And
You Thought the War Was Over
By Heather
Mallick
Globe & Mail
14 June 2003
I have found them. Yes,
yours truly has tripped over WMD, the "weapons of mass destruction"
that Junior Bush and Tony Blair used to justify their conquest of Iraq.
Those missing weapons were variously explained as a) destroyed before
the war b) not "literally" there -- and why aren't reporters
more conceptual in their thinking? c) never there at all d) exported
to Syria or e) in beakers in those two Winnebagos a panicky Mr. Blair
keeps mentioning.
What's more, these WDs are
not just M for mass, they're F for forever.
The embarrassing part is
they were found not in Iraq but in Vietnam. We forget wars fast. Who'll
remember Iraq next year? Who thinks of Afghanistan now? And who knew
the Vietnam War was still being fought with WMDs?
What I am about to write upsets me a great deal and I have delayed writing
it. Some details may be distressing.
Despite Colin Powell saying
Saddam Hussein was the biggest user of chemical weapons since the First
World War, the greater culprit was in fact the United States. From 1961
to 1974, the United States admits that it dropped 72 million litres
of chemicals on Vietnam, most of it Agent Orange with a super-toxic
strain of dioxin called TCCD. U.S. soldiers dumped an additional 260,000
gallons of herbicide just to empty their tanks. The Guardian reports
that one soldier regularly dumped his poison into a central drinking
water reservoir. He doesn't want his name used, at which one can only
smile hollowly.
A Canadian environmental
science company, Hatfield Consultants, has discovered that the dioxin
hasn't dispersed. It has rooted itself in the soil at levels 100 times
higher than we would tolerate on Canadian farmland, spreading through
water into the food chain and from there into human blood, breast milk
and fetuses.
The poison has blossomed
through three generations of Vietnamese so far. It appears it will continue.
Its toxicity is difficult to describe. When General Powell held up his
tiny vial of what he said were scary anthrax spores, it hardly compared
to a small 80-gram tin of TCCD. That tin would destroy New York City.
The United States dropped 170 kilograms of it.
This WMD kills and maims
unstoppably. The grandchildren of those who first saw the sweet-smelling
yellow powder fall from the sky are damaged beyond belief. Agent Orange
causes innumerable diseases plus almost every cancer known to humankind.
I have obtained this information
from Web sites created by Vietnamese hospitals and U.S. war veterans
abandoned by their government, as well as e-mail with a Vietnamese doctor
attempting to care for some of Vietnam's 650,000 damaged children (500,000
have already died). Most of all, I have relied on a recent Guardian
exposé by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy. I cannot read it
and look at the photographs without falling into sadness for days.
Some dioxin babies were
born with two heads. Thankfully they are dead and float in formaldehyde.
Another baby photographed in a crib has a massive pointed head and eyeballs
that bulge far outside his face. Another victim is 19. In her photo,
she looks about 6. She walks like a spider and her skin is septic wet
red rubble. Her sister's fingers and toes drop off and she loses more
skin each day as her mother watches. Polio, Down syndrome and profound
retardation are everywhere. Some children look scarcely human. Some
women, the Guardian reports, give birth to genderless squabs that sound
like the pigoons in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: Lumps containing
organs.
We're used to bad things
dissipating as time passes. The fields of France are green now and their
people healthy. Agent Orange is different. The World Health Organization
says there are two ways to clean it up: Bake all the soil in Vietnam
to 1,000 degrees Celsius, or pave the country with concrete and chemically
treat what lies beneath. There are 80 million Vietnamese living on that
soil. The fact is, almost nothing can be done.
A Globe reader in Vietnam
tells me the Vietnamese are resilient. They tend to get on with things.
"People have to manage somehow and they have a miraculous ability
to do just that. Physical limitations are commonplace here and are not
understood as obstacles to participation in quotidian life."
When I visit http://www.vnrc.org.vn
(Vietnam Red Cross) and http://www.ogcdc.org, and contact a doctor who
talked to the Guardian reporters, his e-mail messages back to me end
with gentle good wishes for my family. I am stricken by this man's courtesy
to a Canadian who lives happily with her wealth and health intact. He
needs money to pay for operations on damaged children. He runs the OGCDC
(Office of Genetic Counselling and Disabled Children) at Hue Medical
College with small donations from around the world.
And there you have it. Agent
Orange was the second time the United States used a WMD, the first being
Hiroshima, but its effects were worse. It fits the Bush-Rumsfeld-Powell
definition because poison is still flowing now.
U.S. politicians rarely
think long-term. Whether we support or oppose their efforts in Afghanistan
and Iraq, those were mere social calls by comparison. In Vietnam, the
war is still being fought by proxy, via an American liquid that came
in orange cans.