http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/unfinished_business_suffering.html
Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM
By Plain Dealer staff
Illustration Omitted:
Lisa DeJong, PD. Heather Bowser's father Bill Morris was exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Heather was born with several birth defects.
Vietnam and the United States have a common enemy.
Its name is Agent Orange.
From 1962 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed millions of gallons of the herbicide, which contained the toxic chemical dioxin, to defoliate the jungles and forests that gave cover to Ho Chi Minh's northern forces in what was then South Vietnam.
At least 4.5 million Vietnamese, and the 2.5 million Americans who served there, may have been exposed to Agent Orange. These numbers do not reflect the possible impact on future generations.
The U.S. Veterans Administration now recognizes 15 illnesses linked to war-time exposure. The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that roughly 3 million adults and children continue to suffer illnesses and birth deformities because of these contaminated sites.
This is a fixable problem.
To the majority of Americans, it is also an invisible one.
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http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/the_vietnam_war_ended_but_a_si.html
The Vietnam War ended but a silent threat from Agent Orange remained: Unfinished Business
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM
By Connie Schultz
Illustration Omitted:
Nick Ut, The Vietnam Reporting Project. Fear of deformities from exposure to Agent Orange drives expectant mothers to storefront clinics like this one in downtown Hanoi, where many undergo multiple ultrasounds without doctors' referrals.
This is first of six parts of the special report Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange.
In late fall 2010, I was beginning a four-hour wait at Tokyo's Narita International Airport for my flight to Hanoi when a Vietnamese woman sat down several rows away and offered a shy smile.
A few minutes later, she gathered up her carry-on bags and moved to the empty seat across from me.
She asked me a series of questions in English.
"You are from America?"
I nodded, and introduced myself. Returning the favor, she told me her name was Mui Nguyen.
"You are going to Vietnam?"
I nodded again.
"Why are you going there?"
I told her I was a journalist and that I was reporting on how women and children continue to be affected by Agent Orange.
"Ah," she said, nodding again. "Agent Orange. Yes. I understand."
We continued to talk, and her story unfolded. A mother of two children, she had grown up in Vietnam but was living in Canada. We discovered we were born in the same year, but the similarity in our childhoods ended there.
With little prodding, she recounted her first memory of the Vietnam War.
"When I was 8, I looked out the window of my bedroom in Hanoi and saw bombs falling from the sky," she said. "After that first attack, we had to leave our home. We ran to the countryside. Every time the bombs fell, we ran into underground tunnels."
She asked what I knew about Agent Orange. I recited the facts and figures and some of the stories of suffering that, by then, were keeping me up at night. Months of research had taught me what quantifiably happens when nearly 11.4 million gallons of herbicide containing the toxic chemical dioxin is dropped on a tiny, rural country -- and never cleaned up.
Now I was on my way to meet the women and children behind those statistics.
Mui smiled, and sat a little higher in her seat.
"We love Americans," she told me. "We hold no grudges. We understand you didn't mean to hurt us like you did."
By the time America's war in Vietnam ended in 1975, more than 2.5 million Americans -- including about 10,000 women -- had served there; 58,148 died. Ohio ranked fifth among states in the number of losses.
Twenty-six of those soldiers came from my home county of Ashtabula. Until I went to college, I thought everyone knew someone who fought in Vietnam. That was the first time I realized some communities were hit harder than others. I have spent years trying not to think about that too much, because it sticks in that part of memory that has nothing to offer but pain.
What we resist persists, goes the adage. Last spring, Editor James Marcus of the Columbia Journalism Review sent an e-mail asking if I'd write an essay for the magazine's "Second Read," in which writers reflect on a formative work of journalism or nonfiction.
Only one book affected my life so deeply that I'd want to spend 3,400 words explaining why. Michael Herr's "Dispatches" was a groundbreaking account of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the boys fighting it. I read it in 1978, when I was a sophomore at Kent State University.
I couldn't write about the war without remembering my working-class hometown of Asthabula:
By the late 1960s, it seemed you couldn't drive three blocks in any direction without passing the house of a boy who had gone to Vietnam. Neighbors would take over potluck and beer the night before they boarded the first flights of their lives. They left full of brag and bravado, but so many of them came home spent, and eerily old.
As the war progressed, our small town shifted incrementally, like a ship that slowly starts to tilt with an uneven load. First, we knew one boy who left. Then we knew another. Soon, Mom was writing notes to other mothers every week, it seemed, filling them with words of encouragement, or sympathy, in her careful backhand. I was in the middle phase of young life -- too young to know everything, too old to know nothing at all. I would be sitting in school with 20 other fifth-graders, and suddenly a classmate would be called into the hall. The assumption was always that another family had gotten bad news from the war. One time it was our family, but the news was good after a really bad scare.
My cousin Norman was there and, for some reason, Mom knew there was a chance that he had been shot. I still remember the call that came two days later. I was sitting on the sofa when the phone rang and my mother rushed to answer. She listened for a few moments, and started to cry. "He's alive!" she yelled, "He's alive." She later said his air mattress had been shot out from under him. I pictured him lying on one of those colorful inflated rafts swimmers used on Lake Erie, and thought Vietnam must be one crazy place.
Nearly 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam. Ohio lost 3,094 of them. The rest of our boys came home, but the ship never righted. Guys I'd known my entire life weren't fun, or funny, anymore. No more teasing, no big-brother reprimands to get out of the street and quit picking on the little ones. Sometimes I'd look at my friends' older brothers sitting at the end of long front porches and their stares would scare me. I'd look in their eyes and get goose bumps. It was as if they thought I was trying to start a fight just by smiling at them. I'd scamper off, full of questions my father warned me never to ask.
Thirty-five years later, the country of Vietnam remained a gnawing mystery for me, as it does for so many Americans of my generation. But the swirl of my interest began and ended with the stories of the American lives that were changed and sacrificed. I spent little time thinking about how the war had affected those who continue to live in Vietnam. Instead, I broke down the issue in a way that avoids all complexity, or reflection: The Vietnamese were the victors, and we were the victims of an ill-conceived "conflict" that was never resolved.
I knew a few America-centric details about postwar Vietnam: After the collapse of Saigon in 1975, the U.S. enforced a trade embargo that was not lifted until February 1994. Three years later, President Bill Clinton appointed former POW and U.S. Rep. Douglas "Pete" Peterson as the first U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Since 1973, Vietnam has identified the remains of 627 of 1,353 missing Americans. Today, 726 American servicemen have yet to be found.
That was about all I knew about postwar Vietnam.
What I should have known about our unfinished business there is the rest of this story.
Illustration Omitted:
Associated Press File. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military sprayed 11.4 million gallons of an herbicide called Agent Orange, which contained the toxic chemical dioxin. Today, 28 dioxin "hot spots" continue to damage Vietnam's food supplies and imperil the health of its citizens.
The U.S. military mission was to obliterate the canopied jungles and forests of South Vietnam that provided impenetrable coverage for Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese Army.
Between 1962 and 1971, at airports and American operations centers throughout South Vietnam, the U.S. military stored, mixed, handled and loaded onto airplanes more than 20 million gallons of herbicide.
The spraying campaign ravaged 5 million acres of jungle and forest, and destroyed crops on another 500,000. Various chemical companies, including Dow, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, Occidental and Hercules, supplied the herbicides. Early on, U.S. planes dropped pamphlets written in Vietnamese, assuring farmers that the chemicals were harmless to humans and animals.
Some of the herbicides, named for the color of the stripe on their barrels, were contaminated with dioxin. Agent Purple, Agent Pink, Agent Green. The most toxic of these brews was Agent Orange.
Today, more than 2 million acres in Vietnam remain barren. Numerous studies have shown that "hot spots" on the perimeter of former U.S. bases in the south still leach dioxin into the soil, contaminating water, vegetation, wildlife -- and people. Field researchers have found dioxin in nursing mothers' milk and bloodstream, at far greater than established safe levels.
