Dancing with the kids at Ms. Hien’s day care center

April 27, Friday, Da Nang: Today was somewhat routine. First we met with Mr. Huynh Duc Tran, Chair of the Da Nang Union of Friendship Oranizations (DUFO) and Ms. Nguyen Thi Kim Tuyen, Chief of International Cooperation Division of DUFO. She is responsible for coordinating international activities on UXOs and AO. The factoids we gathered included an 11 to 13.5% growth rate in Da Nang for each of the last five years. They want sustained development while paying attention to the environment (in the US, we call that having our cake and eating it, too). The city is very young, with very little left from the bad old days–or good ones, either. Da Nang was largely destroyed during the last phases of the war. Foreign investments run to $3.7 billion US, with the US being one of the major players.  There are 200 NGO’s operating in the Da Nang area. There were more than 1.7 million tourists in 2011. And so forth.

He recited their “Don’ts and Do’s’: Don’t have kids not in school (up to 8th grade is free, above that either costs the family, or is by merit scholarships). No one living in poverty.  No murder. No theft. Do encourage education. Do provide culture. Do have jobs for everyone. Do proved shelter for everyone. (Note that health care is not on the agenda. They have not gotten that far, yet.) This was fairly typical of the types and detail of information we derived from our official meetings.

Then we went to visit another of Ms Hien’s day care centers, this one in the middle of Da Nang, and again got to dance with the kids — equally badly as the day before.

Restored military Jeeps, olive drab, rag-topped, and complete with non-working PRC-25 radios, antennae, and E-tools.

We had lunch at one of Suel Jone’s favorite hangouts, Hoa’s Place near Marble Mountain. Mr. Hoa is a character, having grown up during the war selling cokes to the GIs at the marines’ Marble Mountain Air Facility. He “hates the gummit” and is usually three sheets to the wind by lunch. We ran into a contingent of veterans of the 3d Marine Regiment, in country for a battlefield tour. Nice enough guys really, but they seemed mostly interested in reliving their own experiences during the war, and in hanging out together, and were not even curious about what we were doing there.  Weird.  Also weird was their chosen mode of transportation: two restored military Jeeps, olive drab, rag-topped, and complete with non-working PRC-25 radios, antennae, and E-tools. The only thing missing was a roof-mounted 50 caliber. Turns out you can easily rent these beasts in Da Nang with new Toyota engines, though God knows why you would want to. They were about to embark on the same loop through A Luoi and Khe Sanh that we had just completed — minus a quiet and air-conditioned van and the humanitarian reason for doing it.

Marble Mountain Buddhist monastery

Following this weird interlude, we visited the famous Marble Mountain Buddhist monastery. The mountain, one of four actually, is riddled with caves and many ancient and simply old statues and shrines. I read somewhere that some of the hidden caves were used as recovery centers for wounded VC during the war, but was unable to confirm this during our visit, and a quick internet search failed to turn up any confirmation.

Paul Cox

Da Nang Airport is an Agent Orange hotspot and after 40 years still nothing grows.

April 26, Da Nang: Another full but very interesting day. First, we were met by well-known chemist Dr. Nguyen Ngoc Tam at the Da Nang airport hotspot where we learned much new about the best-studied hotspot. Briefly, during the war, the Da Nang airport had more air traffic than any other airport in the world as we unleashed our vast technological power on untamed jungles, rice paddies, and rice farmers. Part of that frenetic fratricide was Operation Ranch Hand, the Air Force program to turn paradise into a parking lot spraying dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange over more than 1/8 of the land mass of South Vietnam, and significant fractions of southern Laos and eastern Cambodia. In the process of storing, transferring, and loading the herbicide, and washing down the planes, they (of course) spilled it everywhere.

There are five areas on the site that are severely contaminated; the loading area, the storage area (where after 40 years still nothing grows, and dioxin is 330 times action levels), Sen Lake that gathers the runoff from the other two sites, the ditches in and out of Sen Lake, and a last area where AO was re-drummed in 1971 prior to shipping it to Johnston Island in the South Pacific for incineration. There is a plan and funding for cleaning up the two first areas, but no plan, funding or agreement on the last three. The US will spend something like $42 million to dig up the contaminated soil in the loading and storage areas, pile it up, insert electrical heating elements and heat it to 300 C°, which will break down the dioxin into not-toxic constituents. The Vietnamese government will have to build an entire new power plant to provide the electricity for this operation, but afterwards they will have it to supply electricity for the city. We could not find out what type of power plant it is to be, where it is, or who pays for it, but an American company has been selected to run the cleanup. What we did find out, however, is that, there is no plan or agreement on the cleanup of Sen Lake or the redrumming area. We even found a gadget that appears to be some sort of unexploded ordnance. No touch!

