Fred Wilcox - Scorched Earth

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks smashed into the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon. Vietnam lay in ruins, its towns and cities bombed to rubble, the countryside seeded with unexploded mines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells. A decade of chemical warfare had reduced majestic triple canopy jungles to toxic graveyards. Mangrove forests, habitats for songbirds and vital to coastal ecosystems, had turned into eerie moonscapes.

Agent Orange, the most widely used herbicide in Vietnam, was named after the orange stripe painted around the fifty-five-gallon barrels in which it was stored. It was a fifty-fifty combination of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, two commercial herbicides used widely in the United States. The 2,4,5-T in Agent Orange was contaminated with TCDD-dioxin, a carcinogenic, fetus-deforming, and quite possibly mutagenic chemical. Nearly forty years after the last spray mission, scientists continue to find high levels of dioxin in the food and water near abandoned military bases and in the blood, fatty tissue, and mother’s milk of the Vietnamese who live near these installations.

Making their way through dense jungles, US soldiers heard a cacophony of squawking birds, chattering monkeys, and insects buzzing like high-voltage wires. But after C-123 cargo planes swooped low over the trees, inundating them with Agent Orange, the ground was littered with decaying jungle birds and paralyzed and dying monkeys. Clusters of dead fish shimmered like buttons on the surface of slow-moving streams. “It was,” said one combat veteran with whom I spoke, “like walking through a graveyard.”

Years later, veterans would recall being soaked like the trees when aircraft jettisoned their herbicides. They’d also remember feeling dizzy, bleeding from the nose and mouth, and suffering from debilitating skin rashes and violent headaches after being exposed to Agent Orange.

Vietnamese caught in the path of herbicide missions complained that they felt faint, bled from the nose and mouth, vomited, suffered from numbness in their hands and feet, and experienced migraine-like headaches. They said that farm animals grew weak, got sick, and even died after being exposed to defoliants. As the use of herbicides escalated, Saigon newspapers risked publishing stories about babies born with heads shaped like mice, pigs, and sheep, about two-headed babies. Peasants whose families had lived on the same land for generations said they’d never encountered such strange phenomena. Doctors and nurses who delivered these babies could not recall having seen similar birth defects before the American War.

Scorched Earth is about a tragedy that, unlike earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and wars of limited duration, has been maiming and killing people for decades. It is about the aftermath of a chemical warfare campaign that destroyed the lives of several million Vietnamese adults and children. No one can be sure when, if ever, this calamity will end.

In 1983, Random House published Waiting for an Army to Die: The Tragedy of Agent Orange , the first book to chronicle the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans. I’d spent two years interviewing scientists, doctors, lawyers, and young veterans who were sick and dying from diseases that normally do not attack young men. Many of these illnesses were remarkably similar to those from which laboratory animals suffer when they are exposed to TCDD-dioxin. Moreover, veterans from Australia, South Korea, and New Zealand who’d been exposed to Agent Orange were experiencing illnesses—cancer, numbness in their arms and legs, diabetes, and heart problems—similar to those from which US veterans were suffering.

For the next thirty years, I kept track of research on the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on human beings and animals, taught college-level courses on the Vietnam War, wrote extensively about the war, and worked with veterans to persuade the government they’d served to treat them with dignity and respect, and to compensate them for the long list of illnesses they’d contracted due to their exposure to toxic chemicals in Vietnam.

I have long believed that the missing link that will prove once and for all that Agent Orange destroys human beings would be found in Vietnam. In July 2009, after many long years of preparing to research and write about this link, I flew with my son on the first leg of an arduous investigative journey. On a previous trip to Vietnam, I visited a small base camp that Vietcong soldiers had constructed deep inside of the jungle. Decades after the US Air Force sprayed the area with Agent Orange, this hideaway could easily be spotted from the air. There were no birds and no animals except crocodiles and monkeys with large lumps growing on their skinny bodies. No sign that the jungle would ever return.

My methodology in writing Scorched Earth was scientifically anecdotal, or anecdotally scientific. I did not set out to gather mountains of statistics or studies jam-packed with incomprehensible charts and graphs. Instead, I wanted to meet Vietnamese people who’d been exposed to Agent Orange; I wanted to listen to their stories and to hear if their accounts were similar to those of American veterans, as well as veterans from the other nations that sent troops to fight in Southeast Asia. Additionally, I hoped to talk with Vietnamese scientists, doctors, community activists, and others who’d dedicated their lives to researching the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on human beings. In short, I set out to listen to Vietnam.

I wanted to observe what life is like for impoverished victims of chemical warfare in Vietnam and to record what ordinary Vietnamese have to say about the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin on their families, and how they view their future. In many respects, I was determined to be a kind of medium for people who, as I found, struggle to survive not only their serious illnesses, but the sorrow of knowing that their plight, their destiny, is irrevocable. Their children will never attend school; they will never be able to work, marry, or bear children of their own.

In the opening pages of this book, I give readers an overview of the massive environmental damage caused by the use of herbicides, Rome Plows, and other methods to destroy Vietnam’s forests. Proponents of the defoliation campaign told those who challenged the attack on Vietnam’s environment that the trees would soon grow back. And while some of the mangrove forests have returned, forty years after the last spray mission wild “American grass” still grows where jungles once stood. Scientists do not know when, if ever, these jungles will return.

In Ho Chi Minh City, I interviewed the doctor who delivered the first headless baby in a Saigon hospital in 1967, and who spent the next forty years researching the effects of dioxin on pregnant women. Late one afternoon, my son Brendan and I were escorted into a locked chamber of horrors down the hall from the children’s ward in Tu Du Hospital. Inside this room, monsters float in large formaldehyde-filled glass jars. “Skeptics,” said the doctor who accompanied us there, “are more than welcome to visit this room, after which I will be happy to answer their questions.”

I set out in Scorched Earth to show what happens to human beings who are exposed over long periods to TCDD-dioxin, the most toxic small molecule known to science. Researchers who’ve spent years studying the effects of dioxin on laboratory animals know that pregnant mice given minute doses of this chemical develop cancer and give birth to horribly deformed offspring. They know for certain that dioxin is fetotoxic in pregnant laboratory animals and that it is a human carcinogen. They know that it might well prove to be mutagenic in human beings.