Craig's Project

“Only You Can Prevent Forests”

-Operation Ranch Hand crew motto-

Twelve color photographs stand alone on a wall. The small, white labels under these pictures will haunt me until I die. The names include Vo thi Dieu Hien, Le Quang Vinh, Le Van Loi, Nguyen Hoa Binh, Tran Anh Kiet, and Truong Van Vinh. Dates of birth range from 1977 to 2002. These young Vietnamese children should be out running through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City or their rural villages, but these children are on this wall for a reason. They suffer from encephalitis, shortened limbs, and full-body paralysis. They are the children of parents who lived in heavily chemical-sprayed areas of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

As I walk into the next room of the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, I am stopped by a barrage of even more horrifyingly real pictures, as well as by two formaldehyde-filled jars containing stillborn, deformed children. Their eyes seem to be looking at me eerily through the brownish liquid in the jars, and I suddenly look up to an American veteran’s black and orange banner that reads “Agent Orange, Dioxin Kills.” I wonder how the United States could have done this. I begin to get sick to my stomach and can’t bear to look anymore, and yet I cannot look away. This is reality; this is what Americans and Vietnamese have to live with today. A decision was made in 1961, one in which these children had no part, and yet they are suffering the full consequences of it.

As I board the bus and head to our hotel, I see many young men, women, and children standing on the crowded street corners without any limbs, including a young man right outside of our hotel with no arms and a boy down the street with no legs. These are not pictures. No white labels underneath these people describe what has happened to them, leaving me to draw my own conclusions. I am in a daze. So many questions, and so many answers I don’t want to hear.

Chemical warfare is a very significant topic to consider in 2003. One of the reasons the United States and the United Kingdom went to war with Iraq is the suspicion that the Iraqis might have chemical weapons. In my high school history classes, I learned about individuals like Saddam Hussein using chemical weapons. They were evil people who did not value human life. The history of chemical weapons goes back further than that. In fact, the United States used chemicals such as herbicides and defoliants during the Vietnam War.

Chemical warfare began in World War I, but the use of chemical weapons dates back to the 6 th century BCE with the Assyrians poisoning enemy water supplies by depositing rye ergot in wells (Medical NBC Online). The Germans first used chlorine gas at Ypres, Belgium, in 1915 against the French, and they also used mustard gas as early as 1917. In World War I, 100,000 tons of toxic chemicals were used (The Why Files). Mac Thi Hoa, the Vice Director of the Agent Orange Victims Fund in Hanoi, said that this tactic was supposed to come to an end with two landmark decisions. The League of Nations banned the use of noxious substances in wartime in 1924 and the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibited the use of poison gas and the practice of biological warfare (Hoa) . The United States, however, didn’t sign the Geneva Protocol until 1975, when the damage in South East Asia had already been done (Williams 111).

Agent Orange, the most well-known chemical used during the Vietnam War, originated as a defoliant in a laboratory at the University of Chicago during World War II. It was developed by Professor E. J. Kraus, who was chairman of the school’s botany program (Sampley). Kraus contacted the War Department, but it was too late in the war to use it, so it was marketed as a weed killer for yards and roads. The Army used the same chemicals that were used on weeds, but the herbicides used by the farmers were heavily diluted. Ted Sampley of the U.S. Veteran Dispatch website said that the Army continued to experiment with the defoliant in the 1950s. Test trials were done in Puerto Rico, even though leaders knew it contained dioxin. Dioxin, however, was not known to be overtly harmful yet. During the Malayan Emergency of the 1950s, British aircraft sprayed herbicides on the isolated jungle plots of communist insurgents as part of a successful food elimination program, an action that was observed by the United States (Young). Charles J. Gaspar writes in the Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social and Military History that the United States also had an “extremely effective” defoliation experiment at Camp Drum, New York in 1959 (Gaspar 598).

On November 30, 1961, at the request of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, United States President John F. Kennedy personally approved the use of herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam (Gaspar 598). Three specially designed aircraft landed outside of Saigon on January 7, 1962, and the first use of herbicides in Vietnam started five days later (Gaspar 598). According to Harry G. Summer, Jr., author of the Vietnam War Almanac , the United States military command in Vietnam didn’t officially admit to using defoliants until September 23, 1966, though, over four years after its inception (Summer 39).

