Indochina: A Generation of Refugees

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Hughes has succeeded in helping many of his young charges, but failed with others. One boy, after attempting suicide at the age of 13, was killed in an accident two years later. In his pocket his friends found a one-piaster note on which he had written "How many tears, how many drops of sweat?" Of the 200 kids to whom Hughes has given refuge in the past year, no fewer than 15 have committed suicide.

The war has had an equally brutalizing effect on the young girls of Viet Nam. For them, marriage is an increasingly unattainable goal; families and clans have been scattered, eligible young men have been killed or are away at war. In the chaos of war and relocation, tens of thousands of girls have gone to the cities to become prostitutes, often lured by newspaper ads promising money. English-language lessons and good times to those who become bar "hostesses." An astonishing number of Viet Nam's 300,000 whores tell the same story: they live in fear that their family will find out the truth about the "city job" that pays far more than their parents ever earned.

The effect of war on Viet Nam's preadolescents is just as devastating. The records of Saigon's Center for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery are full of case histories of childhood gone awry. A 13-year-old named True was running in the fields outside Nha Trang when he stumbled upon a fountain pen. Shouting to his friends, he placed the pen in his mouth and bit into it; it turned out to be a Chinese-made plastique bomb that destroyed half his face. Similarly, a 15-year-old named An was raiding a garbage heap at the U.S. airbase at Tuy Hoa when he set off a mine that blew off both his legs.

The center has operated on some 3,000 children burned by napalm, white phosphorus ("Willie Pete" to the G.I.s) or the highly flammable JP4 jet fuel that sometimes finds its way to the local black market as cooking fuel. Earlier this year, its doctors treated a 15-year-old girl whose hands had been cruelly burned by an incendiary bomb years before. "I'm convinced," says the hospital's Dr. John Champlin, "that out in the bushes there are many people who'll come in after the war. We haven't hit 20% of the injuries yet."

Beginning of Debate. There is also the question of how many may have suffered genetic damage from the herbicides used in defoliation. A cause-and-effect relationship has not been proved. But, says Champlin, "I do not know a doctor in this country who doesn't think there is a higher incidence of birth defects in this generation than the last and who doesn't attribute it to the use of herbicides."