Ms. Hein’s Center for handicapped children

Next, on to the newest facility of the Da Nang Association of Victims of Agent Orange (DAVA) at the south end of town, fairly close to where I was stationed in 1970 on a barren lump we called Hill 34. Couldn’t tell exactly, because nothing remains as it was, but we were close. There we visited a center run by the dynamic Ms. Hien that cares for handicapped children, most of whom are AO victims. Most come each day, picked up in a bus designed for 16 that they cram 35 kids into. They have many more on a waiting list, but no transportation to pick them up. A few live so far away that they stay at the center all week, and others are delivered by their parents. Hien has been trying to find another bus and the funds to maintain it and pay a driver, but… The center is quite lively and the children performed for us and made us perform for them (BADLY, I might add). They are happy, well fed, and socialized, and given some medical care, education, vocational training, and lots of love.

Tran Duc Nghia is 37 and has club feet

These are relatively high-functioning children. For contrast, we went to a family at the south end of the airport, in the middle of the city. There a 74-year-old widow of a former VC soldier who died in 2005 is caring for two disabled ‘children’, ages 33 and 37. She gets $30/month stipend from VAVA and the government to care for her kids, but is frail and has to spend that cash hiring a neighbor to help with them. The older one, a man, Tran Duc Nghia has club feet and is unresponsive. He spends his life on the bed.  The daughter, Tran Thi Ti Nghia, can just barely get around with a walker, and is also only marginally responsive. When asked what she will do when she gets too old to care for them, the mother started crying. She has no idea.

These Vietnamese patriots have paid a very high price indeed for fighting for their country.

Paul Cox

A Luoi Valley: A So is a know Agent Orange hotspot

April 25, Wednesday: A Luoi. This valley was a major battleground throughout much of the American War. Battles named Ashua Valley, Hill 888, and perhaps others I forget were fought there. The valley angles from northwest to southeast and was a natural route from the Ho Chi Minh Trail into South Vietnam aimed at Da Nang. It was sprayed heavily with defoliants throughout the war, and was bombed mercilessly. There were three Special Forces bases, A So (hence Ashua) was in the southern portion, and two others were located further north in the valley. The western side of the valley has high, forbidding mountains, either in or on the border with Laos.

The only detailed study of Agent Orange in the Vietnamese countryside was made about 6 years ago of the valley and surrounding mountains. After taking samples from many locations, the study concluded that most of the dioxin has been eliminated from the countryside, but that the three bases in the bottom of the valley are still quite contaminated from repeated spraying in the concertina wire to control weeds in the approaches to the base. A So existed for three years, and is the most contaminated; the other two existed for two and one years, and therefore have much less contamination.  Thus, A So has been declared one of the 28 known hotspots, and the 25 families that lived on the former base have been moved off, and fencing and thorn bushes planted to keep people away from the dioxin until a more permanent solution can be found.

All this is by way of introducing our activities for the day we spent in A Luoi. After the requisite meeting with local officials of the A Luoi People’s Committee, we visited three families, each with completely disabled young adults, whose parents had been exposed during the war. Two were from the A Oi minority group and one was Vietnamese. In all cases the father had fought along the HCM Trail in this area and had been sprayed repeatedly. The children are all in their mid-twenties.

One woman takes care of her 26-year-old daughter, and cannot leave the house. The father died of cancer 8 years ago, and there is no one to relieve her. She lives on a government stipend of 800,000 VN Dong ($40) each month, and out of the small garden she grows outside her two-room house built for her by a foreign NGO. The other two are relatively well off; one family lives on a military retirement while the wife works, and the other family has both parents still able to work, but they lock the girl up in the house during the day while they are both away. All three children could benefit from day care, physical therapy to keep their limbs supple, and perhaps train them to feed themselves, etc. And certainly the parents could use assistance with care of these invalided children, which will be even more important as the age. Many parents are already in their 70’s, and will not be able to care for their children for many more years.

So, this was a heavy day. Then we drove across the mountains to Da Nang. I don’t suppose you want to hear about the van breaking down (twice) in the middle of nowhere due to overheating on the steep mountain roads carrying a pile of fat Americans, or about the flat tire, right? I didn’t think so. It was all good, though. We got a chance to walk around in the jungle a little while the engine cooled. It is beautiful, but every bit as forbidding as I remember it back in the Day.