Operation Ranch Hand, as the mission was called, had three main purposes: (1) to protect U.S. and allied military bases from attack by clearing grass and shrubs and defoliating trees, (2) to destroy foliage in order to discover hidden military positions, stores, and transport routes, thus facilitating air and artillery strikes, and (3) to destroy crops thought to be useful to guerilla forces (Hoa). According to the Oklahoma Agent Orange Foundation, fifteen so-called “rainbow herbicides” were used in Vietnam, their names being determined by the four-inch colored bands that went around the 55-gallon drums that held the chemicals. Agents Pink, Purple, and Green were a few of the different chemical mixtures that were used, but the main three were Agents Blue, White, and Orange.

Operation Ranch Hand had many ways of distributing these chemicals. The main form of distribution was by Air Force C-123 cargo aircraft. These were specifically designed to hold 1000-gallon high-pressure pumps and were equipped with wing-mounted nozzles to spray the chemicals (Pham). These planes had to fly very slowly, only going 130 miles per hour and very low to the ground, at an altitude of around 150 feet, to make sure the target area, and nothing else, was sprayed (Gaspar 598). Other forms of dispensing the chemicals included spraying done by trucks, helicopters, and Navy boats along riverbanks. Even individuals with backpack sprayers spread the chemicals throughout the country (Williams 112). These were the same substances that farmers throughout the United States were using on their crops and weeds, except that in Vietnam, the herbicide concentration was between six and twenty-five times greater than that recommended by the manufacturers (Pham). In the period 1962-1965, herbicides were strictly monitored and only sprayed around military bases, artillery positions, and along roadsides (Launius 347). But as the war continued, restrictions on spraying became almost non-existent and monitoring these missions became less meticulous.

Until 1964, crop destruction operations were rare, and only South Vietnamese personnel conducted them. After the Gulf of Tonkin incidents in 1965, though, American forces started to destroy crops as well. On account of the increased popular sensitivity to issues of crop destruction, Hoa also said that Operation Ranch Hand aircraft had to display temporary South Vietnamese markings when they flew these missions, and United States pilots had to wear civilian clothing.

In late 1965, the United States also began spraying the Ho Chi Minh Trail complex of roads and footpaths in southern and eastern Laos, and in 1966-1967, Washington approved the spraying of herbicides in the Demilitarized Zone (Gaspar 599). This increase led to the peak years of Operation Ranch Hand from 1967-1969. In 1967 alone, almost two million acres were sprayed, 85% for defoliation and 15% for crop destruction. Gary Taubes, in his article “Agent Orange May Not Have Harmed Vietnam Veterans,” says that the Defense Department “temporarily” halted all spraying of Agent Orange in April 1970, a ban that it never lifted in spite of intense and repeated protests from the military serving in Vietnam (Taubes 163). Ranch Hand crews then sprayed all existing stocks of Agent White in a matter of days, flying their last defoliation mission of the war on May 9, 1970 ( Gaspar 282) . Gaspar says that crop destruction missions continued, but they too ended on January 7, 1971 (Gaspar 599). The South Vietnamese regime, however, continued to use these chemicals on its own land until 1975 (Hoa).

Almost nine years to the day after it began, Operation Ranch Hand was defunct. At a cost of approximately $100 million, over nineteen million gallons of herbicides were sprayed over six million acres in South Vietnam (Pham; Casci 112). Overall, 17.8% of South Vietnam’s natural acreage was sprayed with herbicides and defoliants, but Laos was also part of this operation, with almost half a million gallons dumped on it (Hoa). There had to be a reason that Agent Orange was banned in 1970, even though the military vehemently demanded to continue using it, but what was it? Why was Agent Orange so different from these other chemicals? Spraying over nineteen million gallons of chemicals on over six million acres has to have physical and environmental effects. What were the repercussions of this specific operation’s actions going to be in the future?

