For many the effects of Agent Orange continue to be felt. PHOTO/Geoffrey Cain/IRIN
DANANG, 9 April 2010 (IRIN) – When US airplanes sprayed the jungle around Tran Thanh Dung with an orange mist during the Vietnam war, he did not know his children would suffer four decades later. At the time he was a child soldier with the Viet Cong, the communist guerilla group in central Vietnam.
“The American airplanes came right towards me and dropped a mist on the jungle, and the next day, the trees were dead,” he recalls. “We weren’t scared. We were confused.”
Tran was sprayed with Agent Orange, a herbicide used by the US army to kill off foliage in Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and early 1970s, so the communist forces could not hide in the forests.
The defoliant was contaminated with dioxin, a chemical believed to cause birth defects in the children of those exposed, say health experts. Today, Tran’s 18-year-old son suffers from spina bifida, an ailment doctors said was caused by Tran’s contact with dioxin in the early 1970s.
Child victims like his son have “been forgotten”, Tran says. He wants the US government to reimburse the families of Vietnamese soldiers for the effects of the spraying. “The problems of the war will never leave us.”
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