Agent Orange: Seeing the forest for the leaves

Book Reviews: Seeing the forest for the leaves

"Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent Orange by Vietnamese Writers" by Charles Waugh and Huy Lien

"The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam and the Scientists Who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment" by David Zierler

16 April 2011 - At the same time that it was fighting a counter-insurgency campaign against guerrillas in Vietnam, the United States was waging another shadowy war. I'm not talking about the blockade just off the Florida coast during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 or the 1965 intervention by US troops in the Dominican Republic. Nor do I refer to the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) "secret war" in Laos or the "sideshow" conflict the US fought in Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s.

From 1961 to 1971, the United States waged a relentless campaign of "herbicidal warfare" which historian David Zierler tells us in his important new book, "The Invention of Ecocide" {Barnes and Nobles}, "targeted not specific weeds but entire ecosystems". In this overlapping campaign to the one that targeted Vietnamese people, the US military fought the environment itself. There, the US saturated the landscape with weed killer and there, Zierler writes, "the forest was the weed".

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Here were the disturbing stories that Americans need to hear in order to have a clearer sense of what "ecocide" meant and still means for Vietnam and its people. Here, in this slim paperback that's roughly the same length as Zierler's history, are stories that Vietnamese know not only from the homegrown literary journals and books where these short pieces were first published, but from the "Peace Villages" around the country where children with birth defects live and from their own hamlets where they may know men and women they've seen suffer and shrivel with their own eyes.

In the "Family of Fallen Leaves" {Barnes and Nobles} we find the stories of proud, strong women crippled and withered, not only by bullets and bombs whose visible scars brand one as a heroic veteran, but by invisible chemical residue that saps strength and sags bodies under the guise of personal weakness. Here are the women of Vietnam, giving birth to children who, however politically-incorrect it is to say, can accurately be called monstrosities or, perhaps even more painfully, having children who seemed to be in fine health before their slide into infirmity.

The prose is, without a doubt, strong stuff. "Terrified by my mother-in-law's mournful cry, I raised my head to look at my belly, and nearly fainted when I saw what I had given birth to," writes prize-winning author Suong Nguyet Minh in the voice of a woman whose husband had been exposed to herbicides while serving as a soldier. {continued}