This past September I joined the organization Veterans for Peace for a 16-day tour of Vietnam. For some, like myself, it was their first trip to Vietnam, for others it was their first time back since they fought in the war, and finally a few who have been back many times since the war. The trip primarily consisted of military veterans from a number of different eras, as well as three civilians. The trip was led by a number of veterans who have taken up residence in Vietnam, as well as two local Vietnamese guides. We started up North in Hanoi and finished in the South in Ho Chi Minh City. Along the way we primarily visited agencies dealing with the effects of Agent Orange, Unexploded Ordinance, and Vietnamese veteran organizations.

Agent Orange

From 1961-1975 the US military sprayed over 20 million gallons of toxic chemicals across Vietnam in order to clear foliage around bases and along military routes so that they could have longer lines of sight to better maintain security. The effects of that spraying have had long-lasting effects on both the Vietnamese and US veterans and their children. While the US Veterans Administration has slowly begun to recognize these effects on veterans and their families since the 90’s, there is still very little acknowledgement of the negative health effects on the Vietnamese. However, the US has recently completed a cleanup of one of the biggest containment sites near the Da Nang airbase, and has committed $180 million to clean up the Bien Hoa airbase, but have no intentions at this point to clean up any other contamination sites. More than a million Vietnamese people have died because of Agent Orange since the end of the war, and there are currently more than three million Vietnamese people who require daily support as a result of the effects of Agent Orange. On this trip we visited a number of orphanages and hospitals that take care of children born with complications due to agent orange, and we met with a number of doctors and organizations that treat and advocate for the victims of Agent Orange. Along the way, one of the members of our delegation, Paul Cox, was honored for his work on Agent Orange. You can fill out a digital postcard that will be sent to your congress person to urge them to support H.R. 326 the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2019, by clicking here.

Unexploded Ordinance

During the war the US dropped over 8 million tons of munitions across Vietnam (an additional 2.5 million tons into Laos). It is estimated that 10% of those munitions failed to detonate upon impact, leaving many bombs spread throughout the country. Many of these were cluster bombs, composed of a large shell when dropped but spreads into small anti-personnel mini-bombs about the size of a baseball. Unexploded cluster bombs are very tempting for children to pick up because they look like toys, and then they are often badly harmed or killed. One of the areas that is most heavily bombed was the Quang Tri Province, near the DMZ line, which separated South and North Vietnam. Since the end of the war there have been more than 100,000 injuries and fatalities. One of the organizations we visited that is addressing this issue on multiple fronts is Project RENEW. We first visited a field site where an all-female clearance team swept a field for unexploded ordinance. We also visited a number of different facilities led by Project RENEW that train and employ victims affected by ordinance, as well as a prosthetics clinic to help the victims.

The All-female bomb clearance team from Project RENEW.

A surprising tidbit that I had learned of came from their education program, which has been wildly successful. One of my favorite shoe companies, TOMS (who advertises buy a pair, give a pair, whereas for every pair you buy they give a pair of shoes to a child in need) donates to Project RENEW, who then use the shoes to train kids what to do when they come across suspected unexploded ordinance. Between bomb clearance and education in the Quang Tri Provence, casualties have dropped from around 70 a year to 0. There are still a lot of bombs, but at least people are becoming educated as to what to do when they come across them. It should also be noted that this only covers the Quang Tri Provence, which was the most heavily affected, so most of the resources have been focused here. One of the missions of Project RENEW is to make all the work community led, so that people are being trained and can then train and help others, to make the work able to transfer to other parts of the country.

Vietnamese Veterans Organizations

The meetings we had with Vietnamese Veterans Organizations were mostly formal and ceremonial. While they all fall under one large organization known as the Vietnam Veterans Association, each city has its own chapter which does outreach work for its members. They service over 3 million veterans, covering those who fought the US, China, and Cambodia. The services they provide include: missing in action recovery, Agent Orange relief, business training, and providing medical supplies like wheel chairs. After the initial ceremonial greetings finished, we would open up to discussion. A couple of the times in the open discussion a member of the delegation would apologize for their participation in the war, which often times was dismissed as the Vietnamese understood that it was not their fault, that they were serving their country and that it was the policy makers who were to blame. In almost all of our meetings there was jovial moments as they would be thankful that we were bad shots, or one of our veterans would joke about wondering who the guy was who shot him on Hill 55. It often ended with many hugs, handshakes, and pictures. Many of these veterans are governmental officials now, so in many ways this was a form of public diplomacy, which was discussed within the meetings, as they hoped we could bring more industry and tourism to Vietnam, but also so that we could raise awareness around the lasting effects of the war to try and get reparations.

UD Alum and funder of the Vietnam Legacies Project, John C. Meager (UD, ’63), speaks to the Hanoi Vietnamese Veterans Association

Closing Thoughts

This is just a brief overview of the trip and some of the information that I will be analyzing for my portion of the Vietnam Legacies Project. On the trip I interviewed the veterans who were most involved in organizing these tours and who have had the most involvement here in Vietnam; I took extensive field notes while conducting a participatory ethnography, and; I sent out surveys to the participants of the trip. While I will be analyzing this data over the next few months, I hope that this will help the Vietnam Legacies Project to not only better understand the long-lasting effects of the Vietnam War, but also how we can start to implement some of the healing processes that we can see in these organizations to countries like Iraq and Afghanistan (my generation’s war, and the Iraq War which I was a part of from ’04-’05). Many of these organizations were founded by US veterans who participated in the Vietnam War, and are now practicing public diplomacy, which is an act of healing their own moral injury from participating in a war they did not believe in, as well as healing the traumas of war that are still affecting the Vietnamese people. Furthermore, I hope to be able to help US veterans who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan be able to go back to those countries to help heal themselves as well as the countries that we have damaged with our wars. As Paul Cox stated when asked why he keeps on returning to Vietnam stated, “I’m trying to repay the interest on debt that I can never repay.”

Dr. Benjamin Schrader

University of Dayton, Vietnam Legacies Project, consultant