Agent Orange’s main ingredient was dioxin, a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) calls “one of the most perplexing and potentially dangerous” chemicals known to man (Sampley). Taubes also says that it is at the top of the EPA’s list of carcinogens (Taubes 164). The 1986 Sixth International Conference in Fukuoka, Japan, concluded the following:

Dioxin is the most dangerous chemical ever developed by man. Doses capable to kill human beings and animals vary from entity to entity but always within the limits of a few micrograms for each kilogram of body weight.

This conference affirmed the fact that dioxin is the most dangerous chemical ever developed by man. It was already established that dioxin was in Agent Orange, but now it was common knowledge that dioxin is lethal.

Agent Orange, a reddish-brown liquid mixed with either kerosene or diesel fuel, was used more than any other chemical in Vietnam (Casci 111). Though it was not the most lethal chemical used, its usage was so much higher than all other chemicals that it is the most memorable (Gaspar 292). Agent Orange comprised sixty percent of the herbicides used in Vietnam, and altogether almost twelve million gallons of it were sprayed throughout the south over an area as large as Connecticut (Taubes 164). Hoa said that dioxin is so lethal that some scientists estimate that the entire population of New York would die if a mere 80 grams of it were put into the city’s water supply. It is difficult to measure the amount of dioxin that was in Agent Orange, but in South Vietnam, a total of 170-kg of dioxin was sprayed throughout the war (Hoa). In tests done on laboratory animals, a mere two parts of dioxin per trillion (ppt) caused stillbirths and death (Pham).

Opposition to the use of Agent Orange developed quickly. Studies were conducted worldwide, spurring international debate about the wartime use of chemicals. In early 1963, Richard Dudman wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch , accusing “U.S. forces of spraying the land with poison” (Guilmartin 466). The Kennedy administration denied that “poison” was being used, maintaining food denial to be a “wholly normal” warfare tactic (Guilmartin 466). As early as 1964, the Federation of American Scientists expressed opposition to herbicides in Vietnam on the grounds that the United States was capitalizing on the war as an opportunity to experiment in biological and chemical warfare. John E. Wilson and Kim Younghaus of the Dictionary of the Vietnam War say the North Vietnamese began claiming in 1966 that herbicides were causing permanent ocular lesions, chromosome alterations, and hereditary deformities in infants, as well as lasting damage to crops, forests, and entire ecosystems. The Defense Department, however, denied those claims. (Wilson and Younghaus 7-8).

The United Nations also came into the picture in the late 1960s. Its secretary general, U Thant, sought to ban the use of herbicides used to defoliate the jungle, arguing that it violated the 1925 Geneva Protocol (Land and Evans-Pfeifer 553). In December 1969, the U.N. General Assembly resolved that any use of chemical warfare violated international law, but the United States rejected the resolution as being outside the sphere of the General Assembly (Williams 114). This pressure, though, brought about the Nixon administration’s public renunciation of defoliant use in Vietnam in 1969. Defoliation continued, however, into late 1971 by the United States in Cambodia (Wilson and Younghaus 7).

A 1969 study of the health effects of herbicides by Bionetics Research Laboratories indicated that dioxin in Agent Orange caused birth defects (Wilson and Younghaus 8). Also in 1969, after a five-year study, the National Cancer Institute told the Department of Defense that serious health problems might occur with exposure to herbicides (Gaspar 599). On account of these efforts, on April 15, 1970, the Departments of Health, Education, and Welfare, Interior, and Agriculture ordered the immediate banning of dioxin in the United States, except for carefully controlled use on non-cropland, such as ranges and pastures. The Harvard Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons (CBW) Armament and Arms Limitation state that in April 1972, added U.N. pressure and new studies led to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which prohibited the development, production, stockpiling and acquisition of biological weapons. This convention is commonly referred to as the first international treaty to ban an entire class of weapons.

The turmoil over Agent Orange and dioxin energized the United States media and Vietnam veterans. The Agent Orange controversy in the United States took off in the 1970s due to the airing of a special report for television entitled “Agent Orange: the Human Harvest” (Young). This program motivated several studies and findings, as numerous social, political, scientific, and legal forces came into play.

