There are people around the world who have devoted their time and energy to understanding the legacy of Agent Orange and coming up with solutions to address this problem. These champions come from all different backgrounds and levels of expertise, but all are true humanitarians that are helping make Agent Orange history.
Members of Rotary International and Vietnam Dialogue Group
at the dedication of a water system in Dong Son Commune
(central Viet Nam, May 2012)
Our Man in Hanoi
Charles Bailey Tackles
the Vietnam War's Unfinished Business
By Peter Slavin
Swarthmore College Bulletin
For
years Charles Bailey ’67 has awakened every morning thinking about his job: how
to restore the ruined fields, forests, and rice paddies and help the human
casualties of Agent Orange in Vietnam. For the Vietnamese people, Agent Orange
has been the lasting curse of what they call “the American War.”
Five
months after the Ford Foundation made Bailey its man in Hanoi in 1997, he went
to the central highlands, the locus of heavy fighting during the war. Coming
upon a huge pine-tree plantation in a valley, it dawned on him, as an
agricultural economist, that the pines had been planted where an entire jungle
had once stood. He learned that the valley had been wiped clean by aerial
spraying during the war. He thought of Agent Orange, the most common and most
toxic of the chemical herbicides applied in vast quantities by the U.S.
military from 1961 to 1971.
The
aim was to destroy all vegetation and thereby eliminate the Viet Cong’s food
sources and hiding places. Vietnam’s Red Cross estimates that herbicides cut
short the lives or disabled up to 3 million adults and children. And the impact
apparently continues with a third generation.
DIOXIN
STILL DEBILITATING
The
great concern of the Vietnamese has been these children, the offspring of
people exposed to the spraying. “Almost 50 years later, babies are being born
disabled,” says former Ford Foundation President Susan Berresford. “They’re not
even the children of people who were in the war. They’re just children who live
in an area where they imbibe the fish or duck or whatever it is that carries
this.” Despite the claims, the U.S. government has been highly skeptical for
decades of dioxin’s impact on human health.
Dioxin
is the chief contaminant in Agent Orange. It’s a class of chemicals so
poisonous it is tested in parts per trillion and remains toxic for decades. The
diseases attributed to it include cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and nerve
disorders. At least one generation of Vietnamese children has been afflicted
with birth defects, including spina bifida. The Vietnamese also blame dioxin
for children born with extra fingers and toes.
The
more than 2 million American troops in Vietnam who may have been exposed to
Agent Orange—how many to a dangerous degree is unknown—eventually won the
possibility of aid from Congress. Any Vietnam veteran who later developed any
of 14 diseases and conditions is entitled to disability compensation, expected
to total $42 billion by 2022. By contrast, the United States offered Vietnam no
help in dealing with Agent Orange until a few years ago.
THE
FROZEN PERIOD
After
visiting the highlands 14 years ago, Bailey tried to determine the extent of
the damage that Agent Orange inflicted in Vietnam. “But nobody [from either
nation] wanted to talk about it at all,” he says. The two countries were miles
apart on the question of American accountability for the legacy of Agent
Orange. At one pole were the Vietnamese who demanded justice for Agent Orange’s
human and ecological casualties; at the other were Americans who insisted on
scientific proof that the chemical was responsible. Bailey calls these years of
deadlock “the frozen period.”
The
more he learned, the more dismayed he became by how his government had muddied
the waters and evaded its responsibility for Agent Orange’s aftermath. He grew
increasingly aware of the defiled land, lingering dioxin “hot spots,” and the
ill health and disabilities among the Vietnamese—the war’s “open wounds,” as a
report later put it.
Then
a U.S. embassy official presented plans to spend $50 million on large-scale
testing in Vietnam “to show that the dioxin in people’s bodies came from
sources other than the U.S. spraying during the war,” Bailey recalls. The plan
went nowhere, but it fired his resolve to do something about Agent Orange. He
decided his foundation could go where diplomats feared to tread. He has been
walking that fine line between polarized camps ever since.
Initially,
it was a slog. The frozen period went on and on. Though Bailey wanted to give
the Vietnamese grants for Agent Orange projects, between 1998 and 2005 he was
able to fund just three. “People did not want to work on it,” he says,
marveling. “I’d never had anyone anywhere in the world not want a grant from
the Ford Foundation.”
That’s
something, considering Bailey spent spent more than three decades as a grant
maker for the foundation, working in the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East,
and Africa besides Southeast Asia. After graduating from Swarthmore with a
history degree, Bailey was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal, then picked up an
M.P.A. in public policy from Princeton before joining Ford in 1972. He later
earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Cornell University.
BREAKING
THE ICE
Work
did get underway on the three grants Bailey arranged for Vietnam. The first
provided wheelchairs, prosthetics, and other help to people with disabilities.
Next, Bailey sought to assess all 2,735 former U.S. military bases in southern
Vietnam to identify any that still harbored dangerous levels of dioxin.
Remarkably, a Canadian study found that dioxin no longer contaminated the soil
in landscapes where it had been sprayed. It was concentrated primarily at
former U.S. bases where it had been stored and loaded aboard aircraft. The
third grant funded a conference at which Vietnamese and American officials
finally broke the ice, talking informally about Agent Orange.
In
2004, a new American ambassador, Michael Marine, arrived in Hanoi. Marine drew
on Bailey’s work to make the case that the United States should do more. He
found Bailey’s very different attitude “tremendously important, because at that
time everyone else was turning their backs on the issue.” Agent Orange was “a
dead issue” until Bailey came along, Marine said, according to Susan
Berresford.
