Anthropologist Diane Niblack Fox spoke on the lasting consequences of Agent Orange 50 years after it was used in the Vietnam War.

by Catherine Schuknecht (UCLA 2015)

UCLA International Institute, February 13, 2015 — "Agent Orange, as a term and chemical, links the local to the global," said Diane Niblack Fox at a February 5th talk sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. "It blurs boundaries. . . and its reference ranges from the technical to the metaphoric."

Fox is one of a number of scholars studying the consequences of Agent Orange — a concentrated chemical compound of 2,4-D (dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) and 2,4,5-T (trichlorophenoxyacetic acid) that was used by the United States to defoliate forests in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War. She is a member of the Department of Anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

Audience members included Joe Carrier, who traveled with the National Academy of Sciences to Vietnam in 1972 to replant a defoliated mangrove forest, and Nam-Hau Doan, current and founding president of CHEER for Viet Nam. The latter is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that provides aid to Vietnamese children, including those affected by Agent Orange.

Background

Between 1961 and 1971, the United States and its allies sprayed 21 million gallons of 6 chemical defoliants, including Agent Orange, in areas of southern Vietnam. The goal of the spraying was to reveal the hiding places of enemy combatants and to destroy food crops.

According to the U.S. Air Force, 10 percent of South Vietnam's overall landmass was devastated by the chemicals, including 24 percent of its upland forests and 33–50 percent of its coastal mangroves. "Taken together," explained Fox, "the chemicals defoliated an area. . . about the size of Massachusetts."

An estimated two-thirds of these defoliants contained a dioxin byproduct of the 2,4,5-T manufacturing process known as TCDD (2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin), a highly toxic substance. The health implications of exposure to this substance are devastating, said Fox.

Although it is impossible to know an exact number, at least several million people were exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Exposure to the chemical has been linked to skin diseases, digestive problems, neural diseases, cancers, birth defects and many other ailments.

The chemical also caused permanent damage to the forests it came into contact with, resulting in soil erosion, flooding and habitat destruction. In many of these areas, noted Fox, replanting is impossible.

Agent Orange: Metaphor or medical emergency?

Over the past 50 years, Agent Orange has evolved beyond its scientific meaning to represent the lingering consequences of war and reparations that cannot be repaid.

"In America," explained Fox, "Agent Orange is often called the symbol of deceit and betrayal; a metaphor for everything that was wrong about the most unpopular war in American history." For many Vietnamese, the term is a synonym for birth defects and the workings of fate, or karma.

Others argue that focusing exclusively on the chemical misses the full extent of the war’s destruction. "You have a war that destroyed the health system, destroyed the infrastructure, created problems of pollution, hunger, malnutrition and their associated diseases," an American physician told Fox. "And you are going to sit around arguing over one small part of that total damage, pouring millions of dollars into research, rather than helping people, which you could do for a fraction of the cost?"

Another scientist cautioned Fox that "if we assume certain health consequences are from Agent Orange when they are not, we may not be focusing on causes we can prevent in the future."

The human experience of Agent Orange

Fox lived in Vietnam from 1991 to 2001, working as a teacher volunteer coordinator and writer. In 1997, she began work on her doctorate in anthropology, which centered on conversations with Vietnamese about the long-term impact of exposure to Agent Orange.

Many of the families Fox met during her travels with the International and Vietnamese Red Cross told her stories that distinctly differed from the rhetoric of science and politics about Agent Orange.

The speaker told the story of a couple she interviewed in a rice-farming village in the Thai Binh province of Vietnam. The husband had served as a Special Forces soldier in a heavily sprayed region of South Vietnam in 1972. "Where he was stationed," explained Fox, "the trees were denuded of leaves. . . . [He] saw 200 liter barrels with yellow stripes." (These yellow and orange identification stripes represent the origin of the nickname Agent Orange.)

"We thought whoever died, died at once, and whoever lived, lived whole," said the man’s wife. Instead, her husband returned from the war with many diseases of the skin, as well as ailments of the nervous, circulatory and digestive systems. Within one 12-month span, the couple visited the hospital 30 times.

The man’s wife also experienced devastating after effects of exposure to Agent Orange. "[T]he first fetus my wife gave birth to. . . was like a monster — a monster in a fairytale," said the husband. "[I]t didn't have a human shape, and a few minutes after it was born, it died." The couple's second child was slow witted and their third child, epileptic and blind. Their fourth child was 16 at the time of the interview and enrolled in school.

"An unavoidable war broke out between our two countries; in reality, nobody wanted it," said the husband. "But what happened — that is the consequence of the bombs and bullets and of the chemicals — outrages the Vietnamese people. . . because the result is not to kill a person at once, but. . . waits for the children and for the grandchildren."

Although it's impossible to prove that all of these illnesses are caused by exposure to TCDD — the required blood tests are very expensive — Fox argued that these individual human experiences are where the larger story of Agent Orange begins.

"If telling the human experience risks simplification," said the speaker, "leaving the story of Agent Orange to science and politics risks missing the lived experience. . . . It is a mix of these very human stories and science that has advanced our understanding of Agent Orange."

Fox hopes that the effects of Agent Orange can open dialogue between Vietnam and the United States. "American veterans,” she said, “ [see] the similarities between the illnesses that mark their own lives and those that mark the lives of Vietnamese thought to be affected by Agent Orange. She cited one U.S. veteran’s observation that "it was like looking in a mirror."

United States slow to act

Acknowledgment of the toxicity of Agent Orange is a comparatively recent phenomenon. During the 1950s and 60s, many members of the U.S. military believed that herbicides were a gentler form of warfare that would not hurt people or permanently damage plants.

Fox noted that it was not until 1962, when American marine biologist Rachel Carson published her book Silent Spring on the dangers of the American enthusiasm for chemicals, that scientists began to oppose the use of Agent Orange in earnest.

In 1964, 5,000 scientists, including 17 Nobel laureates, signed a petition to stop the use of such chemicals in Vietnam. Five years later, the United Nations voted to include herbicides under the 1925 Geneva protocol that bans chemical weapons. In December 1970, the U.S. government finally issued an order to halt wartime use of herbicides. At the same time, the Nixon Administration founded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The growth of our scientific understanding about Agent Orange has been based on evidence drawn from industrial accidents, laboratory experiments, epidemiological observations, longitudinal studies and measurements of traces of TCDD found in the soil and body tissues of people who are living today. . . on what are still highly contaminated hotspots," explained Fox.

In "hotspots" around military bases, where dioxin leaked directly from barrels while being transported, she pointed out that "experts in dioxin decontamination have found up to. . . 1,000 times the level of TCDD deemed acceptable by World Health Organization standards."

By the 1980s, annual International Dioxin Symposia began to be held and U.S. veterans settled a class action lawsuit out of court with the companies that had manufactured Agent Orange.

In 2002, over a quarter century after the war ended, scientists from 19 countries around the world met in Hanoi for the first conference on the consequences of Agent Orange to be cosponsored by both the United States and Vietnam.

Only in 2007 did the U.S. government begin to allocate funding for dioxin remediation, as well as to support public health and disability programs in Vietnam. To date, the funding has reached a total of US$ 136 million.

See the fact sheet on Agent Orange produced by the War Legacies Project.