In 1978, the Veterans Administration, now known as the Department of Veterans Affairs, set up a special examination program known as the Agent Orange Registry Examination Program for Vietnam veterans who were worried about the long-term health effects of exposure to Agent Orange (Lancil). United States veterans who were on the ground in sprayed areas, and even those who were responsible for handling the spraying and the movement of the chemical, were worried about their health. The most disturbing element regarding Agent Orange is that there is no test to definitively show if the substance caused a veteran’s medical problems. However, tests can show the level of dioxin in human fat and blood, which is where dioxin is stored in the body. But how does dioxin enter the human body?

Hoa says that dioxin can contaminate the body in three ways: (1) most importantly through food, and to a lesser extent, drink, (2) via the respiratory tract, penetrating body tissues, and (3) by absorption through the skin, though this happens rarely. In pregnant women, dioxin can go directly to the fetus through the placenta, and it can also be transferred to an infant through breast milk (Hoa).

In the 1970s, Italian scientists conducted research on the possibility of dioxin contamination through food and found that foods that contain dioxin are mainly shrimp, fish, meat, and milk (Hoa). These are the foods that can hold the dioxin for longer periods of time. Foods such as grains, rice, and fruits, the study showed, do not contain dioxin (Hoa).

The Vietnam War: An Almanac states that in November 1979, the United States General Accounting Office reported that thousands of American troops deployed in South Vietnam were exposed to the Agent Orange herbicide, “despite previous Defense Department denials of such assertions” (Bowman 350). After this report, thousands of veterans began asking the Veteran’s Administration for treatment of their ailments and disorders.

Thousands of tests, studies, and court cases emerged over time, but the two main findings occurred in 1984 and from 1994-1996. Paul Reutershan worked with Agent Orange as a helicopter crew chief in Vietnam during the war. In 1978, eight years after his tour of duty ended, he was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer was so powerful that his doctors could no longer identify the organ tissue from which it originated. Reutershan was only 28 years old at the time of his death (Taubes 162). Before he died, he sued Monsanto, Dow Chemical (who produced dioxin and napalm as well), and Diamond Shamrock, all of which produced Agent Orange (Taubes 162). The case was later extended to include four other chemical companies and was joined by 15,000 veterans and their kin. These were men who had cancer, relatives of veterans who had been killed by cancer, men who had fathered children with birth defects, and others in similar circumstances.

In May 1984, the case was settled out of court. In all, $180 million was to be distributed only to eligible veterans by a “special master” appointed by the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, New York (Summer 67). Keith Parkins, in his article entitled “The Legacy of Agent Orange,” said Monsanto, the main producer, was forced to pay 45.5% of the total amount. This was definitely a landmark decision in the controversy because the main producers of Agent Orange were implicitly confessing that they were responsible for the ailments of these veterans and their kin. Although the dollar amount per veteran was only around $1000, the veterans had finally gotten companies to acknowledge that they contributed to causing their ailments and were liable to compensate them in some way.

From 1994 to 1996, the Institute of Medicine under the American Academy of Sciences officially stated that there was evidence linking ten diseases to Agent Orange exposure, among them Hodgkin’s disease, numerous respiratory cancers, prostate cancer, multiple myeloma, and spina bifida (Hoa). Hoa goes on to specify that eligible veterans would have to show a service record anywhere from February 28, 1961 to May 7, 1975. In 2000, Type II diabetes was added to the list, and on January 4, 2003, so was chronic lymphonic leukemia (BearLakeMichigan). The compensation and disability for which these veterans are eligible obviously varies, but it is important that the government acknowledges that the chemicals used as far back as forty years ago are still affecting people today. According to the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, around 10,000 American Vietnam veterans are currently receiving disability pay for illnesses related to Agent Orange and other herbicides used during the war.

Much has been written about the effects of Agent Orange on American Vietnam veterans, but little has been said about the Vietnamese who lived in the sprayed areas year after year (Luce 107). Mac Thi Hoa, at the Agent Orange Victims Fund in Hanoi, estimates that the number of Agent Orange victims in Vietnam could be anywhere from 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. In addition, Hoa says there are 70,000 to 100,000 children born deformed each year as a result of Agent Orange exposure. The same list of diseases the United States uses as a basis for veteran’s compensation is utilized by the Vietnamese for considering the effects on its population as well (Hoa). As was clear in the War Remnants Museum, birth defects are common in both the first and second generations.

