Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent Orange by Vietnamese Writers

Foreword

฀ xi฀ foreword One evening in April 1973 when it was announced that the last American combat troops had left Vietnam, I remember sitting on the porch of the farmhouse that my wife and I rented near Penn State University, where I had been hired to teach after returning from the war. Sitting next to me was Bui Ngoc Huong, who, after four years and four surgeries to repair his destroyed mouth, was staying with us before undergoing his last reconstructive procedure in Philadelphia. It had been a warm day after a spring rain, and at dusk our empty little valley had begun to fill with fog. Then, from the hillside chapel across the creek and the gravel road, we heard the ringing of the church bell in its tiny belfry, the sound softened by the evening mist. “What’s that about?” Huong asked. I explained that a parishioner had gone to ring the bell because our soldiers were coming home. It was a custom. Peace, I said, might be coming to Vietnam. Like most people, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, I thought our long war would soon be over. Huong was sixteen, had grown a foot on American food, and wore his hair long in the cool style of the day. His father was a South Vietnamese soldier who had been killed in battle. His mother had run off with another soldier, putting Huong in a seaside orphanage near Da Nang. At the orphanage, playing with other kids on the beach, he had picked up a strange object and for some reason touched it to his tongue. It exploded. He had found a Dragon’s Tooth,a“scatterable”landmine,smallerthanachild’shand,sownby air, which took off the front his of mouth and lower jaw. In the U.S., xii฀ foreword he had been placed with American foster families as he recovered from surgeries that had left him with a working mouth and brownish lips fashioned from a skin graft. When I first saw Huong at the orphanage, he was holding a hand mirror to locate the small hard hole that was then his mouth and trying to feed himself by stuffing soft food into the opening. Now, four years later, my wife and I were his last foster family before his final surgery and his going home to his grandmother, his only living relative. Huong thought a minute, then asked, “Is it peace or only a bell ringing?” Wars, as we continue to forget, do not end when the last shot is fired. The hostile nations, winners and losers, are changed forever as soldiers come back altered, damaged, or not at all. Their families are changed. Slowly or quickly, these domestic changes reverberate through societies as the economic and personal costs continue to be paidlongaftertheshootingstops.InancientChina,generalsreturning home with their armies reentered the capital through a gate of mourning. This was true whether the campaign had been a success or a defeat because war is a pollution and ceremonies are required to protect the living from the inevitable spiritual consequences. DuringtheVietnamWar,Ivolunteeredasacivilianconscientious objector and worked as the field representative for the Committee of Responsibility, a volunteer group of doctors and lay people who soughttobringthemostseverelywoundedchildrentomedicalcare. The children that we brought to hospitals in Saigon or airlifted to major teaching hospitals in the U.S. were riddled by bullets, slashed byclusterbombflechettes,blindedanddeafenedbytossedgrenades, had spines severed, and had lost their limbs. One boy had his chin glued to his chest by napalm. One girl had her face burnt and her eyelids scorched off by a white phosphorus artillery shell. One gun- foreword฀ xiii฀ shot toddler survived the massacre of her family in a ditch because she was protected by their bodies. During the war I often traveled from Saigon to regional hospitals to speak to referring doctors, or to bring passport paperwork to the children’s families, or to accompany these children on airplanes and ambulances to hospital beds in Saigon before their long trip to the United States. Sometimes Vietnamese or American military doctors would ask me to bring back with me to Saigon other children scheduled for corrective surgery. Once I accompanied five children with cleft lips and palates. They weren’t considered war-injured, just unfortunatelydeformed.Nowweknowbetter.Cleftpalatism,along with spina bifida, other gross malformations, and Down Syndrome, can be caused by Agent Orange or, more accurately, by the teratogenic dioxin by-product in the...