victims of maybe the most destructive and meaningless part of what the Vietnamese call the ‘American War’. In short: Operation Ranchhand – its official Pentagon codename.
In an increasingly desperate effort to locate and neutralize the hidden bases of their elusive enemy, the US air force sprayed a total of 72 million liters of dioxin contaminated pesticides over the forests and rice fields of Southern and Central Vietnam.

Thousands of hectares of forest and fields vanished, but the military objectives were never achieved. Operation Ranch Hand may have been long forgotten as a waste of effort and funds, if it were not for the harm it did for generations to come.

Walking the rounds with Dr. Phuong

I first heard about Agent Orange from a Danish trade union official. In 1982,  he told me about his visit to the Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City.  He had brought back with him a few amateur photos of poor quality from the hospital ward and from the basement collection of abnormal foetus. The unborn monsters (and this is what they were) had been removed from young Vietnamese women, who had grown up in the heavily sprayed areas in Southern and Central Vietnam.

The trade union official had a very hard time controlling his emotions, while he told me about what he had seen among the patients of dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong.

Dying side by side
A few months later I realized my self that nothing could really prepare the human mind and heart for the experience of walking with Dr. Phuong on her rounds among the young girls that lay there two-and-two in the hospital beds. Some were dying side by side with others, who desperately clung to the hope for life without pain and fear.

A few girls had a bed of their own – those that were expected to die within hours.

Many other heart breaking scenes followed in hospitals, orphanages and in utterly poor villages, where I collected the facts and figures of a disaster of unbelievable proportions.

My companion, press photographer Ole Johnny Sørensen recorded everything in photos so horrifying, that most of them were considered unfit for publication by our editors.

Among them were the pictures of 4 year old Kim – a little girl in Tay Ninh, who had been born without eyes. Tears were constantly streaming out of her empty eye sockets – due to the agony of a rare liver cancer that was to kill her a few months later.

Thousands still suffer on three continents
The worst of it all may be that is still with Viet Nam today, what we encountered 30 years ago. Even though the last spraying missions by the US air force was carried out in 1972, thousands of people still suffer the consequences even today. In the past four years  I have visited victims all over Vietnam – in Hai Duong, Thai Binh and Nam Dinh provinces in the North, in Da Nang and Kontum in central Vietnam, and in Da Lat and Ho Chi Minh City in the South. The pictorial journey on this site represents only a few of the thousands of people, who are still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange.

Waiting for an army to die

Most Agent Orange victims are Vietnamese, but not all. Large numbers of American soldiers and allied troops from Australia and Korea were also exposed to the deadly herbicides.

To this day the price is still being paid by victims across three continents – as vividly described in “Waiting for an army to die” and “Gi Guinea Pigs” – possibly the saddest and angriest books you could read about Agent Orange.

And just for the record – the outcry of the US veterans and their families was sufficiently embarrassing for the producers of Agent Orange to set up a compensation fund of USD one billion 30 years ago to assist the US victims with their medical bills.Only a few years ago, the Pentagon followed suit with a very limited compensation scheme, which makes it possible for US veterans to apply for assistance to pay their medical bills.

No compensation has ever been paid to the poor Vietnamese farmers by corporations like DOW Chemicals and Monsanto, who made huge profits on wartime deliveries or by the US government, who ordered the deadly chemicals.

For years it was left to the Vietnamese themselves and a handful of NGO’s to clean up this mess. Only recently, the US Embassy in Hanoi has approved funding (USD 3 mio.) in order to clean up one of the worst ‘dioxin hot spots’ in Da Nang, where the dioxin levels are still a 100 times higher than the legal limit in the US.

The US Department of Defence has also – belatedly – recognized that there is a direct link between dioxin exposure and a number of serious diseases, found among US veterans, who are now eligible for financial support. No such scheme is available for the thousands of victims in Vietnam.