Tomorrow, Da Nang and the best known AO hotspot.

Paul Cox

April 24, Tuesday

Now it is covered in greenery of all colors, and the road has been moved a half mile south, so our view of the outcrop is from a new angle. It also seems bigger — clearly the result my weaker legs making it even more unscalable than it was when I was 20. But when I checked an old map file on my computer, I confirmed that rock pile was the Rockpile alright. In the photo the Rockpile is on the left and Razorback runs towards the right. And so it went all day, through Cam Lo, past the Razorback, under the shadow of Tiger’s Tooth, and right down the middle of LZ Stud — I didn’t recognize much — the only thing that was really clear was the left turn of Highway 9 towards the south near the Rockpile. After Stud we were in new territory for me, so I just took in the sights as 9 headed west to Khe Sanh and beyond into Laos.

As we passed Cam Lo Ville (now City), I related the story of how I inadvertently burned down an Army armored personnel carrier (APC) one night when I shot a white-phosphorus (WP) pop flair too low. WP burns at 5,000 F and is not to be messed with. A pop flair (see photo) launches a bit of WP into the air and slows its descent with a small nylon chute. The bright light from the burning WP is supposed to provide only about 45 seconds worth of illumination. However, I fired the flair on too low a trajectory, and the chute opened directly above an APC, dropped into the open hatch, and landed on the APC’s floor carpeted with not one but two layers of ammo cans. In the glow of the flair down the hatch, we could see everyone bailing out of the APC. Then the ammo started to cook off and the whole thing burned all night. Thus, we got illumination for a lot longer than the normal 45 seconds, but since it was at ground level, it was not very effective. The Army cap’n came around the next day asking who had sent up that flair, but no one ratted me out, and I certainly did not want the cost of an APC taken out of my check.

Khe Sanh was hot and boring. After lunch in Khe Sanh village, we picked up the Ho Chi Minh Highway, a pale shadow of one of the greatest military engineering feats of all time — the Ho Chi Minh Trail — and headed south to A Luoi (we called it the Ashau) Valley. The North Vietnamese Army moved untold tonnage of material and manpower down the trail system over a 16-year period, under constant rain of defoliants and hail of bombs delivered by the wealthiest and most industrialized country in the world and in history. Still, the new highway reflects a new and peaceful era, and is a decent two-lane ribbon.  When it is finished, which will be soon, it will be the only road other than the coast highway that runs the length of the country. While the Ho Chi Minh Trail was largely in Cambodia and southern Laos, the new highway carefully stays inside Vietnam’s borders, even when it is not a convenient route. The road stitches the highlands to the rest of the economic and political structure of Vietnam, and it is a hedge against loss of portions of the coastal highway when global warming floods the lowlands.

There we visited three families with children afflicted with Agent Orange. The photo shows one, Pham Quoc Huy, 22, whose mental retardation severe spina bifida, other deformities, chloracne, and frequent seizures render him unable to communicate, walk, care for himself in even basic ways, or even sit up. Both the father and the mother were exposed. The family has five children, two are “OK” but frail, one died from brain cancer, and two are clearly affected  by AO, Pham and his 29-year-old sister, Pham Thi Thuy. The other two families are in similar straits with young adult children with birth defects, mental retardation, and a host of other health problems — a situation that drives families into dire poverty. It was a rough day emotionally, but a powerful motivator. We must find ways to help these families. We cannot undo the done, but we should be able to provide the victims with much better care.

Paul Cox

We visited one of Project Renews demining sights outside Dong Ha. This particular area is contaminated with mortar rounds, artillery and bomb, grenades, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of cluster bombs — about 2/3 the size of a baseball and dropped by the millions over both populated and unpopulated areas. Many did not explode, but are deadly ogres and gremlins eager to eat a kid, or someone searching for scrap metal, or a water buffalo. They are a long-lasting feature of Operation Kill-Em-All-And-Let-God-Sort-Em-Out–a body-count obsessed, racism fueled, free-fire-zone enabled, the-only-good-commie-is-a-dead-commie war of paranoia and arrogance. When one of these little gifts gives, arms, feet, eyes, lives and livestock are forfeit. See photo for partial map of Vietnam showing all the (recorded) air and artillery strikes during the war, and lighter photo for partial map of injuries from UXOs since the war.

