Agent Orange and Other Atrocities

We visit a handicapped handicrafts centre just outside Saigon where victims of Agent Orange, the dioxin chemical that was sprayed across the countryside in Vietnam by the Americans during the war, work to create laquerwear paintings on to plates, bowls, jewellery boxes and screens to sell to the public. These are the children of the Vietnamese civilians who were exposed to the chemical and have subsequently suffered birth defects such as loss of limbs or poorly functioning limbs and deafness. The work they produce is incredibly skillful, using tiny fragments of eggshell and mother of pearl to inlay intricate designs into their paintings. The long term effects of Agent Orange are still being felt by the Vietnamese people. The U.S. administration compensates the Vietnamese people through aid packages but they have still have not been brought to justice over using the chemical and others like it over such vast areas of the country, not only causing such inhumane suffering as mutations of the body but also complete deforestation and destruction of wildlife in the area affected.

photo of an American soldier with a tank of Agent Purple, another chemical poison used.

These areas still lie to waste. Nothing grows there. There were many atrocities during the Vietnam war, some admitted to like the massacre of innocent women, children and elderly men committed by the soldiers under the command of now Senator Bob Kerrey, but although he has brought forth his involvement, there still has been no prosecution.

He claims that things done in the past should be forgotten. He believes the Vietnamese people want to forget as he does. This does not appear to be the case when we visit the War Museum in Saigon. The displays here are all anti American and call for prosecution of war crimes committed during the war. It's very obvious the Vietnamese, as a country, still feel very strongly about the atrocities that were committed by the US army and want to see some kind of justice. It's ultimately so difficult to prove such things however. What actually happened in the field can be told differently by so many factions. Previous to coming here, we'd always been under the impression that the US army went in to Vietnam to help defeat the Viet Cong who represented a communist threat to the country. However, from the information we've gleaned here, it seems they were here long before the actual war started and actually engineered the entire conflict for their own gains, trying out weapons and using some that had already been officially banned by the UN international council. The war was shown to the American public as successful combat against the ruthless communist guerillas, with propaganda illustrating their 'boys' proudly fighting for the cause. In fact those same soldiers were committing awful deeds, we saw a horrifying photo of an American soldier carrying the blown up remains of a Vietnamese soldier but there was only half a head and some entrails left. There were other photos of American soldiers setting alight villagers houses, torturing civilians for information and scenes of the aftermath of dead bodies from massacres conducted by the US army in their attempts to capture the Viet Cong.

a strange one- a photo of a poster showing American soldiers holding the heads of Vietnamese they've just decapitated.