BOOK REVIEW 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
Reviewed by Nick Turse
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, "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".
Comprehensive,
well-sourced and skillfully arranged, The Invention of Ecocide takes on
a subject at which too many books of the war offer only a glance. Under the
auspices of Operation Ranch Hand, the US military sprayed up to 20 million
gallons (75.7 million liters) of chemical herbicides - most notably Agent
Orange - defoliating around five million acres (two million hectares) of
forest, and destroying large quantities of essential crops like rice and fruit
trees.
Yet many histories of the war offer only a couple of paragraphs or, if you're
lucky, a few pages to what many by the end of the war recognized as a new form
of devastating chemical warfare and considered a crime under international law.
In The Invention of Ecocide, Zierler concentrates on the scientists who
came to this realization in the 1960s and then fought their own battles, in the
halls of congress, at international conferences, and through scientific
associations, to name and define this new atrocity, which they called "ecocide"
(an environmental analog to genocide), and see to it that it was ushered into
the dustbin of history.
A fast read at just under 170 pages, The Invention of Ecocide explains,
as Zierler writes:
The massively destructive effects of herbicidal
warfare became known as "ecocide," so called by several academic scientists who
protested herbicidal warfare beginning in 1964 and who ultimately won the right
to inspect its effects in Vietnam six years later. What they found was not
simply the elimination of "weeds" but the destruction of whole environments
upon which humans depended - and the looming prospect that the chemicals
themselves might harm humans and animals.
The very notion of
the most powerful military on the planet turning to destructive chemical agents
to destroy another country's environment, and in the process poison its fauna
and people, is both hideous and terrifying. It's the stuff of nightmares. It's
a shame that The Invention of Ecocide fails to fully capture the horror
of this uniquely repugnant brand of warfare and drive home just how devastating
it was for the people of Vietnam - a nation of farmers, many of whom braved the
onslaught of bombs, artillery shells and helicopter gunships only to have their
crops shrivel and die under herbicidal assault and have their lives altered in
profound ways by chemicals produced half a world away.
A historian with the US Department of State, Zierler writes in an even-handed,
cautious and academic manner and keeps an extremely tight focus, too much of it
to my mind, on a group of scientists who fought against the use of chemical
defoliants in Vietnam and reports I would say not enough on just what those
herbicides did, who they harmed and what the countryside looked like in the
wake of American ecocide.
When I've spoken to survivors of the war in rural villages around Vietnam,
they've never been at a loss for words about how devastating it was to have
their formerly lush lands transformed into what they call barren "white zones".
In his bibliography, Zierler lists two interviews with Vietnamese - one
conducted in Saigon, the other in Hanoi, and you get the sense that he never
traveled outside the cities to speak with ordinary villagers who endured
herbicidal warfare at ground level.
One wishes his editor had stepped in and recommended he scrap the bibliography
- there are, after all, endnotes - and add some material on the human fallout
of America's ecocide in Vietnam. Sometimes an author needs to step up, abandon
the bloodless conventions of academe and speak out in a loud, clear and
unambiguous voice.
Thankfully, Zierler's publisher has recently offered a text that ought to be
packaged as a companion volume. Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent Orange
by Vietnamese Writers is a collection of mostly fiction that very
speaks loud truths.
"Disgust" and "revulsion" are not the words normally thrown around in a
positive review, but those words catch exactly the thoughts that raced through
my head and the feelings that pulsed through my body while reading the book's
13 selections. Here were the voices, the humanity, the pain, that I found
missing from The Invention of Ecocide.
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 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.
"[I]nstead of a baby, just a piece of bloody red meat. It had a dark mouth that
looked like a fish running aground and yawning before dying." Or there's
novelist Hoang Minh Tuong's tale about another veteran whose wife gives birth
to a son named Mung and a daughter, Duyen. "When Mung turned eight, his hair
fell out and his legs began to weaken. By the time he was 10, he could no
longer walk," Hoang writes in a short story titled, "Grace". "Then it was
Duyen's turn. She also lost her hair, and tumors began to form all over her
body. Her eyes bulged out, and her memory deteriorated."
There's no denying that in recent decades, Agent Orange has sometimes been used
a catch-all; that it's been seen as the only wedge issue with enough legal
standing, popular resonance and recognizable fall-out to compel the US
government and the American people to offer something in the way of reparations
for a war whose horrors, however inconceivable to most Americans, went far
beyond ecocide.
Have some ailments and birth defects that may have nothing to do with American
herbicides been chalked up to their use out of desperation? Surely. But can you
fault a nation that suffered millions of dead and wounded people; a nation
whose people were bombed and shelled and poisoned and traumatized and made
refugees and brutalized in innumerable ways, from clinging to the one issue
that some Americans, if for no other reason than that US veterans and their
offspring have found themselves similarly afflicted, will give some credence?
