Over a year ago, the United States and Vietnam agreed to join in a program that would attempt to reduce the legacy in Vietnam of the days in which the United States used chemical weapons on civilian populations, including children -- chemical weapons, I would add, that are still wounding children almost 45 years later.

The Danang Airbase is one of three "dioxin hotspots" -- alongside Bien Hoa and Phu Cat airbases -- where concentrations of extremely toxic contaminants from Agent Orange are nearly 400 times the globally accepted maximum standard. Until five years ago, when the area was finally sealed off, Danang residents such as Binh fished, bathed and harvested lotus plants from the Sen Lake -- and ate local fish with more than three times the safe level of dioxin. As a result, victims groups say, rates of cancer, birth deformities and other dioxin-related diseases are higher than the national average in the area -- and the health threat lingers. "In hotspots like Danang Airbase we are still finding very young people who are affected by (Agent Orange related) diseases," said Nguyen Van Rinh, chairman of the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin (VAVA). "The government doesn't have the capacity to move them out of contaminated areas," the 71-year-old retired general told AFP. Hanoi says up to three million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, and that one million suffer grave health repercussions today, including at least 150,000 children born with birth defects.

Things seem to be progressing, if one of the Americans most active in the program is to be believed.

The U.S. military decided to use defoliants during the Vietnam War as a way of clearing forest cover. Agent Orange was a chemical that at the time was widely used in American agriculture to kill weeds. In Vietnam, however, we sprayed millions and millions of gallons of it in concentrations up to fifty times what the manufacturer recommended. Wherever Agent Orange was sprayed, it pretty effectively killed all crops, trees, shrubs, and other vegetation. We did that for ten years, from 1961 to 1971. By the end of this time we had denuded an area nearly the size of Massachusetts of all the things that people in a rural economy need, forcing millions of Vietnamese farmers and their families to leave their homes and migrate to urban areas. It became clear later that much of the Agent Orange sprayed on Vietnam was contaminated with dioxin, a toxic byproduct of the manufacturing process. This dioxin residue persists at a small number of localized hot spots in central and southern Vietnam...The much more fundamental issue, however, is the impact of dioxin on the people of Vietnam, an issue that continues to the present. The impact centered on those people who were exposed during the war - civilians, soldiers, Americans, Vietnamese, and their descendants. Dioxin is linked to continuing health and disability issues for the people of Vietnam, similar to what our own veterans have experienced, but on a much larger scale.

It is good that we have delayed making war this time. A little humility in this regard is something quite appropriate. It really does us little good to wax moralistic about one set of chemical weapons and not another, just as it does us little good to pretend that there is anything like making "a little war" in a small place. Nothing about a weapon is humane. Nothing about a war is little. The only difference is where you happen to be standing when the weapon is launched, or the war is made. For the rest, we yield the floor to Major General William T. Sherman, commander, Military Division Of The Mississippi.


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