Agent Orange and the long-term effects
Agent Orange and other dioxin-contaminated herbicides were stored, loaded onto airplanes or frequently sprayed at the site marked on the map. The dioxin contaminate is still present in the soil at high enough levels to be harmful to people living at these sites today.
Illustration Omitted:
View Potential Dioxin Hotspots in Vietnam in a larger map
Site contamination level
Red: Priority hotspots in need of clean up and remediation.
Yellow: Sites with signifcant risk or where dioxin contamination has been found.
Green: Sites that have a lower risk level from dioxin contamination.
Blue: Sites where risk of residual dioxin is suspected.
Purple: Sites where more information is needed to determine risk level
The U.S. Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, now links dioxin to various cancers, diabetes and nerve and heart disease among people exposed directly or indirectly, and to spina bifida in their children.
The body of research documenting Agent Orange's devastating impact on Vietnam's second- and third-generation postwar children has been growing steadily. In one oft-cited 2000 study, academics Le Thi Nham Tuyet of Vietnam and Annika Johansson of Sweden studied 30 Vietnamese women who were exposed to Agent Orange and/or married to men exposed during the war and found high numbers of miscarriages and premature births. About two-thirds of their children had congenital malformations or developed disabilities before the age of 5.
This is not news, until you consider how many of us have never seen or read the admirable journalistic efforts to cover the unthinkable disabilities among children hidden away in small villages, orphanages and hospitals in Vietnam.
In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time and now president and CEO of the nonpartisan Aspen Institute, addressed the issue of lingering doubts about cause and effect in an essay for Time titled, "The Legacy of a Distant War."
Forget laying blame, Isaacson wrote. The U.S. should make it "a humanitarian issue rather than a compensation case, and help immediately to clean up the contaminated sites."
The Vietnam Red Cross estimates that up to 3 million adults and children in their country have suffered from exposure to Agent Orange. Until the hot spots are eradicated, their numbers will only grow.
My ignorance about all these facts and figures was boundless. I was nervous about what I'd find in Vietnam. I foresaw a relentless string of sad, hopeless stories full of helpless children and their grieving parents. I also could easily imagine meeting many Vietnamese citizens full of hostility for a nosy American.
I was wrong.
Illustration Omitted:
Nick Ut, The Vietnam Reporting Project. Le Thu Huong, who is 29 and lives in Hanoi, is relieved when her fourth ultrasound reveals a healthy pregnancy. The slightest abnormality can trigger a woman's decision to abort -- a practice quietly encouraged by Vietnam's government.
Thao Nguyen Griffiths was my tireless traveling companion. Having started life in a remote village in Vietnam, she didn't want to become a teacher like her parents or to work for the Vietnamese government. Instead, she became a highly educated and sophisticated activist, championing the cause of her country and the people she loves.
The 32-year-old dynamo works for several advocacy groups, including the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. As VVAF's country director, Thao has spent more than a decade lobbying for help to remove land mines and to clean up the hot spots of Agent Orange.
"I wanted to learn about land mines because it is a way for me to learn about my country's war with the United States," she told me.
Smiling softly, she added, "Then I started learning about Agent Orange."
The Vietnam Reporting Project had arranged for Thao, who lives in Hanoi, to handle logistics for the trip, help establish contacts, set up interviews, and translate during many of the interviews.
Thao and I were in constant contact in the weeks leading up to my trip, and so I learned a lot about her before I ever got to Vietnam. At first, she was all business. But our conversation quickly turned mother-to-mother personal after she told me she and her Australian husband have two young children, Liam and Aimee.
I asked if she had worried about Agent Orange when she was pregnant.
"Everybody worries," she said. "I have never met a Vietnamese woman who does not worry about that."
Fear of birth defects has created a climate of anxiety for women of reproductive age, and doctors say abortions in Vietnam have skyrocketed in recent years. In Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, storefront clinics offer prenatal ultrasounds without a doctor's prescription, and researchers report that some women are so anxious about birth defects that they get dozens of ultrasounds during a single pregnancy. The slightest indication of an abnormality can cause a woman to seek an abortion, which doctors say the government encourages.
In 2002, several weeks before she gave birth to her son, Thao took a five-day field trip to central Vietnam, which remains highly contaminated with Agent Orange. Her job was to survey children with disabilities in Quang Tri, formerly known as the DMZ, or demilitarized zone, which had served as a boundary between North and South Vietnam during the war.
"It was an eye-opening trip for me," she said. "It was the first time I had personally met with so many children who were disabled because of a war that had ended many decades ago. They were kids born with disabilities, or kids who came in contact with unexploded munitions."
She was haunted by nightmares for the remainder of her pregnancy.
"I kept having dreams that I gave birth to a child covered with hair, or missing limbs, or unable to see because he had no eyes."
A French doctor delivered her baby in a Hanoi hospital. Thao remembers being unable to immediately share the doctor's joy when he yelled, "It's a boy!"
A nurse rushed Liam to Thao's side. She grabbed at his hands, his legs, frantically counted his fingers and toes.
"Only then could I smile," she said. "Only then could I be filled with joy."
She let out a long sigh.
"So many mothers," she said, softly. "So many mothers do not have that happy ending. Not in Vietnam."
Then she laughed.
"No, no, we must not end on this," she said. "You have to know, Vietnam is not about our sad stories. The Vietnamese are a forward-looking people. Martin Luther King did not begin his speech with, 'I have a nightmare.' "
Thao's themes of hope and forgiveness pulse through the Vietnamese culture. Repeatedly, others reminded me that Vietnam is not a country of grudges.
As one doctor patiently explained, "If we hated everyone who invaded us, we'd have no friends."
Illustration Omitted:
Nick Ut, Associated Press. Nick Ut's famous photo known as "Napalm Girl" is credited for raising the awareness of the Vietnam War. Nick Ut rushed Kim Phuc to a nearby hospital after the photo was taken.
Photographer Nick Ut's personal story is intricately tied to the Vietnam War, which the Vietnamese call America's War.
Nick, who joined me in Hanoi as a Vietnam Reporting Project fellow, was born in Saigon in 1951. He became an Associated Press photographer in 1969, four years after his beloved older brother, Huynh Thanh My, another AP photographer, was killed in the war. Three years later, Nick captured a jarring image that ran in newspapers and magazines around the world.
On June 8, 1972, Nick was standing on the road leading to the village of Trang Bang, which planes were attacking with napalm. Instinctively, he raised his Leica camera and focused on a 9-year-old girl named Kim Phuc, who was running toward him, naked and screaming from burns on her tiny body.
After he took the picture, he threw water on Kim's burning skin and then rushed her to a nearby hospital, which saved her life. Nick left the hospital and turned in his film to Associated Press editors in Saigon.
His photo, commonly referred to as "Napalm Girl," is widely credited for triggering worldwide outcry against the war. The following year, Nick won the Pulitzer Prize for photography. He was 21.
Nick was wounded three times during the war. Another brother was killed fighting for South Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, AP helped Nick flee to the United States, where he became a citizen in 1984. He now lives in Los Angeles.
Nick's parents and four of his siblings have died. His remaining siblings and extended family live in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. When I met him the morning of Oct. 15, he was three months away from celebrating his 45th year with AP.
Today, Nick is the equivalent of a rock star in Vietnam. A documentary about Nick and his work had run in Hanoi only weeks before we arrived, and so whenever we were in the city, he was swarmed by admirers, particularly elderly women. He was ever patient, pausing in his work to smile and often show them his latest shots on the camera's view screen.
I didn't have to spend much time with Nick to understand that he has never been able to leave behind the children, and his own memories, of Agent Orange.
"It would come down like rain," Nick told me, only hours after we met. "I worried -- later, when we started finding out how bad it was -- I worried that I had been exposed. But I'm fine. My children are fine. My grandchildren are fine."