At the Phu Sanh Gynecological Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, glass jars line the wall of one room. Don Luce, author of the article “Vietnam Remains Scarred by the War,” amplified on the grim realities according to what is stored there:

Each crock contains a stillborn baby, to which women from the Ben Tre province gave birth since 1980. Some babies have three arms; some have two bodies above the waist; one stillborn has a face on its abdomen; another’s umbilical cord protrudes like some Cyclops’ eye from the center of its forehead.

The same scene can also be seen in the Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, where hundreds of stillborn deformed babies are preserved in bottles (Parkins). Unfortunately, the effects in Vietnam are seen in many more people than these stillborn babies. Luce also mentions that the Viet Duc Hospital in Hanoi specializes in cancer, and doctors there see numerous cancer patients everyday (Luce 107).

There is limited information on this issue from the Vietnamese perspective due to the Vietnamese government’s control of distributed information. Frances Fitzgerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam , says that when the government was presented with reports of the lasting effects of nine years of American defoliation in South Vietnam, they would not defend their own people. They would simply ban the subject from the newspapers (Fitzgerald 321). By banning the issue from newspapers, the government made it difficult for Vietnamese suffering from exposure to have a forum to talk about their disabilities or to know that other people are experiencing the same effects. The post-1975 Vietnamese government, as is evident in the War Remnants Museum, wants to solely blame the “imperialists”—the French and the Americans—for these atrocities instead of focusing on the South Vietnamese role. In December 1981 the Vietnamese government invited a group of American war veterans to Vietnam to discuss such issues as Agent Orange. Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach then advised them that his country would welcome a study on the use of Agent Orange during the war (Bowman 352).

The costs of testing and much-needed surgeries are astronomical. The Vietnam Red Cross says that Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai established the Agent Orange Victims Fund in order to seek humanitarian assistance, both domestically and internationally, to raise money for such needed causes. This effort was aided by the start of the Vietnam Red Cross in 1998, but much more assistance is still needed. According to the Vietnam Red Cross, of the over one million people affected by Agent Orange living in Vietnam today, financial support and medical materials have only reached about 2,000 families. It is difficult and expensive to get dioxin testing done in Vietnam. Hoa says that the World Health Organization states that there are currently only about ten laboratories worldwide capable of analyzing dioxin.

I found Vietnam to be a country full of lush forests, dense jungles, and fields upon fields of farmland. George C. Herring, author of America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 , says that one of the mottos of the Operation Ranch Hand crews, however, was “Only You Can Prevent Forests,” playing off Smokey Bear’s popular saying of the time, “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” (Herring 183). Unfortunately, the effects of over nineteen million gallons of chemicals sprayed throughout South Vietnam did not just affect the health of Vietnamese and Americans. The environment and ecosystems of South Vietnam were completely devastated in the heavily sprayed areas. Mason Florence and Robert Storey referred to this as “ecocide” in their Vietnam edition of Lonely Planet , claiming that this was genocide of the environment (Florence and Storey 534). Heavily sprayed areas included inland forests and mangrove forests for the most part (Summer 67). Herring estimates that the use of defoliants and herbicides destroyed one-half of South Vietnam’s timberlands (Herring 183).

About 36% of the mangrove forest area and 10% of the inland forest area in South Vietnam were destroyed during the war and will not return to its natural state for perhaps a century without extensive reseeding (Launius 347). Tang Pham’s article, “Vietnam and Herbicides,” explains that the typical mangrove forest is home to roughly eighty different species of birds, as well. One major way that such extensive damage was done to the environment was through chemical drifts. Even though the planes flew at such low altitudes and slow speeds, effects of herbicides were visible 500 yards away from the spray site, but the vapors were strong enough to defoliate up to six miles from the actual spray site (Pham).

