Remembering the Children of Agent Orange: A Personal Investigation
Agent Orange took my father, and quite likely took my sisters. My story is frighteningly common. Part 1 of a series.
In the first part of this series, I chronicle my father’s exposure to Agent Orange as an Army nurse in Vietnam, which would cost him his health.
Part 1: A Personal Investigation
Part 2: Generations of Loss
Part 3: How Dioxin Damages Generation After Generation
Part 4: What Remains
Wars never end. Their toxic aftermath lingers, for generations.
Wars lay waste to the land, to the air, to the water. Hotspots in Southeast Asia are still heavily contaminated 50 years after the US government blanketed jungles, rice paddies, rivers, and villages with 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides, contaminating the region with dioxin, one of the most toxic substances on the planet.
Wars also lay waste to those who perish, as well as to the survivors of the battlefield. Many soldiers in Vietnam, for example, returned with mysterious ailments that tormented them for decades, and earned them hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from the US government and the chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange — if their conditions didn’t kill them.
The story of Vietnam veterans and Agent Orange is well known. Much less well publicized, however, is the intergenerational genetic damage that America’s wars have wreaked on the American children of those who served.
Agent Orange sprayed half a century ago in Southeast Asia has short-circuited the health of hundreds of thousands of US children of Vietnam veterans, estimates Heather Bowser, a cofounder of Children of Vietnam Veterans Health Alliance. Bowser was born premature with a missing leg and fingers to a father who died at age 50 of a heart attack after returning from Vietnam. Many of the 5,000 members of the private Facebook group Bowser cofounded have reported mysterious birth defects, autoimmune diseases, cancers, fertility issues, and chronic ailments that were not in their family history before a parent served in Vietnam.
Besides Bowser, those affected include people like Lori Weber of Canton, Michigan, outside Detroit, whose father the US government has recognized as 100% Agent Orange disabled for Parkinson’s disease. Among Weber’s birth defects are hip dysplasia, spina bifida occulta, and pars defects of the spine. In total, she has had 30 surgeries. Her son has multiple complex health problems as well.
They include people like Laura Nichols of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, who a VA judge declared 100% Agent Orange disabled in a rare ruling, and whose mother died of lung cancer after serving as a helicopter nurse in Vietnam. Nichols’ sons have endured cancer and birth defects.
They include the estimated 3 million Vietnamese whose health has been seriously affected by Agent Orange, and who continue to be born with staggering rates of birth defects.
The ranks of the dead most likely include my two sisters. My father and sisters died prematurely in midlife after suffering from an endless series of health problems, decades after my father had served in Vietnam as an Army nurse in evac hospitals and POW camps, and had become a US-certified Agent Orange disabled veteran.
My father, Mike, died in 2003 at the age of 59, in large part due to his exposure to Agent Orange. My 39-year-old sister Ami died next in 2010, three years after being diagnosed with a merciless neurodegenerative disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In the summer of 2020 as the pandemic raged, I helped bury her twin, Missie, after she succumbed at age 49 to a decade-long battle with chronic lung disease, immune-system problems, and mental illness. Like many other children of veterans who were conceived before the war, I am relatively healthy.
No one, no matter how powerful, is immune from the dire health effects of modern warfare. President Biden’s son Beau died from brain cancer that the President believes may have been linked to massive burn pits he was exposed to during his service in Iraq.
To find out why my family members died and I did not, I immersed myself, like a detective, in the science behind one of the most expensively and diligently studied — and perhaps most willfully obfuscated — environmental disasters in modern history. I discovered the emerging field of epigenetics, which shows how a father’s environmental exposure to toxic chemicals, not just a mother’s, can be transmitted to his children’s genes without ever changing the DNA sequence, with diseases flicking on and off like a light switch depending on fate.
While few definitive conclusions can be drawn in terms of individual cases, the collective epidemiological evidence is damning, some of which has gone unreported and in several cases buried for years under mountains of government bureaucracy and delay.
