October 25, 2005

Dear Friend,

I return from my latest (50th? 60^th? since 1975) trip to Viet Nam both charged up and frustrated.

Being charged up has to do with what happened on the trip; being frustrated has to do with what awaited me upon return, real life constraints on our ability to respond effectively.

The trip was centered on Peter Yarrow’s second performance tour, this time to Hue and Ho Chi Minh City as well as a return to Ha Noi. Culturally and politically, the program was a great success. Peter communicated the spirit as well as the content of his “Peter, Paul and Mary” repertoire to an overwhelmingly Vietnamese audience. People were especially moved by Mary Beth Yarrow’s reading of a poem about My Lai by her uncle, former Presidential candidate and Senator Eugene McCarthy.

By the third concert in Ho Chi Minh City it all came together. Carnegie Hall style (an innovation in Viet Nam), twenty five students from the University of Social Sciences and Humanities formed an enthusiastic on stage chorus, encouraging the audience to sing along too. Quang Dung, a young very popular singer who had been an awkward auxiliary on stage in Ha Noi, became a full partner in the HCMC performance. At the end of the show, Peter had the audience on its feet, arms crossed and singing “We Shall Overcome”. (photo by Ted Lieverman)

Peter continued to lift up the issue of US responsibility for the consequences of an unjust war, in particular the impact of Agent Orange. He returned to Friendship Village to sing again for disabled children and visited the hospitals in Hue and Ho Chi Minh City where the tragedy of a plague of birth defects comes home. He expanded his understanding of post-war legacies by visiting in Dong Hoi and Dong Ha, north and south of the former DMZ, with survivors of unexploded ordnance (UXOs) and land-mines and with the staff of American and Vietnamese organizations that assist them.

We had a good meeting with Ambassador Mike Marine who was friendly and forthcoming on everything but the Agent Orange issue. Peter and Suxanne Pasch (Vice President for Academic Affairs at Wheelock College) conducted a workshop on Operation Respect at the Ha Noi University of Education for 200 teachers and students plus staff from the Youth Federation.

The Vietnamese print and TV media covered the performances extensively and half hour shows are being edited in both Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City. Peter spent an hour answering questions on-line on Vietnamnet. Don North, a Canadian TV reporter who has worked on NBC and ABC, documented the whole trip. We will turn his 21 hours of digital video into a documentary and a sampler will be available by December.

The personally most moving aspect of the trip was not on the planned program. FRD consultants Hugh and Nhi Hosman and I visited the A Luoi Valley (familiar to Americans as “A Shau”), at the behest of the head of the provincial Union of Friendship Organizations, the former “mayor” of Hue, Le Van Anh. Anh had worked in agricultural development in the valley for a decade after the war, and is determined to find help for the ethnic minority population that suffers from the suspected impact of Agent Orange and the incontestable effect of UXOs.

The two hour drive west from Hue is spectacular. The “valley” is a broad flat highland area bordering the mountains in Laos and the Ho Chi Minh trail. No doubt its strategic military location explains why the area was so contaminated by both Agent Orange and UXOs.

We visited one family with a 15 year old boy with severe mental and physical handicaps (photo below) and tried to go to another home where a woman in her twenties lay unable to move from her bed. She was visible to us from outside, but no one else was at home. A few hundred yards down the road was another 15 year old boy as badly handicapped as the first.

During a meeting with local officials, we learned of the overall statistics. They are already assisting with $10 monthly grants 680 cases of birth defects which they ascribe to Agent Orange. Another 4000 plus cases are known.

Somehow seeing the children in their homes with their families has an even more powerful impact than seeing their counterparts in Friendship Village, the school in Hue or in the Tu Du hospital ward in Ho Chi Minh City.

I have been disappointed for years that the admirable men holding the position of US ambassador in Ha Noi find it impossible to go beyond official denials of any long term impact of Agent Orange and of US responsibility for unintended consequences of its use. FRD has carried out a low key educational effort on the topic. We included legacies of war in ten Indochina conferences for non-governmental organizations in the1980s and 1990s, and today offer the most comprehensive web site. FRD is cosponsoring an exhibit by Vietnamese artists of their interpretations of the Agent Orange scourge for showing in both Ha Noi and in the US. <http://www.ffrd.org/agentorange.htm>

But that is not enough. We need to find the resources and the vehicles for bringing the issue to the fore. Agent Orange is not only a question of humanity and morality, but also a growing impediment to closer US-Vietnam relations. While US officials believes the problem will go away, they have fundamentally misread its origins and resonance among average Vietnamese.

This visit stimulated an idea that can help strengthen the case scientifically and will generate greater public awareness in the US. It builds on the professionally rigorous research conducted in the A Luoi Valley by a Canadian environmental company, Hatfield Consultants.

We are preparing a proposal to team Americans and Vietnamese to carry out a systematic survey of the suspected victims in the A Luoi Valley next summer. The survey would be undertaken by Hue university students (from the medical school, English department and the learning resource center) paired with volunteer American counterparts.

Using a professionally designed epidemiological questionnaire, the teams can create an unimpeachable data base that sheds light on the controversy about causation. Assembling a broad roster of family histories will add human depth to the scientific debate. And one can be sure that every participant will go home as a powerful advocate for humanitarian assistance to the victims/survivors, whatever the cause.

Photo by Don North

The inspiration for this idea is the boy pictured above. His father had been a soldier who was sprayed three times. In 1976 he married a woman from Hue and brought her to the valley. Their fist two children were normal. The next three suffered birth defects, one dieing in infancy, the son we saw, and a daughter with a deformed leg. Would a pattern like this suggest that the mother’s exposure to residual dioxin in the environment is responsible? This question is triggered by the fact the Veterans Administration accepts only one birth defect as attributable to a father’s exposure, but eighteen if the mother was exposed while serving in Vietnam.

The survey will also document the number of victims of Explosive Remnants of War (land mines and UXO) in the valley and the rate and cause of new accidents.

This is only the first step in a comprehensive project to provide humanitarian and economic aid from private sources to address the legacies of war in the valley and ultimately to motivate US government response. At the end of the day, the magnitude of the need and moral responsibility for current consequences of past actions, obligates an official US response.

The A Luoi Valley offers an unparalleled opportunity to make the point.

1) The Hatfield study demonstrates the area was severely contaminated by Agent Orange containing dioxin, both from spraying and by unsafe disposal or accidental spillage.

http://www.hatfieldgroup.com/files/CHEMOSPHERE_1.pdf

2) The people of the A Luoi district have suffered a large and disproportionate number of birth defects and other health problems, many of which could have been caused by dioxin.

Proving that 2 is connected to 1 is a matter of controversy among scientists and government officials in the US and Viet Nam. While scientific studies should go forward to advance our knowledge, the grave problems faced by those exposed to and possibly affected by Agent Orange require immediate and substantial attention.

For purely humanitarian reasons, the US ought to provide wide scale assistance to survivors with cancers and birth defects who were exposed to Agent Orange, or whose parents or grandparents were exposed. If causation is proven conclusively a decade from now, it would be unconscionable that nothing was done during the intervening years to relieve the suffering of unintended victims of a US weapon of war and their families. If research is scientifically inconclusive, the US will gain merit for its generosity to those suffering grave disabilities.

However, unless we find substantial funding for a barely visible cause, FRD will not be able to address Agent Orange or any other aspect of US relations with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Warm regards,

John McAuliff, Executive Director

PS We have just received an additional challenge grant of $15,000 from the Chino Cienega Foundation, bringing us to $55,000 from this source in 2005. Prospects for receiving a similar grant in 2006 depend on our ability to show matching grants in 2005.