Luce points out that this spraying of chemicals by the United States also killed many permanent crops, such as rubber, fruit trees, coffee, and timber, in the exposed areas (Luce 107). After the war, Vietnam did not have the resources to start seedlings and replant the forests all at once. Therefore, the income from these crops had been lost to the Vietnamese (Luce 107). The deforestation caused by the spraying of these chemicals would have been enough to supply Vietnam’s timber harvesters for thirty years. The defoliated areas also included forested mountainsides. Luce says that when the monsoon rains strike, nothing remains to hold the water, so it eventually rushes down the mountainside and floods the farmland in the flat coastal areas below (Luce 107). The exposed land, which lacks organic matter, then laterizes (that is, it forms a six- to eight-inch layer of brick consistency at the surface). It will take almost a century or more for mosses and clumps of grass to break down the laterite so people can use the farmland again (Luce 107). This whole process is called desertification, where the land basically becomes a desert where nothing can be grown for decades. Nevertheless, the Defense Department actually claimed that defoliation benefited small Vietnamese farmers and the forest industry (Casci 112). The military services agreed with the Defense Department, saying that the spraying of chemicals might actually have helped the Vietnamese economy. The Defense Department’s claim was that it helped the Vietnamese by giving the lumber industry easier access routes to haul wood and small farmers by giving them new space to plant gardens near roads, which provided them with new markets (Wilson and Younghaus 8).

Half a million of the six million total acres that were sprayed in South Vietnam was cropland. Agent Blue, whose main ingredient was arsenic, was the main chemical used in crop destruction (Wilson and Younghaus 7). Spraying over farmland affected a wide range of crops, including rice and sweet potatoes (Gaspar 155). On account of the destruction of rice crops, the United States had to import billions of tons of grain into South Vietnam to keep prices stabilized and prevent the economic base from collapsing (Wilson and Younghaus 8). The United States was destroying the crops and then bringing in billions of tons of the same crops that had just been destroyed (Wilson and Younghaus 8). Before the war, Vietnam had been one of the largest rice exporters in the world, but suddenly it had to import an average of one million metric tons of rice annually (Long 600).

The environmental aspect of the use of chemicals in Vietnam caused a lot of concern to many Americans at the time, as environmental consciousness was steadily growing. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring , sensitized the public to the dangers chemicals posed to the environment, and Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” negatively referred to the use of the pesticide D.D.T. on farmlands (Williams 114). These were two of the vehicles that the American public used to become more aware of chemicals in the environment, and it definitely led them to see the troubles with Agent Orange in Vietnam’s soil. This increased consciousness led to a push to get rid of the remaining two million gallons of Agent Orange after the war. The 15th Field Artillery Regiment website reports that over 15,000 drums stockpiled at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, Mississippi and over 24,000 drums from Johnston Island were transferred to the Dutch-owned ship Vulcanus and destroyed in the summer of 1977.

Today, dioxin is still present in the food chain. It is found in the soil of Vietnam and in the fat of carp, which is a staple fish in the diets of some of Vietnamese Montagnards, or mountain tribes (Hoa). In the pictures in the War Remnants Museum, it is clearly visible that Agent Orange is still affecting children of parents who lived in heavily sprayed areas. In the United States, the controversy continues, with numerous ongoing studies and court cases. The January 24, 2003, addition of chronic lymphonic leukemia to the growing list of twelve diseases listed by the Department of Veterans Affairs that are linked to exposure of Agent Orange shows that this controversy is far from being resolved.

What is known is that many veterans have died since returning from service in Vietnam due to this exposure. But their names are not on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., even though these veterans also died from fighting in the war.

The decision to use chemical weapons in military settings has made wars last for decades after the bullets and bombs stop. Vietnam is still clearly suffering physically and environmentally from this today, even thirty-five years since the war ended and chemical weapon use ceased. In the United States we are not suffering environmentally from this decision, but Vietnam veterans definitely are suffering physically and emotionally. I will never forget the pictures I saw in that museum or the crippled people I passed by on the street. They are engrained in my memory, as I am sure they are with the families and relatives of veterans, civilians, and children who have been affected by the effects of using herbicides and defoliants for nine years during the Vietnam War.

The bullets have stopped, and Vietnam is finally being recognized for what it is—a beautiful country with an incredibly rich culture. But because the decision to use chemical weapons was made, both the United States and Vietnam are still at war in, regrettably, a war that won’t end.

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This quotation is found on a wall in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, surrounded by pictures of affected children.