Agent Orange

Time to clean up the mess we've made.

Honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with this one. I almost opted to write another poem, for poems, I feel, do a far better job of guiding our hearts into the hidden wounds where appropriate grief resides, that sacred inner mud pool from whence holy metabolized re-membering can commence. But in the end I figured I should give another essay a go, with the intention being to more specifically speak to an aspect of our not-so-distant history that has risen again in recent days due to the wicked foul play of the monstrous Agent Orange now residing in the White House. I’ll do my best here to write in such a way that might, gods willing, properly honor what I have just bore witness to on a recent trip to Vietnam, all those beings both seen and unseen who needlessly suffered and continue to suffer there as a result of U.S. negligence, and how my own spirit now grapples with knowing, yet again, that the country of my birth will likely do little, if anything to clean up its long meandering trail of toxic runoff (both literally and figuratively) deeming such works as “inefficient”.

An Agent Orange landscape in transition: Former A So Special Forces base and Agent Orange Museum. / Photographs by Ylan Vo (2016)

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Last week, a dear friend of mine, Ylan Vo graciously took myself and several of my students to the A Shau Valley (Vietnamese: thung lũng A Sầu) in Vietnam where she has been researching the history and aftereffects of chemical warfare for several years. Located near the ancient imperial capital of Huế, along the border of Laos, The Shau Valley runs north/south for 40 kilometers and hosts a 1.5-kilometer-wide flat bottomland covered with shimmering elephant grass. It is flanked by two lush and densely forested mountain ridges whose summits vary in elevation from 900 to 1,800 meters. This valley was one of the key entry points into South Vietnam for soldiers of the so-called “Vietnam War” (It was the “American War” to the people of Vietnam) and was where necessary materials were brought in by the North Vietnamese Army. As such, thus was the scene of heavy fighting.

We entered the A Shau Valley via Route 548, a stretch of highway which was paved directly over a section of the infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail. (*A man joining us claimed this trail was the second longest trail in the world, second only to the legendary Inca Trail. I haven’t been able to prove or disprove this. I’d love to learn more about this if anyone has more details!) The energy of this place haunted me and strangely, gave me hope, for the villagers who fought the invaders off here, though they were badly bruised and many killed, ultimately resisted their enemy and won full autonomy, heroically demonstrating to the entire world that even a seemingly insurmountable empire can be defeated when people collectively organize and commit intergenerationaly to something far bigger than themselves. God help us. May we be wise, and peaceful.

Ho Chi Minh and a couple of his comrades.

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My friend Ylan and her team guided us past a seemingly endless trail of bomb craters, now filled with rain water that serve as eerie drinking vessels for wandering water buffalo. The valley is so stunningly beautiful that it’s hard to imagine it was once a major battleground. As we walked, she told us about the impressive tactics used by infamous revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh and his guerrilla soldiers, about how they managed to persist through unimaginable struggles and ultimately resist the strongest military in the world by using simple DIY methods such as the communal making of tiger traps crafted from sharpened sticks of bamboo to capture their enemy. They risked their lives by sawing through undetonated bombs to harvest metal for making their own weapons. They constructed hundreds of miles of hidden underground tunnels to hide in and from whence to protect their families from invaders. And while they fought off the opposition, they managed too to farm secretly and raise children, some of whom, we learned, were born and eventually came of age all within the insides of these subterranean corridors that housed everything from schools, kitchens, hospitals and even games rooms to play in. No matter whose side you agree with, this is beyond impressive!

I couldn’t help but feel tinges of awe, melancholy, rage and reverence as I considered what it must have been like, forced to live in a narrow network of snake infested caves because of a trigger-happy outsiders inability to let people live the way they wanted to. How often has the U.S. done this?! How often empire claims to know what is best for people they know nothing about, announcing to all their only intent is to “liberate” while blatantly seeking to control ever more of the world we all call home. And how the saga continues! With China. With Russia. And elsewhere too. In farms, in strip-malls and on beach fronts the world over. All in the name of “progress”!