He smiled, shrugged his shoulders.
"I am lucky," he said. "So far, I am very lucky, you know?"
He shook his head. "But the children you will meet here, Connie?" he said. "They are not so lucky."
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http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/friendship_village_provides_su.html
Friendship Village provides support to people affected by Agent Orange: Unfinished Business
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM
By Connie Schultz
Illustration Omitted:
Nick Ut, The Vietnam Reporting Project. Twenty-year-old Le Duc Quang, in red shirt, has lived for four years in Friendship Village, which was founded by American Vietnam War veteran George Mizo to give medical care to children with disabilities caused by exposure to Agent Orange and help some of them learn potentially marketable skills. Le's mother and father served in the war. Four of their seven children, including Le, were born with disabilities.
This is the second of six parts of the special report Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange
From the moment we started meeting the children of Agent Orange, I tried to remind myself, over and over: The children of Friendship Village are the lucky ones.
They have a clean, safe place to live, at least for a while.
They are surrounded by people who care about them, and who do not avert their eyes at the sight of them.
Most importantly, they have one another, and for the first time in their lives, they are encouraged to believe in their own future.
The word we heard repeatedly from the children was "burden."
I am no longer a burden to my family.
I dream to be able to support myself without burdening my mother.
I do not want to be a burden to my country.
Part of Friendship Village rests on former rice paddies, 17 miles outside Hanoi. More than 100 children, from age 6 to 20 or so, live there for two to four years for medical treatment, rehabilitation and job training. At any given time, 40 or so war veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange also stay at the Village for a few months' respite care.
George Mizo, an American veteran who was exposed to Agent Orange and later yearned to be part of a "living symbol of peace, reconciliation and hope" founded the Vietnam Friendship Village Project in 1992. Veterans from the U.S., France, Japan, Great Britain and Vietnam initially helped Mizo raise awareness, and the seed money, that made it possible to welcome the first group of children as temporary residents in October 1998.
Today, the nonprofit organization cobbles together contributions from donors around the world.
"We either will create a world of peace or we won't," he said in an interview not long before his death at age 56 in 2002, which friends and loved ones attributed to his exposure to Agent Orange. "But it's our choice."
His vision resulted in a haven for disabled children to get medical care and to learn potentially marketable skills. But it also isolates them from loved ones -- often for years -- because most families cannot afford to visit them.
In one room, more than a dozen children bent over tables, embroidering intricate floral patterns on fabric. Children graduate to using sewing machines to make clothing. Two doors down, others painted tissue-thin paper petals, which they will turn into elaborate floral arrangements.
Most of them were shy but friendly. Virtually all of them smiled and were willing to talk, through translator Thao Griffiths, about their lives.
Le Duc Quang, a 20-year-old with a child's body and an old man's face, said both of his parents served in the Vietnam War, and that three of his six siblings also were born with disabilities.
"I will open a flower shop some day," he said, smiling shyly. "Flowers are beautiful, and make people appreciate life more."
Bui Thi Hoa, a wheelchair-bound, 17-year-old girl with curvature of the spine, spoke in a high-pitched whisper. "I've been here two years, and I'm very happy to be here," she said. "But I miss my family. And I don't know what will come next."
It wasn't easy to instantly gauge every child's disability. Only in conversation, for example, did I realize that some children who looked to be 8 or 9 years old were in their early 20s. With others, it was only after they slowly pushed away from work stations and started to walk that their deformed feet and bent backs were apparent. Throughout Friendship Village, children helped one another navigate through their days.
Dang Vu Dung, the current director, was a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army during the war. He came out of retirement to take this job out of a sense of duty, he said, and out of gratitude for his own good luck.
"I am in good health," he said. "I want to give back to my country, and this is a way of helping the children of my fellow veterans."
How much they are helped remains an open question. While many of them seem to be thriving, they face uncertain futures once they return, especially those who are dependent on the wheelchairs and walkers that are commonplace at the Village. Still, they are far more fortunate than their profoundly disabled peers, forever trapped in hospital wards and orphanages.
"Many of them will return to homes that don't even have access for those," Dang said, pointing to a walker parked outside the embroidery room. "These children need more support to continue doing what they learn here."
He sighed, then smiled.
"We do not focus on what cannot happen," he said. "We focus on what we can do while they are here."
As we turned to leave, Thao waved at me as she wound up a call on her cell phone.
"Vietnam is a country of surprises," she said, beaming. "How would you like to meet an American woman whose father was exposed to Agent Orange?"
"She's here?" I asked. "In Hanoi?"
Thao nodded, then started to laugh.
"You will like even better where she is from," she said. "Her name is Heather, and she came all the way from Ohio."
* * *
http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/heather_bowser_connects_with_h.html
Agent Orange leads Heather Bowser to connect with her father's past in Vietnam: Unfinished Business
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM
By Connie Schultz
Illustration Omitted:
Courtesy of Heather BowserBill Morris left for Vietnam in 1968, full of American patriotism and a sense of duty. He never stopped loving his country, but he never forgave the U.S. government for his exposure to Agent Orange, and what he was certain it did to his only daughter.
This is the third of six parts of the special report Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange.
Barely 48 hours earlier, Heather Bowser raised her seat back to the upright position and braced to land in the home of her father's demons.
As the plane descended toward Hanoi's Noi Bai International Airport, her anxiety soared. The 38-year-old Ohio native had been planning this trip for a long time, but now that she was nearly there, uncertainty was beginning to mute the buzz of her initial excitement.
Her mind raced: What will I find there? What will the Vietnamese people think of me? Am I ready for this?
It didn't help that she'd been wearing her prosthesis for 33 hours straight. No matter how she shifted and stretched in her seat, she couldn't ease the ache in her right thigh. She was long overdue for a break from the state-of-the-art mechanical limb that relied on suction to stay attached, but an artificial leg isn't something you can pull off and hoist as carry-on luggage.
To bolster her courage, Heather pulled out a picture of her father from 1967, just before he made the same journey. Back then, William Allen Morris was a 20-year-old newlywed, one of thousands of young Army draftees girding themselves to land in war-torn Vietnam.
Heather closed her eyes and silently talked to her dad:
How did you feel on your first flight to Vietnam?
What were you thinking as you got closer to the ground?
Were you scared?
She would never get those answers.
What she did know was that her father had marched out of the bowels of a black military transport and into the arms of ghosts that would travel with him the rest of his life. On the same day Bill Morris landed, he and his fellow soldiers were ordered to extinguish a raging chemical fire. They fought the toxic flames for several hours, none of them wearing so much as a face mask for protection.
His soldier's mantra began that night: One day down, 394 to go.
Heather sat up a little straighter in her seat. If her father could fight a foot soldier's war in the jungles of a divided Vietnam, she could face whatever awaited her now, when the country was united and at peace. She was her father's daughter, his "Heather the Feather," and she knew he would be proud of her.
Pride drove Bill Morris, every day of his life.
He was raised to provide for his family, and was always reluctant to admit he ever needed help.
He was a proud father, the kind who believed you never stop championing the kids you brought into the world. He was a proud veteran, who never asked why it was he, and not his high school buddies with college deferments, who had to go to Vietnam.
Bill was a proud American, too. No matter how angry he would later become with his government, he never stopped loving his country.
As for his time in Vietnam, that was a private hell he would not share. Rarely did he talk to family -- or anyone else -- about his military service.
He did have his moments. Once in a while, in the days when he was still coming home from work at the steel mill and Heather was finally old enough to toss back a few beers with her dad, he would let down his guard. Heather remembers those talks like they happened yesterday. Some memories burn long, and hard.
Father and daughter would be chatting about the daily ups and downs of life, and his mood would suddenly cloud. That's how Heather knew he never stopped blaming himself for what had happened to his only daughter.