The Vietnamese people, their erstwhile conquerors, and the children on both sides of the conflict born afterward have been collectively stalked by a capricious force that causes random genetic mayhem from birth through midlife and beyond, generation after generation. As with characters in a slow-moving Greek tragedy, a fatal flaw lay not just within the state and society, but also at a cellular level within ourselves.
My Father’s War
From 1967 to 1969, my father was a captain in the Army, tending to wounded soldiers in the 85th and 67th evacuation hospitals and in POW hospitals in and around Qui Nhon in Central Vietnam. Nurses like him often worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week, preparing up to 20 soldiers for surgery in an hour after they had been evacuated in waves of fast helicopters, often after being horribly disfigured by napalm, land mines, grenades, and small arms.
Nurses had to quickly make life and death decisions during triage about who could be saved, and who would be made comfortable while they were put behind screens to die. The sense of guilt and helplessness about these soldiers, whose average age was only about 19 years old, could be particularly traumatic for the nurses who cared for them.
In his free time, my father took hundreds of photographs. Their ordinariness belies the carnage he witnessed during the height of North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive. My father’s photos depict shy Vietnamese children posing on the streets, women in conical straw hats hawking rice and vegetables in village markets, Day-Glo Buddhist cemeteries in the highlands, and sparkling white-sand beaches where soldiers surfed in scenes reminiscent of the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now.
My father’s photographs also call to mind one of his favorite TV shows, M*A*S*H, a comedy that harnessed the antics of doctors and nurses working in a field hospital during the Korean War to help Americans process their lingering despair over losing the Vietnam War. One photo shows a grinning man, shirtless and sunning himself on a makeshift lounge chair made out of an Army-green stretcher while his friend props up his flip-flopped feet on a sandbag that would normally have been stacked around the field hospital’s flimsy walls to shield it from regular mortar fire.
My father helped patch up both American and communist Vietnamese soldiers, sending them back into combat if they were able. Several of his photos depict urgent scenes of medics hustling pensive soldiers from helicopters into the hospital.
One of the war stories my father told was of sitting at his desk in the nursing station. Hearing enemy fire, he hit the floor. Bullet holes at chest level lined the wall where he had been sitting.
Years after my father’s death, I found a blurry photo showing a doctor with a stethoscope treating a panic-stricken Vietnamese man. Could he have been one of the Vietcong soldiers my father had talked about patching up at a POW hospital and handing over to the South Vietnamese forces for what he knew was almost certain execution?
As I was growing up in Houston, Texas, my father sometimes told me and my sisters stories about treating wounded GIs, Vietcong POWs, and civilians who were drenched in what we now know was the dioxin-contaminated defoliant Agent Orange. The military crop-dusted Vietnam in a fine, calibrated mist in order to flush out the Vietcong from the dense jungles that protected them and to drive farmers from their villages.
“When they sprayed Agent Orange up in the highlands where your father worked as a nurse in a POW camp, the civilians would come screaming and yelling into his hospital,” my mother, Carol, remembers. “He’d cut off their clothes before treating them.”
Vietnam was a chemistry experiment gone horribly awry: Herbicides were sprayed at more than 50 times greater concentrations than used on any farm field, and they were many times more toxic to humans, owing to being mixed with jet fuels, Agent White, malathion, and hexachlorobenzene, a pesticide in the same class as DDT. Less than 1 microgram of dioxin alone can kill an adult guinea pig. The EPA’s maximum dose of dioxin in drinking water is equal to 30 drops in a 13 billion gallon container of water as high as the Empire State Building.
The field hospitals where my dad worked were located in Binh Dinh province — the 10th most heavily sprayed Agent Orange hotspot. The Air Force’s declassified HERBS tapes show that Agent Orange spraying in Binh Dinh province accelerated sharply starting in February 1967, peaking at 9,000 gallons every few days in mid-1968, before gradually tapering off by the end of 1969 — precisely the period of time when my father served there. The nearby Phu Cat airport was the site of a nearly $1 billion cleanup in partnership with the US at several air bases.
Levels of dioxin in fish, ducks, chicken, and beef sold in markets in Bien Hoa, for example, were still highly contaminated with dioxin — decades after the spraying ended.
Next Up, Part 2 in the Series: Generations of Loss
