HANOI, Vietnam — My husband, Josh Kvernen, and I visited Nguyen Thi Thanh, a 74-year-old woman living in the central part of Vietnam, as we laid the groundwork for a 2018 Mennonite Central Committee learning tour to the area. She was angry.
“The poison [dioxin] has brought sorrow on the
Vietnamese people, and my family in particular,” she shouted. “Why did you
bring this poison to us here?”
She was addressing her words to
us because we are from the United States, whose military used Agent Orange for
11 years during the war in Vietnam, which lasted from 1954 to 1975. This
herbicide and chemical defoliant contained dioxin, a potent toxin that has
since been shown to cause multigenerational birth defects and disabilities
among those exposed to it.
She had good reason to be angry.
Her husband had been bedridden for 10 years. He lay comatose on their bed,
requiring her full-time care. During the war he served as a doctor, and he
lived and worked in areas heavily sprayed by Agent Orange while he helped care
for Vietnamese soldiers.
Ten years after the war he began
to experience major health problems and had to stop working. His family
connects his illness to his exposure to dioxin through the United States’ Agent
Orange spray missions during the war. Their son also has intellectual and
physical disabilities that prevent him from working and that could have been
caused by dioxin exposure.
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