And would anyone, aside from the lawyers for Dow and Monsanto - the chemical
companies responsible not only for the defoliants but for manufacturing them in
such a way as to increase the amount of exceptionally toxic dioxin produced -
deny the horrific effects of American herbicides on Vietnam?
In the preface of Family of Fallen Leaves, editors Charles Waugh and Huy
Lien (the pen name of Nguyen Lien) say they have arranged the "works from those
that cannot yet see hope for solving this challenge [of fully addressing and
redressing of the issue of Agent Orange and other toxic defoliants] to those
that do".
In reality, Family of Fallen Leaves is one sad story after another, and
if the later chapters of the volume are truly hopeful, the preceding stories
have so hobbled the reader's sense of optimism that it's hard to find much to
be hopeful about. But sad isn't even the half of it, when it comes to these
lovingly crafted, expertly translated, exquisite stories of pain, loss and
heartache.
When you read Family of Fallen Leaves, you feel it in the pit of your
stomach - no small achievement for any type of literature, much less fiction
translated from a language where so much is implied, contextual and makes use
of ritual phrases and intricate word play.
It's actually The Invention of Ecocide, not Huy and Waugh's book, that
ends with a message of triumph and hope. In his final paragraph, Zierler
writes, "This present study has demonstrated how a group of non-government
actors were able to advance a vision of international security based on
interdependence and environmental threats common to all people."
Agent Orange, Zierler reminds us, has not been employed since the Vietnam War.
That's certainly a good thing. But what about those real life Vietnamese whose
anguish echoes that of the characters in Family of Fallen Leaves? Where
does that leave them? Are they destined to suffer forever in a curiosity shop
of victims of extinct forms of combat?
While the anti-ecocide scientists of Zierler's study did achieve something
significant - future environmental warfare plans that the US had drawn up were
shelved - their limited aims had limited effects. "[T]he scientists were ...
ambivalent toward the anti-war and environmental movements beyond their
particular purview," he explains. Thus, while they capitalized on the strength
of both larger movements, they "stood aloof from both". As a result, while they
succeeded in banishing one particularly terrible brand of American warfare,
others have continued to flourish.
Today, an analogous movement to the one Zierler chronicles might take on a
particular type of modern American war-fighting, drone attacks. One could
imagine scientists, technologists, legal scholars, ethicists and others
mounting a comprehensive campaign against America's judge-jury-executioner
brand of unmanned aerial warfare.
You couldn't do justice to that story, however, without offering a clear
picture of what it's like for a villager in North Waziristan to live with the
specter of a small, pilotless, heavily-armed aircraft endlessly circling or to
hear a lawn-mower type engine in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or
whatever it was like for Saddullah, a 15-year-old who was drinking tea with his
family near the town of Mir Ali last year when a missile from a drone struck
his home, killing three members of his family and costing the boy an eye and
both legs.
We now have a concise, clear and detailed history of the small group of
scientists that did away with American herbicidal warfare. We also have a
powerful collection of fiction that helps to offer a sense of the very real
pain wrought by ecocide. What we still need is a complete history of what it
was like to live through American defoliation campaigns.
We're still waiting for a book that paints a clear picture of all the
deleterious effects of herbicidal warfare; one that spells out not only how
fast crops shriveled and died, but what that meant for the fabric of rural
village which was built around agrarian cycles; a book that explains what the
chemical rain smelled and tasted like, how people felt just after they were
exposed and what it was like to have yet one more hardship to deal with - as if
artillery and bombs and helicopter gunships were not enough. There aren't a
whole lot of years left to gather these stories before they're lost to history.
Let's hope someone is on the case.
Family of Fallen Leaves: Stories of Agent Orange by Vietnamese Writers by
Charles Waugh and Huy Lien. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. ISBN-10:
0820336009. Price US$59.95, 164 pages.
The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam and the Scientists Who Changed
the Way We Think About the Environment by David Zierler. Athens:
University of Georgia, 2011. ISBN-10: 0820338265. Price US$70, 252 pages.
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Comprehensive,
well-sourced and skillfully arranged, The Invention of Ecocide takes on
a subject at which too many books of the war offer only a glance. Under the
auspices of Operation Ranch Hand, the US military sprayed up to 20 million
gallons (75.7 million liters) of chemical herbicides - most notably Agent
Orange - defoliating around five million acres (two million hectares) of
forest, and destroying large quantities of essential crops like rice and fruit
trees.
In
the Family of Fallen Leaves 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.