"If I'd only known," he'd say, shaking his head. "If I'd known this was going to happen to you, I would have moved to Canada. If I'd only known."
Bill Morris and Sharon Nelson were students at Bliss Business College in Columbus when they met and fell in love in 1966. She graduated; he dropped out.
"He said he could envision the life of an accountant, and it was boring," Sharon said.
Bill lived in Wintersville, a hiccup of a town near the Pennsylvania and West Virginia borders. He got a job at the Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel mill, but it wasn't long before the Army came calling. Nine days before he shipped out for Vietnam, on July 22, 1968, he and Sharon were married.
God didn't make a man friendlier or more gregarious than her husband, Sharon said.
"He was the kind of guy who walked into a room with 100 strangers and came out with 98 friends." She laughed at the arithmetic. "There's always a couple. . . "
In Vietnam, Bill was an Army specialist armorer, maintaining small arms and weaponry. At first, he wrote to Sharon at least once a month and sent along chatty audiocassette tapes, too. His correspondence offered limited comfort to an anxious young wife.
"We didn't have e-mail and cell phones back then, so you knew by the time you got their mail things could already have changed," she said. "We were watching the war on television, watching them carry bodies into helicopters, night after night. Everybody knew what could happen. Everybody knew."
In February 1969, Bill and Sharon spent a week of R&R in Hawaii. Sharon could see that six months in Vietnam had changed her husband.
"Bill went to Vietnam thinking of it as an adventure. Then reality set in. All he wanted to do was stay alive and get home.
"By the time I saw him in Hawaii, he had become very cautious. He kept looking over his shoulder, sitting with his back against the wall in restaurants, walking on the outside of sidewalks to protect me.
"He talked very little about what was happening in Vietnam, but he didn't need to say anything for me to understand that his life was in danger every day."
After Bill returned to Vietnam, his letters arrived less frequently, and he soon stopped making the audiotapes. For the last two months, he was completely out of touch.
On April 1, 1969, Bill Morris landed at California's Oakland International Airport and headed for the nearest pay phone. Seven months had passed since the last time they talked.
"I heard his voice and told myself, 'Take a deep breath. He's on American soil,' " Sharon says.
A different Bill Morris was on his way home.
* * *
http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/agent_orange_leaves_its_mark_o.html
Agent Orange leaves its mark on the life of Heather Bowser: Unfinished Business
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM Updated: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 11:42 AM
By Connie Schultz
Illustration Omitted:
Heather Bowser's family photographs Enlarge Special to The Plain Dealer William (Bill) Morris was drafted for the Vietnam War in 1967. He sent this photograph to his wife Sharon in 1968. "He went to Vietnam thinking of it as an adventure," Sharon said. "Then reality set in. All he wanted to do was stay alive and get home." (Heather Bowser) Unfinished Business: Heather Bowser gallery (9 photos)
This is the fourth of six parts of the special report Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange
Bill was discharged from the Army in the fall of 1971, and he and Sharon returned to Wintersville. Bill had grown up there, but it didn't feel like home anymore. Most of his high school friends, including several who had worked with him in the mill, had gone off to college, not to Vietnam. He quickly found he had little in common with them.
He went back to the mill, but no longer knew most of the guys working with him. When the steelworkers union asked him to represent his local at a meeting for a Vietnam veterans' support group, it didn't go well. Bill had little patience for rehashing the past.
"He told them, 'Get over it, and get a life,'" Sharon says. "And he never went back."
Bill was beating a retreat.
"He was becoming increasingly withdrawn," Sharon says. "He started drinking more than he ever had."
Bill and Sharon wanted to start a family, but that wasn't going well, either. Her first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages. Then, in the summer of 1972, they dared to hope: Sharon was pregnant again, and this time it looked like she would carry to term.
Bill was ecstatic.
"We both were," Sharon says. "It was the first really good news we'd had since Bill had come home."
In 1972, expectant parents did not routinely hover over ultrasound images of tiny fingers and toes, or seek reassurance in prenatal genetic testing. Sharon and Bill had no idea if she was carrying a boy or a girl.
All they knew was Sharon's due date -- Dec. 7, 1972 -- and they were counting the days until their baby was born.
Heather Anne Morris was born in Pittsburgh's Ohio Valley General Hospital on Oct. 7, a full two months early.
Sharon remembers lying on the delivery table, a tented sheet at her waist blocking her view. She remembers the doctor looking at her newborn baby and gasping, "Oh, my God."
Her memory ends there. On doctor's orders, the anesthesiologist knocked her out.
Two hours later, her tearful husband stood by her hospital bed and delivered the devastating news about their baby girl.
"She's damaged," Bill told her. "She has birth defects."
Sharon was drowsy and thought she hadn't heard him right. But she what Bill was talking about after he helped her out of bed and walked with her to the neonatal intensive care unit. She met her daughter through a window: Heather was missing her right leg below the knee, her left big toe and most of six of her fingers.
Sharon's reaction was immediate: "What did I do wrong?"
A decade would pass before she and her husband came to suspect that Bill's service in Vietnam was the reason their daughter was born with missing limbs. Until then, Sharon bore a mother's guilt.
"I loved her from the moment I saw her, but I was so confused," she said. "You blame yourself, you know. You're the one who carried the baby. You never think it could have anything to do with the father, or anything else."
For the first three weeks of Heather's fragile life, they were not allowed to reach into the incubator to touch even her hand. Almost daily, hospital staff warned them to brace for the worst.
"We were pretty sure she was going to survive," Sharon says. "She weighed 3 pounds, 2 ounces, but she never needed oxygen. But they kept telling us, 'When they're damaged on the outside, they're usually damaged on the inside.' "
Heather's parents asked a Lutheran pastor to baptize her at the hospital. Just in case.
Heather was 3 weeks old before Sharon was allowed to give her a bottle. On one of their countless visits to the NICU, Bill lost his temper when yet another nurse referred to Heather as "it."
Sharon remembers him yelling, "Dammit!" and pointing to his daughter. "This is not an 'it,' this is a 'she,' and her name is Heather."
Heather was discharged from the hospital a month after her birth. On the drive home, Sharon and Bill made a promise to their little girl.
"We vowed that we would not raise her to be more handicapped than she was," Sharon says. "We would do everything we could to make her strong."
Heather Bowser still haunted by Agent Orange Heather Bowser still haunted by Agent Orange Heather Bowser describes herself as a child of Agent Orange. Bowser, who was born without several fingers and is missing part of her right leg, is convinced the cause was Agent Orange. Her father, Bill Morris, fought in Vietnam and was exposed to Agent Orange. Bowser is haunted by the aftermath of Agent Orange and visited Vietnam to meet other second-generation Vietnamese who also suffer from the same birth defects. Watch video
Heather was 9 months old when she was fitted for her first prosthesis, which belted around her waist and didn't bend at the knee. She was a quick study, in part because her parents were relentless teachers in the art of can-do.
"If she wanted a toy, we'd place it across the room and say, 'Go get it,' " Sharon said. "She learned to walk real fast."
For the first five years of her life, Heather's parents told her she was special.
And for the first five years of her childhood, Heather believed them.
Then she started kindergarten.
Heather still remembers the exact moment when she realized that what made her special in the cocoon of a loving home looked mighty different to the world at large.
Her kindergarten teacher had instructed the children to sit in a circle on the floor. In the center was a single sheet of paper with an outline of a child's hands. The teacher told the children to take turns matching their hands to the drawings.
"We were supposed to put our hands in and say, 'This is my left hand, this is my right hand,'" Heather said.
She placed her hands on the paper. Her left hand has a regular thumb, a crooked pinky and three fingers that end at the first knuckle. On her right hand, the three middle fingers stop at her second joint. Her pinky is crooked, with only one joint and a nail jutting from the tip.
She looked at the traced hands, then down at her own.