We all do it. The same ugly, life-killing story unfolds again and again and again. When was the last time you asked the soil for permission to plow Her?? Did it ever cross your mind that maybe the grass doesn’t want to be mowed? That the lettuce doesn’t appreciate your noble efforts to “do less harm”? We are a strange brew indeed. We all think we know best. How easy to point our finger at the other guy. But of course I do too! And of course I consider now Trumps outrageous diatribe regarding “helping” Palestinians by turning the Gaza Strip into a place for prime real estate. My head spins! But I am not shocked. We have seen this all before. Hell, all of the “Americas” have been formed into “prime real estate”. Entire subdivisions are literally built on the bodies of murdered tribal children. Yet my heart still twists itself in knots. How could he do that?!, I think. And I wonder, are we evolving at all as a species? With all our fancy new gadgets and our high since of morality, has as anything truly “developed” since the time of Gilgamesh?? Not from the vantage point of a seed. Not at all.

We approach our destination, the A So Airport. I notice our driver bowing before a small shrine, lighting incence to offer the many countless beings who died here. We learn how dioxin run-off here killed the plants, desecrated the soil, poisoned the water and as such harmed nearly everyone and everything in its wake in one way or another. Entire forests were ravaged from dioxin. Buffalo naively drank water contaminated with it and children who in turn drank the buffalos milk eventually found growing abnormalities in their anatomy. And the effects of this ghastly weapon-of-war were intergenerational, often lasting three-four generations, effecting great-grandchildren years later in morbidly grotesque ways I do not wish to picture here. Think elephant man.

The airbase has only been made fit for human visitation recently, as it still contained remnants of toxicity for decades after the end of the war and wasn’t verified as being fully clean until a mere year ago. During the wartime, the US military used this area to transport and store one of the most controversial weapons of war ever known, “Agent Orange”, a toxic cocktail containing equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D. It was aggressively used as a chemical weapon by the United States military as part of its herbicidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand, during the American War in Vietnam from 1961 to 1971. Ranch Hand involved spraying an estimated 19 million U.S. gallons of defoliants and herbicides over rural areas of South Vietnam in an attempt to deprive the Viet Cong of food and vegetation cover. Areas of Laos and Cambodia were also sprayed. According to the Vietnamese government, Agent Orange caused some 400,000 deaths.

Not surprisingly, The United States government and the most notable company (their were several involved) responsible for the creation of dioxin, Monsanto (i.e. Bayer), have described the aforementioned figures as "unreliable" (click here to read the actual file from 1982 when Monsanto avoids responsibility and denies accountability for their highly toxic product Agent Orange.). Just as the N.R.A. won’t claim responsibility for the ever increasing rate of gun deaths. Just as Dupont, 3M and a slew of other household brands will likely never come out and openly admit their products are killing all of us slowly, and just as the U.S. still refuses to genuinely take responsibility for the countless bodies of African origin who were forced from their homelands to be slaves for wealthy landowners from Europe who made their “homes” on the stolen land of countless tribal peoples of Turtle Island and just as the heirs of the wealth made from such unthinkable acts today don’t consider any of thus their responsibility either, well, so the saga continues…

The A Ao Valley is a success story in many ways. While I was there I ate many fresh, wild harvested foods. The food growing there now is clean, delicious and nutritious. Dioxin has been thoroughly removed from the area. Other parts of Southeast Asia however, are not so fortunate. Consider the Bien Hoa air base for example, home of yet another enormous chemical spill near the major metropolis of Ho Chi Minh City where a massive clean up effort was under way when just last month Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. As reported by ProPublica,

“…The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated with dioxin, the deadly byproduct of Agent Orange, which the American military sprayed across large swaths of the country during the Vietnam War. After Rubio’s orders to stop work, the cleanup crews were forced to abandon the site, and, for weeks, all that was covering the contaminated dirt were tarps, which at one point blew off in the wind.