This Project Renew site was opened in February in response to a number of previous injuries and deaths on the site, and they have disarmed or blown in place more than 75 munitions in a cordoned 5 hectare area. They are moving at a pretty good clip now, and expect to be done with this site by December. This Renew team of 12 people is one of 5 teams. In ten years Project Renew has had no accidents, an enviable record in a dangerous profession. All team members are Vietnamese and long-term residents of Quang Tri, so have a big stake in the success of the program, since their families and neighbors are at risk. All either have had family injured by UXOs, or know people who were. They are professional and very serious. Nothing like a live grenade to focus the mind…

Next we visited the Mine Action Visitor Center that has the dual purpose of educating outsiders about the problems of UXOs, and the more important task as a field-trip destination for every school child in Quang Tri Province to educate them about the dangers of UXOs in the hood.

Lastly, we crossed the Ben Hai River and north to Vinh Moc the first village on the coast north of the Z. Bombing was so heavy in this town that the inhabitants moved underground living like naked mole rats during much of the war. It is a very beautiful location on the clay cliffs overlooking the ocean with bamboo and pine trees providing much shade. The tunnels were more spacious and accommodating than those in the Cu Chi tunnels near Ho Chi Minh City, but that ain’t saying much.

Paul Cox

April 22, Sunday

After a wonderful lunch at a restaurant run by a deaf-mute family during which I added the VFP logo to the graffiti-riddled white-tile walls, we took a relaxing boat trip up the Perfume River to Thien Mu Pagoda.  It was so relaxing that I fell asleep in my chair and missed most of the sights on the way. When we got to the pagoda, there was a group of about 15 NVA veterans lining up for a group photo in front of the tower. When they saw our Veterans for Peace shirts (in Vietnamese: Cuu Chien Binh vi Hoa Binh), great cheers and backslapping erupted.  They insisted that we stand with them for the photo-op, which some of us did.  I commented to Mike Blecker that they really had us surrounded this time. They took one photo, then split like the ghosts they used to be, and NONE of us got a single photo.  Some things will never change.

Thien Mu is an active pagoda and on Sunday the monks and novices were out in force cleaning the grounds, although we noted some young novices behind a wall near the back of the property surreptitiously playing soccer. Obviously the military does not have a monopoly on shitbirds and slackers.

Paul Cox

Dinh Trinh Anh Tu is 19.

April 21, Saturday: In the morning we met with the Thua Thien-Hue Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange. Their director is retired Doctor Nguyen Cuong, who I had met previously when I was in town in 2010.  He had been an NLF (Viet Cong) doctor during the war, so I am sure he has interesting stories to tell. But both times I met him he was all business: a survey in 1999 in Thua Thien-Hue Province identified about 15,000 AO victims, 5,000 in sparsely-populated A Luoi Valley alone. A follow up survey in 2008 with the 15,000 found that about 2,000 had already died. Further studies are planned to refine the numbers but have been postponed due to lack of funds and the complications of working with numerous agencies. Currently, the VAVA chapter provides free medical checkups for AO victims (as opposed to actual care), engages in poverty reduction via micro grants and micro loans, builds compassion houses for the most needy, provides free corrective surgery, and other such programs and coordinates government support for about 600 victims, or 4.6% of the total number who may need help.

Following this formal meeting we visited two AO families in Hue; the first was in an extremely fancy house, which was shocking since we have come to expect that all families affected by AO have been driven into poverty. We met with an older couple both of whom had been NVA, she as a porter/cultural worker on the HCM trail and in the south, and him as a fighter from 1970 to the end of the war. They had a daughter, now 36, who has club foot, diabetes, heart disease, and severe developmental problems. The daughter, Tran Tshin Dinh, was napping while we were there, but they did not want to wake her because she usually yells all day. The parents are exhausted and cannot leave their daughter alone even for an hour. They sacrificed more than they perhaps bargained for when they went to fight for their country. The parents are retired, and the fancy house belongs to a much younger daughter who has been successful in business and now lives in Saigon. They have three daughters, the oldest is AO-affected Tran, but the younger two are fine. It appears that wealth, or its lack, is not the only measure of suffering.

The second family, photo above, is the home of a doctor and his wife, who married and had a child while in medical school. When the boy was born with severe developmental problems, the mother had to drop out of medical school to care for the child. Her husband was able to finish medical school and practice medicine. The boy, Dinh Trinh Anh Tu, is now 19 years old, and cannot walk without help, talk, relate to others, and has several inoperable tumors. The mother has training in physical therapy, so she knows to massage his limbs every day to keep them from curling which would make him even more incapacitated. She is tired, feels that she has lost many opportunities in life, and that it is her karma to have a child like this. When asked what kinds of help she thought Agent Orange victims and families should receive, she said that they need help caring for their disabled children and adults. For some that would mean day-care centers where the children can go while the parents are working. For others it would mean home care for all or parts of days.

