The new casualties of Agent Orange
Shadows of Agent Orange
Third generation of Vietnam victims

Gail Bensinger, Chronicle Staff Writer

Bac Giang, Vietnam -- Five-year-old Phuong looks out at the world through huge, sad eyes as she wiggles her shoulder deeper into her mother's embrace.

Her attempt to hide is not just shyness. Phuong has already learned that strangers are less interested in her sweet face, her gold earrings, her cheerful cotton dress than in her left arm -- a useless stub that ends just below the armpit.

Her other arm is normal, if you overlook the hand with only three fingers. So are her legs and feet, though she has only nine toes. When her mother tries to show visitors the deformities, Phuong cries uncontrollably.

Nearly three decades after the Vietnam War ended, Agent Orange has reached the third generation, and Phuong is another casualty.

Fully half of Vietnam's 82 million people were not yet born when the last U. S. helicopter lifted off from Tan Son Nhat Air Base in the frantic days of April 1975. For most of the others, trying to make their way in this poor but vibrant nation, that time is part of their past, not an issue in their daily lives.

Tan Son Nhat, once a U.S. military hub, is now a busy international airport with duty-free merchandise for sale. Parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply route that crossed hundreds of miles of mountains and jungles, have been incorporated into the north-south highway being constructed down the western edge of the country. Farmland in central Vietnam is scarred with huge bomb craters, some used now to raise catfish.

But if war is just one prism through which the history of Vietnam can be viewed, it still refracts occasionally on the present and the future. Agent Orange continues to claim victims. Land mines pock swaths of the countryside. A generation of middle-aged Vietnamese women lack husbands in this family- oriented culture.

SUFFERING A DAILY REALITY

At the residential treatment center where Phuong shares a sunny, aqua- painted room with three other youngsters, Agent Orange is a daily reality. All of the 30 boarders and nearly half of the 100 day students are suffering from its effects: twisted or stunted limbs, bodies covered with tumors, some blind or deaf children, others with faces in perpetual pain.

During the war, Phuong's grandfather was in the demilitarized zone in central Vietnam when U.S. planes dumped defoliants on the region in an attempt to deny cover to North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerrillas. Now, she and the other boarders are attended by parents learning how to care for their disabled offspring at home. The least afflicted children will be taught trades such as embroidery or handicrafts.

TESTING COST IS PROHIBITIVE

Dr. Nguyen Thi My Hien, a retired pediatrician who raises money for the center, said it would cost an unaffordable $2,000 per child for complete batteries of tests to establish the connection between their conditions and Agent Orange. But the incidence of afflictions matches wartime bombing patterns, she said, even in cases like Phuong's that skipped a generation.

The government is scrambling to find resources for dealing with Agent Orange, dioxin and other defoliants, including medical care and environmental cleanup. Contributions from abroad, local businesses, nongovernmental organizations and some sympathetic governments -- though not the United States -- finance individual projects.

"The U.S. government is really in denial about Agent Orange. The official policy is not even to discuss it," said Chuck Searcy, the Hanoi representative of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the group that built the memorial wall on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

TERATOGENS DUMPED

Many chemicals dumped across much of Vietnam during the war were teratogens,

which cause birth defects in the offspring of those affected, said Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Toan, who served as a battlefield surgeon in Vietnam's successive wars to oust the French and the Americans.

Nguyen, who lost her own son in January to cancer she links to Agent Orange,

became an obstetrician/gynecologist after the war and began seeing deformed babies in her practice.

Eventually, the affected populations will stop being able to reproduce, she said, adding that she suspects the worst is not over: "Many strange illnesses are continuously arising."

In the former war zones, lives are lost and bodies shattered to the left- over rubble of war. Between 1975 and 1998, the last year for which figures are available, an estimated 38,000 people were killed and 67,000 maimed by buried land mines and unexploded ordnance.

MINE REMOVAL PROJECT

"Everyone says the estimates are quite low," said Searcy, the memorial fund representative, who also oversees a pilot mine removal project in Quang Tri Province under the auspices of Asian Landmine Solutions, which raised the $249, 000 to launch it. The project, in the Triet Phong district, is training Vietnamese deminers and educating local residents about danger zones and the risks to "hobby deminers" looking for scrap to sell.

The Vietnam military is in overall charge of demining, Searcy said, but it does not have enough trained deminers or equipment to accomplish a national cleanup without outside help. If villagers report possible bomb or mine sites and nothing happens, he warned, people will stop being vigilant -- but, with the army's resources overstretched, "there's not always somebody who can come get it."

So far, the Triet Phong project to set up local demining teams has been successful, Searcy said. The hope is to expand the model elsewhere. "The Vietnamese wisely like to do things in a small way first," he said. "They like to have a small success rather than a big failure."

To date, donations for various nonmilitary demining efforts have come from individuals or international nongovernmental organizations. Only a trickle of cash and equipment for demining and ordnance disposal has been received from the U.S. government, Searcy said.

He cited a study showing that the three provinces that comprised the demilitarized zone could be cleaned up for about $1 billion over five or six years. "The Vietnamese can do it -- they just need equipment and training," he said.

'LONG-HAIR ARMY' DAYS

In Hue, a city linked in memory to the January 1968 Tet offensive, a war widow named Nguyen Thi Van and her friend Le Thi Suong exchanged recollections of their days in the "long-hair army" -- women who worked carrying documents, transporting food and weapons, helping wounded soldiers escape, digging tunnels, sometimes even fighting.

For them and many of the 30 or so other members of the Lonely Women's Club - - part social club, part support group, part micro-credit establishment, sponsored by the Vietnam Women's Union -- war marked their lives forever.

In this family-centered society, all are single. Some are widows, others are stigmatized by the wartime hardships they endured. Some never found mates because so many potential husbands died on the battlefield. Some broke the social taboo against unwed motherhood.

Nguyen Thi Van supports herself and her son making brooms and raising animals. She said she is weak, the result of torture endured when she was imprisoned for two years by the South Vietnamese army. Le has headaches and faints often, conditions she linked to her exposure to Agent Orange. One of her four adult children is affected by the chemical as well, she said.