Hmmm, she thought, as she raised her palms and stared. This is my left hand. And this is my right hand.
She looked again at the traced hands.
"Every eye was on me," she said. "I couldn't look at anybody. It was a moment that stopped in time."
Heather's mother remembers that day, too.
"She walked through the door and said, 'Why are my hands different?' "
Sharon didn't hesitate. "Because you're unique. All those kids in your class, and you're the only one like this. Your fingers are just shorter, that's all."
Sharon still chuckles at Heather's response.
"She wasn't buying it," she said. "She wasn't buying it at all."
A few days later, her mother showed up in her class with an arsenal of information and good intentions.
"I felt it was necessary for me to explain to her classmates that Heather was still a little girl, still the same age as they were, just different. Her teacher had told me, 'Heather's the only child I can have an adult conversation with.' "
Heather has her own memories of that day.
"She wanted to help them understand that I was no different from them," Heather said. "She showed them my prosthesis and said, 'See? There's nothing to be afraid of."
She smiles gently at the memory. "My mom meant well, but I don't think it helped." Her face softens, and her eyes begin to glisten. "For years, one of my most common nicknames was 'Peg Leg.' "
In sixth grade, Heather started suffering from enuresis, a bladder disorder that required frequent trips to the bathroom. Her teacher was impatient, and ridiculed her in front of her classmates.
"She'd say, 'There she goes, down the hall again,' " Heather says. "I felt humiliated."
Heather finally came home from school one day and told her parents, "I'm not going back."
The next morning, Sharon and Bill showed up in the principal's office. The teacher's comments ceased.
"We learned early," Sharon says. "You have to advocate for your child."
At the end of April, 1975, Sharon watched her husband's face harden as he stared at the television's flickering images of American helicopters taking off from rooftops in Saigon. Panicked Vietnamese citizens left behind raised their arms and wailed into the choppers' wind.
The Vietnam War was officially over. For America, anyway.
"It was all for nothing," Bill said. He turned off the TV, and walked out of the room.
Sharon was growing worried about her husband. Bill was acting erratic, sullen and unable to sleep. By summer, paranoia had taken hold of him. Night after night, he sat in the backyard with a loaded gun, assuring Sharon he had to be there to protect his family.
"It was a discouraging time," she says. "A scary time."
Some of Heather's earliest memories of her father revolved around her mother's warnings:
No loud noises around Dad.
Don't shake Dad awake.
Don't startle Dad.
Sharon can't name a particular moment when it was clear that Bill was getting better. She just remembers that one day he stopped guarding the house, and slowly he found reasons to smile. There was plenty of work, and good union wages at the steel mill. Heather seemed to be thriving, and their son, John, was born in 1978 with no signs of disability.
Bill finally appeared ready to breathe again.
"He just seemed to get better for a while," she said. "I think he felt good about us, about his family."
For a while, he even seemed able to put Vietnam behind him.
Then news stories started trickling out about possible long-term dangers to U.S. veterans exposed to an herbicide called Agent Orange. Journalists started describing dioxin, one of the components of Agent Orange, as one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man.
For a brief period, during Jimmy Carter's presidency, the Veterans Administration conceded the possibility that Agent Orange exposure was causing a wide range of disorders, including headaches, acne, cancer, liver damage and even birth defects. After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, however, the established position soon changed, with officials insisting that the link between Agent Orange and "delayed health effects" was an unproven theory.
Over time, more and more veterans were convinced that exposure to Agent Orange was making them ill and causing birth defects in some of their children who were conceived after the war.
For the first time, Bill started telling Sharon about how he and his fellow soldiers used to grill dinners in sawed-off barrels painted with orange stripes. He also realized that he had served in areas of Vietnam that were sprayed by Agent Orange, probably while he was there.
For Sharon, the jarring moment came in the spring of 1978, when a 28-year-old former helicopter crew chief went on NBC's "Today Show" and declared, "I died in Vietnam, but I didn't even know it."
Paul Reutershan had flown nearly daily through clouds of herbicides dropped from C-123 cargo planes. He saw firsthand how the poison left wide swaths of brown, barren land where forests and jungles once thrived. He told a horrified television audience that he never worried about his own health because the Army told him the herbicide known as Agent Orange was "relatively nontoxic to humans and animals."
By the time Reutershan was able to tell his story on national television, he was dying. He had already founded an organization for veteran activists and their families called Agent Orange Victims International (AOVI) for what he was certain were hundreds of thousands of Vietnam veterans just like him, whose lives -- and possibly their children's lives -- would be irreparably damaged because of their exposure to Agent Orange.
A few months later, Reutershan died from the cancer that had ravaged his colon, liver and abdomen.
By then, two Agent Orange activists -- Bill and Sharon Morris -- had been born.
In 1979, Bill and Sharon formed AOVI's first Ohio chapter. By then, they were convinced that Heather's birth defects were directly tied to Bill's exposure to Agent Orange.
Sharon says that news of dioxin's potential long-term harm churned up feelings of anger, but also relief.
"It was the first time we could say with certainty: Maybe it wasn't something I did."
In retrospect, she felt she'd missed a red flare. When she was pregnant with John in 1977, she changed obstetricians. He took one look at Heather and sent Sharon for genetic testing.
"It was the closest anyone came to saying Heather's problems looked to be caused chemically," Sharon recalls. "They said they only saw her kind of disabilities when the fetus was exposed to a parent's heavy drug use or exposure to chemicals."
At the time, neither she nor Bill made any connection to Agent Orange.
Then, through AOVI, they started meeting children of other Vietnam veterans, many of whom had disabilities, too.
"They were not as physically damaged as Heather was," Sharon said, "but a lot of kids had mental retardation or learning problems."
As a child, Heather often joined her parents at meetings and rallies, and sometimes wore a T-shirt that read, "Agent Orange makes me sick," punctuated with a frowning face.
"I was an Agent Orange kid, and we were all about letting people know that," Heather says, smiling. "Sometimes I'd wear shorts or a skirt to show off my leg.
"I wasn't raised to hide who I was. I was raised to force everyone to deal with the reality of me."
The more Bill learned about Agent Orange, the angrier he became toward his government, and his own innocence as a gung-ho draftee. He blamed himself for what had happened to his daughter, repeatedly telling Sharon the same thing he would tell Heather once she was grown: "If I had known I was taking my future children to Vietnam, I wouldn't have gone."
By the early 1980s, his body started to break down. He was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. In 1984, he started having difficulty breathing and thought he had walking pneumonia. After weeks of chest pain, he finally went to the doctor, who gave him an EKG and sent him straight to the hospital.
Sharon and Bill were in shock.
"His father had heart problems, but in his 60s," Sharon says. "Bill was in his 30s. The doctor kept saying to him, 'You should not be having this. This is an old man's disease."
Bill was scheduled for a heart catheterization, but it soon became clear that he was in bigger trouble. He underwent a quadruple heart bypass on Dec. 27, 1984.
He was 38 years old.
"We never recovered from it," Sharon says. "Financially, it just ruined us. There were strikes at the plant, a lot of stress for the family. The life we should have had -- we should have been able to send our kids to college on our own -- that was gone."
Bill was convinced that his exposure to dioxin had damaged his heart, but neither the Veterans Administration nor the chemical companies agreed. He filed a medical claim for disability, citing his wartime exposure to Agent Orange as the cause.
The claim was denied.
Bill was a devoted father, but he wasn't one for the usual terms of endearment, even for his only daughter. No "honey" or "sweetheart" would fall from the lips of Bill Morris. His little girl was Heather the Feather. Later, he proudly called her stubborn because she was bullheaded, just like him.
As a teenager, Heather often fell into quiet, pensive moods, just like her father. She was an adolescent girl with a teenager's heart, but only one leg and several missing fingers. She could see the potentially rocky terrain ahead.
