Requiem in Orange

Tran Van Ngoc was walking to school the first time he saw the planes trailing clouds of white fog. The 16-year-old stopped to watch as the American aircraft circled his village and the mist settled to earth. "It smelled sweet, like ripe guava," he recalls. It was a routine repeated every morning for a year, and soon the village got used to it—just as they got used to a barren landscape, with tree leaves turning black and branches withering.

More than 30 years later, Ngoc thinks of those shriveled trees as he watches his two-year-old daughter crying on a straw mat, waving her crippled limbs. Unable to sit up by herself, Trang is one of dozens of malformed babies born in Bien Hoa, where birth defects occur three to four times more often than in other parts of the country, according to a leading Vietnamese researcher. The prime suspect is Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant sprayed for nine years by U.S. warplanes over southern Vietnam. Nicknamed for the orange stripes on its storage barrels, Agent Orange contains dioxin, now linked to cancer and a host of other ailments, including birth defects. "The doctors told me my daughter's condition is because of this chemical," Ngoc says. "I feel so sad when I look at her. What future can she have?"

There's no doubt in Ngoc's mind that his daughter's deformity was caused by Agent Orange. Scientists are less certain. A groundbreaking conference this week could help change that and may open the door for billions of dollars in aid for Vietnamese victims. Dozens of researchers and medical experts gathering in Hanoi will work together to study Agent Orange's aftermath, seeking hard evidence of a connection between the chemical and illness among Vietnamese citizens.

The official collaboration between the U.S. and Vietnam is a first. Until now, the debate has been defined more by politics than by science. Vietnam estimates Agent Orange is to blame for more than 150,000 cases of birth defects and about 1 million cases of other maladies. Washington flatly denies there's any conclusive link between the herbicide and illness; officials have accused Hanoi of inflating the statistics.

One disturbing new number to be unveiled in Hanoi: Bien Hoa residents have up to 200 times the normal rate of dioxin in their blood, even among those born years after the spraying stopped. Dr. Arnold Schechter of the University of Texas estimates that southern Vietnam has up to 30 dioxin "hot spots" like Bien Hoa, the site of a major U.S. air base where some 7,000 gallons of Agent Orange may have been spread and spilled. Vietnamese officials say Schechter's study adds to the proof that the U.S. caused a massive environmental disaster and owes compensation to victims. "I think the figure should be very, very big," says Nguyen Trong Nhan, president of the Vietnam Red Cross. "We have more than a million victims, so there should be many billions of dollars."

So far, the U.S. has offered nothing. Yet the U.S. Veterans Administration gives more than $1,000 per month to former American soldiers exposed to dioxin. "It's so arrogant," complains Chuck Searcy, a humanitarian aid worker who served in Saigon in 1967 and 1968 as a U.S. Army intelligence specialist. "Why not use the same standard to offer assistance to the Vietnamese?" U.S. veterans sued for compensation; Nhan, the Red Cross president, says a group of Vietnamese are preparing to take legal steps of their own by filing a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government.

The scientific community, however, remains divided over how much damage Agent Orange has done—and Hanoi may be to blame for the absence of persuasive evidence. Crippled infants make compelling anecdotes, but the communist regime in the past has blocked scientific studies by outside researchers. The government routinely says birth-defect rates are high in sprayed areas, yet it refuses to release verifiable statistics. "You can't just say, 'There's a bunch of malformed babies, it must be Agent Orange,'" Schechter says. "There's a lot of hard scientific work to be done."

That work may gain momentum with this week's conference. Clearer data could come within a year or two with both countries cooperating. If scientists confirm the wartime defoliation program made millions sick, the U.S. might finally be shamed into giving compensation. "America caused this problem, so it should take moral responsibility," Ngoc says, cradling his daughter. Unfortunately morality—like science—often mixes poorly with politics.