Paul Cox

Suel Jones

April 20, Friday: We flew from Hanoi late morning and arrived at Chu Lai (former US base converted into the Hue airport) under a blazing hot sun, drove to our hotel inside the walls of Hue, and moved into a splendid little motel just across the street from the walls of the Forbidden City.  We were met there by Don Blackburn, another member of the VFP Chapter 160 who lives in Nha Trang and teaches at the school that Michael Cull runs there. Don used to live in this same hotel when he lived in Hue, and Suel Jones and Chuck Palazzo were also well known by several of the staff, who were very happy to see old friends.

In the afternoon, we had a formal meeting with Ms. Chung Thi Mai the vice chair of the local Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO) for Thua Thien-Hue Province, and her staff person, Vo Dinh Anh Tuan, the deputy chief of office. They related that VUFO Hue Province has formal association with Thailand, US, UK, Laos, China, France, Russia, Japan and overseas Vietnamese; and that portions of the province, especially A Luoi valley is affected by Agent Orange.

We had the rest of the day off, until yet another feast for dinner in a fine restaurant down a tiny little alley within walking distance of the hotel.

Paul Cox

Before meeting with VUFO

April 18, Wednesday:  On our first full day, we first met with Mr. Nguyen Van Kein, Vice President of The Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), and Mr. Bui Van Nghi of the Vietnam-U.S. Friendship Society.  These types of meetings are very formal, set in nice rooms (air conditioned, thankfully), with comfortable chairs arranged with two at one end for the principles, and the rest facing each other across the room, bottled water set on tables between each pair of chairs.  Introductions are made and niceties delivered all-round, before business is undertaken.  In this case, VUFO is in charge of maintaining relations with all of the NGOs working in Vietnam, and the VFP chapter is working towards getting NGO status here so they can be more effective in their work with remediating unexploded ordnance (UXOs) and Agent Orange left over from our little adventure in the 60s and 70s.  The USFS is our official host on the tour, with Mr. Nghi having made most of the difficult arrangements.

Following a wonderful lunch at a wonderful restaurant in a wonderful old villa in a wonderful old part of wonderful Hanoi, we met with the snakes at the US Embassy.  It was enough to put you off your feed.  We met with a woman who is the Deputy Chief of Station (Numba Two Honcho), and a couple of aides–one related to science issues and the other the military attaché, and received (not passively, I am happy to report) the US official pronouncements about how corrupt and incompetent the Vietnamese are, and how they abuse human rights.   We did discuss the primary issues on our minds, AO and UXOs, and they made it clear that they would be happy to do more in those areas, but that Congress has to throw more money.  We suggested that for a start, even without additional funds, they could be more respectful of the Vietnamese.  The official dismissal of the scientific work on AO’s health effects presented by the Vietnamese is one example of our continuing arrogance and unwillingness to face our responsibilities for the damage we inflicted on this country.  It went on like that for about an hour.  We did refrain from breaking up the furniture–but only barely.   The young science guy seemed genuinely baffled when I suggested that human rights abuses in Vietnam were no worse than those in the US.  Clueless in Hanoi–could be a new hit movie.

Cell door at Hoa Lo prison

Following this crude little interlude, we had a second crude adventure visiting the Hoa Lo Prison museum, a venerable Hanoi institution with a long history dating from 1896 when the French opened it to deal with restive Vietnamese.  Most of the prison was destroyed several years ago to make room for Hanoi Towers–kind of a real Hanoi Hilton.  Actually, all of the prison was slated for destruction, but outcry from the public prevented its complete destruction.  What is left makes it clear that it was a really nasty place.  For example one of the guillotines they used is still on display along with some photos of heads in baskets.  Most of the museum is devoted to the ways the French dealt with uppity Vietnamese, and the resistance offered by people in their clutches.  There are two sections of sewer pipe on display that were used by prisoners in famous breakouts.  Only two rooms are devoted to US POWs, and our time was so short that I only got to see one of them.  They have Alvarez’s prison uniform and McCain’s flight suit on display (clean and hung on hangers), and photos of all the B-52 pilots shot down and captured during the 1972 Christmas bombing.

Tomorrow we visit Uncle Ho. Onward!

Paul Cox