Heather always loved to draw, and in 1992 enrolled in art education at Youngstown State University. Her art from that time reflects a young woman's attempts to come to terms with the sadness and anger over the "why" behind her disabilities.
One painting shows Heather, her prosthesis in plain view, slumped against another of her paintings depicting a helicopter's spray falling on an American infantryman in Vietnam.
Her paintings shocked her father.
"I had always tried to be his strong little girl," she said. "We had only talked about what Agent Orange had done to me on the outside. My paintings made both of us face what was happening to me on the inside."
They also revealed a deep yearning.
"There was always a part of me that felt lonely," she said. "I knew there had to be other children of American veterans who looked like me, who had limb loss like me, because their fathers were exposed to Agent Orange.
"I knew they were out there," she repeats. "I just didn't know how to find them."
Heather Bowser Enlarge Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer Heather Bowser remembers well the first ultrasound during her pregnancy with Luke, now 10. "Please, count 'em!" she recalls asking the technician. "Are there two hands? Two feet? Ten fingers? Ten toes? She said 'yes' every time. I knew we were going to be OK." Heather Bowser gallery (6 photos)
One of Bill's biggest fears was that no man worth marrying his daughter would ever discover the remarkable woman behind her physical disabilities.
"I could tell my father was really worried about my future. I knew he was always wondering: Will she fall in love? Will a guy ever marry her? He worried about that a lot."
But Bill hadn't counted on the likes of Aaron Bowser.
Aaron and Heather met as freshmen at Youngstown State.
Both recall that she was the flirt.
"She was always outgoing," Aaron said. "She probably initiated the interest."
Aaron says that from the beginning he never thought of Heather as the girl with one leg.
"She was more normal than most people. Most people have their hang-ups, but Heather wasn't like that. . . . I'm the guy who has to map out vacations. She's more spontaneous, a real free spirit. We brought each other to the middle."
They started dating in their sophomore year. Aaron graduated early and in the fall of 1994 was offered a job in Michigan.
Commencement -- and uncertainty -- loomed.
"I was going to go off for a career, and Heather had another year to go in college," Aaron said. "I thought I'd better snatch her up before somebody else did."
He did it the old-fashioned way: Before asking Heather to marry him, he got Bill Morris' permission.
Aaron's memory of the backyard encounter reveals a father who was in no mood to make a nervous young man comfortable:
After idle chit-chat, Aaron got to the point. Sort of.
"Bill, Heather and I have been dating awhile, and we care a lot about each other."
Silence.
"Bill, I would like to ask your permission to marry Heather."
Heather's father stared at Aaron for 10 long seconds. Finally, he spoke.
"I can tell you care a lot about each other," he said ."But I'm a traditional man. From the moment Heather was born, I tried to look out for her and give her everything she needed. When you marry my daughter, I'll want you to do the same thing."
Aaron nodded.
Bill continued.
"In the old days, you had to give the family something for their daughter."
Aaron, increasingly puzzled, nodded again.
A few more seconds passed.
"A horse," Bill said, his face grim. "I think I'd like a horse."
Aaron's mind raced: A horse? How do I buy a horse? How do I get it here?
It took a few minutes, and Bill's giant grin, before Aaron got the joke.
One of Heather's favorite photos of her father was taken at her wedding reception on Feb. 3, 1996. In it, he is clasping his right hand around her neck as he squishes face with a mustached, fatherly kiss.
"He was so happy for me," Heather said. "He knew Aaron loved me and would take care of me."
Ten months later, in March 1997, Bill woke up in bed and said to Sharon, "I think I'm having a stroke."
Medics rushed him to the hospital in time for Bill to get lifesaving treatment with tPA, a drug that dissolves clots interrupting blood flow to the brain. Within 24 hours, he had all of his movement back, but his life was on a downward slope.
Plagued with complications from diabetes, and having survived a stroke, Bill's body was wearing down to the point where he could no longer log full-time work at the mill.
Bill filed for Social Security disability benefits.
Claim denied.
Bill appealed.
Claim denied again.
On July 7, 1998, Bill Morris got up in the middle of the night, then collapsed on the bathroom floor. Sharon heard him fall and raced to his side.
She called 9-1-1 and performed CPR until the medics arrived. But this time, Bill's heart had stopped for good.
He was 50 years old.
A few months later, Sharon opened a response to Bill's third appeal for Social Security disability payments. She stood in the kitchen as she read the letter, then folded it up, tucked it in her purse and walked out to her car.
Fifteen minutes later, she stood at the foot of her husband's grave at Union Cemetery in Steubenville and gave him the news.
"Well, it's official, Bill," she said. "You're disabled."
For the first few years of their marriage, Heather and Aaron tried not to think too much about having children.
They were living in Columbia, Tenn., for Aaron's job as a customer service rep at Saturn. Heather was teaching art at a local high school.
For a while, they talked about adopting. But five years into their marriage, they decided to stop worrying about the "what ifs."
"We asked ourselves, 'What's the worst thing that can happen?'" Heather said. "We'll have a child like me? Well, what's wrong with that?"
Absolutely nothing, Aaron said.
"To me, it didn't matter," he said. "I knew there were things out there to help if our baby was born misformed. And I was married to Heather, remember. I was so attracted to her because she had attributes I don't have. I rely on her more than she relies on me."
Heather remembers well her first ultrasound. The technician snapped a picture of the image on the screen and said, "It's a boy!" Then she rattled off how she saw two hands, two legs.
That wasn't enough information for Heather.
"I said, 'OK, OK, does he have all his fingers? Does he have all his toes? Does he have everything?"
"Everything!" the tech said.
Heather let out a long breath and turned to Aaron.
"We're going to be OK."
As the years progressed, things in fact did seem OK. In many ways, Heather had her dream life: A loving husband, two healthy boys and a master's degree in mental health counseling. She and Aaron now owned an antiques store in Portage County, too, and were having fun running it on weekends.
Still, a yearning would sometimes sneak up on her, and ambush her mood.
Heather was certain there were other grown kids of American veterans, struggling like her.
"I kept telling myself, if we could just find each other, if we could join together, then we'd have a voice that no one could ignore."
In winter 2009, Heather was surfing Facebook and decided to enter three words into its search engine: agent orange kids.
One site popped up, and her fingers froze at the keyboard: Agent Orange Legacy.
Sharon L. Perry founded the group in 2007 for U.S. Vietnam War veterans' children whose lives have been affected by their parents' exposure to Agent Orange.
Heather immediately joined the website's Facebook page. Weeks later, Perry reached out on behalf of Japanese filmmaker Masako Sakata.
Sakata's 2006 film, "Agent Orange: A Personal Requiem," documented the long-term impact of Agent Orange in Vietnam after her American husband of 30 years, war photographer Greg Davis, died of liver cancer at age 54. The couple believed his illness was directly related to his exposure to dioxin during his time covering the Vietnam War.
In 2007, Sakata traveled to the U.S., where she was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Journalism.
She decided to do another documentary on Agent Orange, this time including American children. Through Sharon Perry, she met five daughters of U.S. veterans. One of them was Heather Bowser.
During Sakata's visit, Heather shared her own private hope.
"One day, I'm going to meet those kids," she told Sakata, referring to children exposed to Agent Orange. "One day, I'm going to go to Vietnam."
A couple of months later, Sakata showed footage of her interview with Heather to Japanese television station NHK, and producers agreed to run a 90-minute program about Sakata's efforts to make a follow-up film. One caveat: Heather had to go to Vietnam to shoot additional footage.
"We talked about it, off and on, for weeks," Heather said. "I was excited, but I was also scared. And I had no idea how I was going to be able to afford it."
Sakata paid for the couple's flight. The Vietnamese Association of Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA), agreed to pay for Heather's and Aaron's food and lodging and a translator.
On Oct. 15, Aaron and Heather drove to Pittsburgh to catch a pre-dawn flight to Chicago. From there, they flew to Seoul, and then on to Hanoi.
