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War's lingering cloud

May 1, 2005 1:10 am

Hoa Ninh, Vietnam--With her warm smile and gentle manner, Dang Thi Chung doesn't seem like a tough war veteran.

But when she was still in her teens, the 50-year-old mother of two fought against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in this steamy rice-growing region west of Danang.

Dang can hardly believe she ever had the courage to be a guerrilla fighter. She marvels that she was able to endure the unrelenting pounding of the bombs that tumbled from U.S. warplanes.

"It was horrible," she said.

But bombs weren't the only thing she remembers falling from the sky. She and her comrades were repeatedly doused with chemicals that killed the trees and plants.

Dang believes that these sprayings caused her two children--whom she had with a man she met during the war--to be afflicted with severe physical and mental disabilities.

As she hosted visitors in a ramshackle section of her home last week, her 15-year-old son, Ngo Tien Dung, sat near her. The boy cannot speak, and suffers frequent seizures. He also had difficulty sitting upright until the aid group World Vision paid for corrective surgery.

Dung's father now lives with the family he had started before meeting Dang, who says she has to be with her son all day and has no time to tend to her rice paddy.

Dang's 22-year-old daughter, meanwhile, is away at a vocational school learning to become a tailor. She also suffers a mental disability--she can't work hard, Dang said--and has recently developed a tumor on one of her legs.

The Vietnamese government has identified Dang's offspring as victims of the defoliant spraying during the war, which entitles her to a little more than $5 a month in government assistance.

That's enough to buy about two weeks' worth of basic groceries--rice, vegetables, maybe a little fish. But she struggles to get by, waiting anxiously for the months to pass until she can sell a pig to boost her income.

There's no scientific proof that links the health problems of Dang's children to the herbicides sprayed by U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.

But as the communist government here celebrates the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, her story highlights one of the most troubling legacies of the war: Millions of Vietnamese and Americans have been exposed to dioxin from the defoliants, and many of these people and their children have been afflicted by a variety of health problems including cancer and birth defects.

According to the U.S. government's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, research shows that dioxin exposure at high levels leads to an increased risk of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. It can also cause reproductive and developmental problems, the research indicates.

The agency says that although scientists have not established a connection between dioxin and birth defects in humans, studies in mice have found that dioxin can produce congenital defects.

Between 1961 and 1971, at least 20 million gallons of herbicides, much of it dioxin-laden, were dumped on southern Vietnam.

The heaviest spraying, conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Air Force's Operation Ranch Hand, occurred between 1966 and 1969, coinciding with the escalation in fighting.

The chemicals were employed to denude forests, clear the perimeters of military installations and occasionally to destroy food crops. The most notorious and widely used defoliant was nicknamed Agent Orange because of the color of the identification stripe on its storage barrels.

Many families in the Fredericksburg area have had to cope with health problems and deaths thought to be linked to exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides sprayed during the war.

In 1992, Ruth Coder Fitzgerald of Fredericksburg lost her brother, former Capt. John Keath Coder, to non-Hodgkins lymphoma, which the U.S. Veterans Administration acknowledges as an Agent Orange-related cancer. Coder flew rescue missions as an Air Force helicopter pilot based in Danang in 1969 and '70.

His co-pilot, Dick Butchka, 63, of Orange Beach, Ala., is now battling multiple myeloma, a blood cancer the VA also recognizes as being associated with Agent Orange.

Butchka remembers the wariness with which Ranch Hand crew members viewed Agent Orange in particular. Before a spray mission involving the defoliant, "those guys were upset because they knew it was bad stuff," he said.

The former Coast Guard captain said it's hard to pinpoint exactly how or when he and Coder were exposed to defoliants, because they were sprayed all over the combat zone in which they served. He thinks most U.S. troops were exposed to the herbicides, but "some people were more susceptible" to their negative effects.

After her brother's death, Fitzgerald led an effort to have a plaque placed near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in honor of Americans who died after the war but because of its effects. She believes Vietnamese people's suffering from the chemical aftermath of the war must surely exceed what Americans have endured.

"Our people were exposed, but we never really had to live with it in the soil," she said.

Fitzgerald said her brother wondered how the defoliants had affected Vietnamese.

"About two months before he died, he said, 'What's happening to people in Vietnam?' I said, 'They're dying like flies.'"

The Vietnamese government says tens of thousands of its citizens have died from cancers and other ailments caused by dioxin contamination. It estimates that 1 million Vietnamese--about one of every 80 people in the country--suffer serious health problems attributable to wartime herbicide spraying.

But Vietnamese scientists have yet to produce research reviewed by Western peers to support these claims.

There's no question, though, that huge numbers of Vietnamese have been exposed to the dioxin from the herbicides--and probably often in large doses.

In 2003, Columbia University professors Jeanne and Steven Stellman published a comprehensive review of U.S. military records on defoliation missions. They found that more than 4,600 Vietnamese hamlets were sprayed with Agent Orange and other herbicides, and that the amount of dioxin contained in the defoliants was nearly twice what had been previously estimated.

Population data were available for about 3,200 of the hamlets that were sprayed. The Stellmans calculated that at least 2.1 million people, and perhaps as many as 4.8 million, would have been in these hamlets when the spraying occurred.

Those who were sprayed weren't the only ones exposed to dioxin from the defoliants. Once the dioxin entered local ecosystems, it contaminated the fatty tissue of animals such as fish and ducks. The dioxin then accumulated in people who consumed those animals.

Dioxin also got passed along to fetuses in the womb and to nursing infants through breast milk.

Vietnamese were exposed in other ways as well. For example, in Danang and other areas around U.S. air bases, local people would often reuse the 55-gallon drums in which the herbicides had been stored.

Studies in recent years conducted by joint teams of Western and Vietnamese scientists have found that some areas around former U.S. air bases remain highly contaminated with dioxin.

Arnold Schecter of the University of Texas School of Public Health is considered one of the world's leading experts on dioxin. Working in collaboration with Vietnamese scientists, Schecter has discovered high levels of dioxin in the blood of people living near the former U.S. air base in Bien Hoa, just north of Ho Chi Minh City.

Schecter concludes that food remains a source of dioxin exposure for some people in Bien Hoa.

"Dioxins are still getting into people," he said.

In 2002, the U.S. and Vietnamese governments agreed to back joint research to try to determine how the dioxin was affecting Vietnamese people, with a particular emphasis on the much-debated question of birth defects. The project originally intended to study cases of cleft lip or palate, neurotube defects and limb abnormalities.

But the U.S. government urged a scaling-back of the initial proposal. It recommended a pilot study examining only dioxin levels in mothers, to demonstrate that U.S. and Vietnamese researchers could work together and to document that women giving birth in Vietnam showed a range of dioxin levels in their blood, thereby justifying a full study.

Hanoi then grew reluctant to proceed, ostensibly because of the changes in the research protocol. There were also said to be disputes over who would control the blood samples taken from Vietnamese.

Finally in March, the United States announced it was withdrawing its commitment to the research, citing a lack of "the necessary cooperation from the Vietnamese government."

Back in Hoa Ninh, Dang doesn't have time to follow the progress of Agent Orange research. But she is certain that for her family, the war continues. And the pain she and her children have endured, she said, is something she can't describe.

"It's too much to put into words."

ON THE NET: Veterans Administration: va.gov/agentorange National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences fact sheet: niehs.nih.gov/oc/factsheets/ dioxin.htm Jeanne Stellman's Web site: columbia.edu/~jms13/articles .html