And even more pressing, the officials warned in a Feb. 14 letter obtained by ProPublica, Vietnam is on the verge of its rainy season, when torrential downpours are common. With enough rain, they said, soil contaminated with dioxin could flood into nearby communities, poisoning their food supplies.

Hundreds of thousands of people live around the Bien Hoa air base, and some of their homes abut the site’s perimeter fence, just yards from the contaminated areas. And less than 1,500 feet away is a major river that flows into Ho Chi Minh City, population 9 million.”

A treatment center for children with disabilities in Ho Chi Minh City in 2009. Many of them are from areas that were heavily sprayed with Agent Orange during the war. Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images

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In mid-February, the Trump administration officially ended USAID, which has funded a great deal of the efforts to clean up messes the U.S. made not only during their war in Vietnam but messes they have made elsewhere. Trump and his curious way of thinking claims that it isn’t fair for the U.S. to always come to the aid of others. Fair enough, if we aren’t the ones responsible for making the mess in the first place, but as anyone who has travelled further than Florida can tell you, the U.S. is almost always involved.

There is a toxic war still raging that is far more dangerous than anything we have experienced in a good long while. It has our sanity all clogged up. We increasingly cannot recognize truth from fiction, real food from fake, or even beauty from a putrid nightmare. Modernity has polluted our minds and the Agent Orange on Capital Hill is but the tip of the iceberg. As long as we keep buying what they are selling us, idly sitting on the sidelines while toxic runoff makes all life inhabitable, we are just as much to blame as the evil empires who deny responsibility for the bombs they drop.

So how do we go about cleaning up such a hard to define mess? Well, maybe we should start by actually cleaning up the messes that aren’t so hard to fine, the ones we obviously made. Like the ones in Vietnam. Or the ones in every lake and river from sea to shining sea. We could stop buying the “forever chemicals” Dupont forcefed us all secretly. We could stop using plastic. Start with the obvious. Stop buying shit you don’t need! All our conveniences come with a major price tag. And none of it is truly all that convenient when one knows where its all coming from. All our fancy phones and obsession with AI and electric energy, our strange desires for weedless lawns, non-stick pans and waterproof jackets, it’s all mutating our bodies and minds and desecrating the Earth in ways not-so-far-removed from what Agent Orange did to the lifeblood of Vietnam. Oh, Monsanto still drops bombs alright. Just look in the sky the next time you drive by a genetically modified “corn” field. Or simply take a gander at the label on the backside of your Round Up-Ready. There is a reason for that little skull and bones there. Buyer beware.

I bow in gratitude for the kindness consistently shown to me in Vietnam. I have visited this country over half a dozen times and not once have I ever received anything but courtesy. There is an intelligence there that we all could seriously learn from. Governments do not represent their people and the Vietnamese people have the wisdom to know this. They have endured incredible hardship and yet they are not filled with hatred. A remarkable feat indeed considering how many in the world today react quite differently when met with hardship. They are a true inspiration, a greatly needed reminder, that humans can be kind, creative, forgiving and able to walk with dignity even when their hearts are filled with sorrow.

The young American soldiers who were forced to fight in that terrible war were not the ones responsible for the millions of innocent people who lost their lives there. Kissinger led a long prosperous life, as did Pol Pot, as will Bush and Cheney and so many others who never even carried a gun but casually drank beers in air conditioned halls far from any resemblance of what one might consider danger as the consequences of their foul choices ruined countless lives for countless generations. The people of Vietnam know this. As such, when they saw me they did not see an American enemy, but a fellow citizen of the world trying to learn and grow and heal and laugh and attempt to make since of these insane times. I found no effort to seek justice. All they want is some help cleaning up the mess we made. Is that so much to ask?

All blessings, no evil.

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Further Reading:

Agent Orange in A Luoi Valley

Last Ghost: Scientific, Environmental, And Social Legacies Of Agent Orange In Vietnam

Trump Halted an Agent Orange Cleanup. That Puts Hundreds of Thousands at Risk for Poisoning.

Why Does Everyone Hate Monsanto?

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#mayallbeingsbehappyandfree