For the first time in her life, she would be with children who needed no explanation for why Heather Morris Bowser was missing limbs.
For once, she wouldn't have to explain anything at all.
* * *
http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/heather_bowser_children_touche.html
Heather Bowser, children touched by Agent Orange find a common bond in Friendship Village: Unfinished Business
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM
Connie Schultz By Connie Schultz
Illustration Omitted:
The legacy of Agent Orange Enlarge Special to The Plain Dealer Hoang Trung Kien, 23, is one of thousands of children identified as third-generation victims of Agent Orange. He currently lives in Friendship Village outside Hanoi, far from loved ones as he learns a skill and receives crucial medical care. (Nick Ut, The Vietnam Reporting Project) Unfinished Business: Agent Orange victims gallery (5 photos)
This is the fifth of six parts of the special report Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange
Heather's heart sank when she entered the gates of Friendship Village.
She had eagerly anticipated this visit. More than anything else on her travel agenda, she looked forward to meeting the many children whose parents were exposed to Agent Orange during the war, children like her. And she had heard a great deal about the Village, which was founded by an American Vietnam veteran like her father.
Two days earlier, she and Aaron had flown out of Pittsburgh in the height of autumn plumage and landed in a country where, even in mid-October, the muggy, exhaust-filled days flirted with 90-degree heat. She was still flush from the sensory overload of the bustling city of Hanoi.
Heather was at first shocked to see the isolated, rural setting of Friendship Village, which was partially built on former rice fields.
She was taken aback by the neglected grounds. Nearly every building was in need of paint and other maintenance. Weeds sprouted where flowers might have grown. It struck her as a barren place for children to thrive.
"But after being in Vietnam for a few days, we came to understand that it's like that everywhere there," she said. "Their expectations are different."
Friendship Village Director Dang Vu Dung ushered her across the campus "like a tour guide who'd done it hundreds of times before."
Her mood changed when she started meeting the children. As she watched them interact and shyly demonstrate their new skills for her, she was caught off guard by a feeling she hadn't expected.
She envied them.
"I never spent time with other children like me," she said.
Vietnamese children still suffer from ancestral beliefs of shame related to birth defects, as if disfigurement were a punishment for family members' past misdeeds. But it is widely assumed that a deformed child is a victim of the long-term impact of the American War, as it is called in their country.
"In Vietnam, if people see a child with disabilities, they immediately think of Agent Orange," Heather said. "That doesn't happen in America, in Ohio.
"Throughout my life, the pictures of Vietnamese children affected by Agent Orange have been far more prevalent. Most people look at me and stare and stare and stare, but nobody thinks of Agent Orange. We have no idea how many of us are out there, and most doctors don't acknowledge any link."
One young girl noticed Heather's hand and tugged on it to examine her missing fingers. Heather asked the translator to explain that Agent Orange was the reason. The little girl nodded with a smile of hard-earned wisdom.
Heather and I met three days later. We joked about the unlikely circumstances that brought two working-class girls from small-town Ohio together as grown women in a restaurant in Hanoi.
"Doesn't God have a sense of humor?" she said, beaming.
In the two hours we spent together that evening, Heather's mood alternated between euphoria and profound sadness. Repeatedly, she said, "I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe I'm in Vietnam." Just as often, she said, with tears in her eyes, "I wish I could tell my dad. I wish he could be here with me."
Never did she wish that more than when she met with North Vietnamese Army veterans staying at Friendship Village for respite care.
"To go into a room full of soldiers being treated. I was very tentative, I didn't know how I'd be received," she said.
She wore a skirt that day, so her prosthesis was in plain view. She showed them her hands. Then, through a translator, she described what had happened to her father. The diagnosis of diabetes and heart-bypass surgery in his 30s; the stroke in his 40s; the heart attack that killed him when he was 50 years old.
They nodded, some of them tearing up as she spoke. They told her they were sorry he was gone. A couple of them followed her down the hall as she was leaving, wanting to talk more about the legacy of Agent Orange that was chipping away at their lives, too.
"When those soldiers started walking with me, I wanted my dad to be there so bad," Heather said. "I wanted him to be able to look them in the eyes and tell them that we share things in common. That we understand."
Heather had dinner two days later in Ho Chi Minh City with VAVA Chairman Tran Ngoc Tho, who was a major general for the North Vietnamese Army.
They talked about how Vietnam's veterans have the same symptoms as Americans who served in the war: heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure. He nodded sympathetically as Heather described how her father suffered.
At one point, Tran excused himself for a few moments, and Heather watched as he tried to collect himself.
"I could tell he was concerned about losing face in front of this young American woman," she said. "So much like my dad."
During her visit with Tran, her own insecurities came to a head.
"I'd been so inward-focused before I got to Vietnam," she said. "I was the American patriot's daughter, and for me it was all about Agent Orange in America. I started to feel guilty."
She finally worked up the courage to ask Tran the question that had been nagging at her since set foot in Vietnam.
"Aren't you angry at Americans? How can you not be?"
Tran waited for the translation of Heather's question, then shook his head.
He answered in clear English.
"No," he said, smiling. "Because we won."
* * *
http://www.cleveland.com/agentorange/index.ssf/2011/01/ending_the_lingering_threat_of.html
Ending the lingering threat of Agent Orange begins with awareness: Unfinished Business
Published: Sunday, January 30, 2011, 5:00 AM
Connie Schultz By Connie Schultz
Illustration Omitted:
Courtesy of Heather Bowser. William A. Morris, Heather Bowser's father, wearing his uniform at basic training in Ft. Lewis in 1967.
This is the final part of the special report Unfinished Business: Suffering and sickness in the endless wake of Agent Orange.
Heather knew that, as she traveled south, she was diving deep into the part of Vietnam that had changed her father forever.
She had come to meet the children, and she had found them. But she also wanted to see, as she put it, "if I'd find any connection to the place where my father's demons came from."
Now she was as close as she was ever going to get to finding them. She stood on Vietnam's famous Route 1 and looked at the crumbling wall of what used to be part of Long Binh Post, the largest U.S. Army base in Vietnam during the war, and where her father had stayed.
The demons that had greeted him in Vietnam stayed with him, breaking his stride until the day he died. Now, they were long gone.
But instead of demons, someone else showed up.
For the first time since she'd landed in Vietnam, Heather felt that her father was ready to join her for the last part of the journey.
Route 1 is a bustling highway now, full of semitractors pulling cargo supply trailers and hostile to pedestrian traffic. Heather knew her father used to travel this same road.
"Pull over," she said to the driver. "I'm getting out."
She took out the photo of her dad as a young company armorer, the one she'd been carrying with her since she left Pittsburgh.
On the back, he had written a note to a childhood friend, dated Dec. 7, 1967:
Dear Jeff
Some day I will be able to take this uniform off for good. And maybe some day men all over the world will see its mistake and lay down their arms and live in peace.
Heather looked at her father's 21-year-old face and smiled.
"Let's go, Dad."
Heather and Bill Morris started to walk.
Traffic zoomed past her, blowing humid exhaust into her face. She kept walking, and walking. They had a hill to climb.
"I was taking the steps of my father," she says. "I was taking them with him."
In the 12 years since his death, she'd had so many questions for him. Now that she finally felt him walking next to her, she was silent.
"I was afraid to talk to Dad," she says. "I felt the symbolic," she says. "I didn't need to talk to him. He was so there."
And she was finally ready to go home.
Three months have passed since Heather Bowser, Nick Ut and I traveled to Vietnam, each of us with our questions about Agent Orange, and our own ghosts at our sides.
Nick had seen so much sorrow in his homeland during the war. He had lost two brothers, and was wounded three times. He'd seen little Kim Phuc running toward him, screaming as her naked body seared with napalm burns.
But Nick has a stubborn capacity for joy. It was he who insisted I take an early-morning walk around Hanoi's Hoan Kiem Lake to hear the Vietnamese women who gather there each day to sing a promise of friendship. When I was overwhelmed by the sight of so many children with disabilities, it was Nick who offered words of comfort, and regularly reminded me that there was much hope in Vietnam, too. And he has never lost touch with Kim Phuc, who is married with two children and lives in Canada.
Still, my country's Vietnam War was Nick's American War, and it is always with him. I was reminded of this in another exchange we had on the streets of Hanoi.
I was walking a few feet ahead of him, hot and sweaty, when I lifted my arms at my side to grab what little breeze was blowing.
"Connie," Nick said, softly. "Connie."
I whipped around. He looked like he was in pain.
He shook his head slowly, and explained.
"When you walk like that, when you walk with your arms out like that, I think of Kim. I think of Kim Phuc."
When I started to apologize, he waved his hand and cut me off.
"It's OK, Connie," he said. "It's OK to remember."
He looked down at the ground, and kept walking.
heather-bowser-matching-hands.JPGView full sizeCourtesy of Heather BowserHeather Bowser found a 12-year-old boy whose limb loss matched hers almost exactly. "Tell me I'm not a victim of Agent Orange," she says.
Heather Bowser continues to wrestle with what she discovered about herself in Vietnam. She holds tight to the many wonderful memories of her trip, but she also admits to moments of despair that she can't quite explain. Not yet, anyway.
"I'm the daughter of a steelworker," she told me recently. "I've always been about 'union pride,' 'America first.' My fear before I left for Vietnam was that I'd be used as a political pawn -- by anyone."
What she didn't expect was to empathize so much with the Vietnamese veterans who were once her father's enemy.
She remembers a particular exchange with a veteran whose first two children were born with disabilities.
"I see the same pain in your eyes when you look at your children that I saw in my father's eyes when he looked at me," she told him.
Sharon Morris says her daughter's trip to Vietnam may ease the pain that has pulsed through her since the day she was born. But only America, she said, can heal Heather's invisible wounds.
"I want our government to at least acknowledge that Heather, and other children like her in this country, suffered because of Agent Orange," Sharon said. "I don't want money. I don't want medical care, although it would be nice if the VA covered Heather's medical expenses. I just want her to get the satisfaction of their admitting to what they did, that they exposed our veterans' children to Agent Orange. They denied it to our veterans for so long. Now I want them to acknowledge that they did it to our children, too."
Heather's feelings about the war, and her own country's role in it, continue to be complicated.
"I think I understand now how confused everyone was," she said when we met last October in Hanoi. "And I'm glad to see that their children of Agent Orange are being cared for."
But then a month after her return from Vietnam, Heather sounded more conflicted in an e-mail.
I think I have a wall that is up to block the reality of [the children's] situations because it is overwhelmingly painful to understand the children there suffer like I have. The most horrifying is, due to hot spots and genetic generational issues, [Vietnam] will continue to have innocent victims. . . [S]omeday they will understand they are different, like I did in Kindergarten class.
The truth in the matter is I am them. . . they are me. We are so common it is frightening. My parents and their parents have suffered. . . It takes so much day-to-day to make it through this life with the cards we have been dealt:
How do we have what it takes to finish this battle?. . .(I) am left to fight, not for myself anymore, but for the younger generation, the babies. How do I fight for them when I am still a victim myself? It's a heartbreaking reality. . ."
Illustration Omitted:
Nick Ut, The Vietnam Reporting Project. Pham Thi Phuong, who is 15, lives at Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnamese doctors say he is one of tens of thousands of young children suffering from exposure to Agent Orange.
Still, she is aware of her privileged American life, which was driven home by a visit to Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. There, she would see jars of deformed stillborn babies and take ragged breaths as she met children with eyeballs the size of tea cups, flippers for limbs, webbed hands and feet.
But she also met a 12-year-old boy, sitting in a wheelchair, smiling at her.
"He was my mirror image," she said. He was missing the same leg and virtually all the same fingers.
Heather gestured with her camera, looked quizzically at the boy. He nodded, and lifted his left hand toward her. She lifted hers and they matched their hands.
"Tell me I'm not a child of Agent Orange," she said weeks later, when she showed me the photo in Ohio. "Same limb loss, same war."
Not, however, the same care.
"I have a $25,000 leg," she said. "The Shriners always made sure I had what I needed. And I have a great life." Her voice broke.
"That boy? He's stuck in a wheelchair. He's living in a hospital."
Her voice trailed off.
Three days after Heather's return from Vietnam, on Nov. 1, 2010, the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs announced it had added three additional medical conditions to the list of presumed illnesses caused by exposure to Agent Orange, a list first established in 1991.
Heather's mother called to tell her the news.
"The VA has changed its mind," Sharon said. "Dad's heart disease is finally on the list."
Heather didn't say a word.
Instead, she dropped to her knees and started to cry.
Scientists have designated 28 dioxin "hot spots" that must be cleaned up if Vietnam is ever to fully recover from the war that ended more than 35 years ago. There are ways to do this, but it's expensive, and Vietnam is a poor country.
In 2007, the nonpartisan Aspen Institute convened a fact-finding U.S.-Vietnam Dialogue Group on Agent Orange/Dioxin. Last year, the group issued a formal plan to help "eliminate the public health threat of dioxin hot spots, improve the lives of people with disabilities, restore the defoliated land, and remove a barrier to fully normal U.S.-Vietnam relations."
Divided into three phases over 10 years, it would cost an estimated $300 million in U.S. government commitments, money raised by private and public donors and "an appropriate continuing investment from the government and people of Vietnam."
Last year, in late December, U.S. Ambassador Michael Michalak announced that the U.S. had set aside almost $17 million to clean up the area around the Da Nang Airport in central Vietnam, which was sprayed heavily with Agent Orange during the war. Total cost of that project is estimated at $34 million.
Cleanup is scheduled to begin in July.
Last October, I arrived in Vietnam full of questions.
Most important, I wanted to witness the legacy of Agent Orange. I got more than I bargained for, and some sad, hard memories threaten to take up permanent residence in my mind.
Vietnamese song
This is a common children's song about the legacy of Agent Orange.
Come to Me (With Love)
by Dinh Tien Binh and Trieu Duc Thanh
Why am I disabled?
Why am I so, or is it my destiny?
Why is my body deteriorating?
I have legs, but I can't walk.
I have hands, but I cannot hold.
I want to speak, but I can't pronounce.
Where's my childhood happiness?
No! Not because of my father.
No! Not because of my mother.
It's because of the war, because of Agent Orange that has destroyed my father's body, and has caused my disability.
Everybody, please come to me with love and compassion.
Let love take over the pain for people with disability.
Love and compassion, my Vietnamese fellows!
Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe these new ghosts will help me add a small, persistent voice to the chorus of American scientists, policymakers, journalists and activists calling for an act of conscience, not confession. We cannot change the fact that the U.S. involvement in Vietnam is the reason millions of innocent people there continue to suffer from exposure to an herbicide we sprayed on them more than 35 years ago. But through humanitarian and private aid, we can alter the future for generations of their children, and their grandchildren.
I also went to Vietnam hoping to finally understand what had happened to the boys from my hometown who left for the war as goofy kids, and too often returned as haunted old men.
That mystery continues to hover. Some stories are understood only by those who lived them. My respect for the survivors -- men and women, in both countries -- only grows.
I returned to American soil on Saturday, Oct. 23. My first conversation about my trip took place at U.S. Customs in Houston, where an official who looked young enough to be born after the war ended peppered me with questions.
"How long were you in Vietnam?" he asked, examining my journalist's visa.
"Eight days," I said.
"What were you doing there?"
"Reporting on Agent Orange."
He looked up, stared at me for a few moments.
"Agent Orange?" he said. "Isn't that old news?"
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