The
turning point came when President George W. Bush visited Vietnam in 2006. For
the first time, a joint communiqué between the two countries included a
one-sentence mention of “environmental contamination near former dioxin storage
sites.” That aside may have been partly prompted by Agent Orange information
Bailey gave a Washington Post reporter, whose front-page story about the
unresolved issue appeared just days before the visit. But the communiqué steered
clear of mentioning Agent Orange or dioxin’s effects on people.
SEEKING
CONSENSUS
The
communiqué marked the first official U.S. acknowledgement of the consequences
of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But the two countries remained at an impasse
concerning what to do about it. So Bailey turned to what’s known as track two
diplomacy—arranging for prominent private citizens from both countries to meet
and explore how to resolve conflicts concerning Agent Orange. Track two, says
Bailey, is “citizen-to-citizen diplomacy to resolve conflict that official
channels can’t handle.” Most participants were experts in fields such as
toxicology and disability services. Bailey dubbed it the Dialogue Group.
It took him more than
a year to recruit former ambassador Ton Nu Thi Ninh, vice chair of the National
Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee, to lead the Vietnamese side. Trusting the
Ford Foundation, the Vietnamese asked Berresford to play a role, and she still
chairs the group. Bailey recruited author and Aspen Institute President Walter
Isaacson to head the American side. The group grew eventually from seven to 11.
The Dialogue Group quickly settled on five top priorities: clean up the dioxin
hot spots, expand services for people with disabilities, establish a laboratory
so Vietnam could test blood and soil samples itself, restore damaged
landscapes, understand the disability issue, and publicize the Agent Orange
story in the United States. The group has made big strides in all these areas.
The
second Ford Foundation grant had found dioxin remained dangerous only where 28
American bases had stood. According to Bailey, “herbicides had been stored,
leaked, or spilled during handling, so that dioxin soaked into the soil or …
into rivers, lakes, and ponds. From there the toxin has moved up the food chain
to the fat of fish and ducks and into human tissue.” Three of these sites were
especially toxic—the bases at Da Nang and Phu Cat on the coast and Bien Hoa to
the south. Most spraying flights were launched from these airfields and when
the program ended, unused stocks were collected at Da Nang, Bien Hoa and
elsewhere.
BREAKING
NEW GROUND
The
area of the Da Nang airport, where drums of herbicide had been stored, proved
to be highly contaminated. Breast milk and blood samples from people who
previously worked cleaning draining ditches or fished from a nearby lake showed
the highest dioxin levels ever recorded among Vietnamese, more than 100 times
international limits.
Environmental
remediation started at Da Nang’s airport. Ford began funding the sealing and
cordoning off of contaminated soil, a way to get American and Vietnamese
officials to begin working together. As a result, by 2008, dioxin no longer
threatened the health of people near the airport. Since then the two
governments have designed and financed the cleanup, slated to begin this
summer. They also have cooperated in expanded social services for several
thousand people with disabilities near the airport. Da Nang is the first place
the former enemies have worked together successfully on Agent Orange.
The
United States also has provided modest funds ($11.4 million) to aid Vietnamese
disabled by dioxin and their families. All in all, Congress has appropriated
$60 million to deal with dioxin’s aftermath. Bailey spent $12 million of Ford
Foundation funds in country and so far has spent $5 million outside to win
support from key American groups and raised another $23 million from private
and international sources. Still, only an estimated 19,000 to 23,000 Vietnamese
with disabilities are being helped.
Vietnam
itself has not been idle, in fact, “has worked steadily since 1980 to deal with
Agent Orange/dioxin remnants on its own,” says Bailey. Hanoi provides $50
million a year in small monthly allowances for people with disabilities believed
caused by Agent Orange/dioxin.
“Its
activities in this area are … avidly reported by Vietnamese news media,”
according to Bailey. Vietnam’s Red Cross has raised another $22 million to
assist the disabled poor.
FUNDRAISING
PAYING OFF
Bailey
has kept on the go outside Vietnam as well, both as an Agent Orange remediation
advocate and fundraiser. The formation of the Dialogue Group five years ago
gave a big boosts to his efforts to raise money to help the Vietnamese. Since
then, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies have
funded the dioxin-testing lab. Rockefeller Foundation, Hyatt Hotels, and HSBC
Bank have agreed to fund innovative and expanded social services for children
and youth with disabilities in Da Nang, forming a public/private partnership.
Bailey
also has enlisted many civic groups, persuading Rotary, for example, to help
fund a clean-water system in a dioxin-contaminated village near the Laotian
border. He raised funds for a program that brings 15 college-age
Vietnamese-Americans to Vietnam each year to work with nongovernmental (NGO)
organizations to help kids and young adults with disabilities. He’s won
financial aid from the United Nations and several countries.
In
addition, he formed a media-strategy team to raise awareness of Agent Orange
back home. The results include a focus group and national opinion poll on the
subject and seven websites operated by NGOs to do media outreach. One NGO has
targeted Vietnam’s worldwide diaspora in pioneering online giving for young
Vietnamese with disabilities, while San Francisco State University sent teams
of journalists to report on Agent Orange. Their work won many prizes.
SEEDS
OF HOPE
“He’s
planted a lot of seeds,” notes Ellen Schneider, who developed one of the
websites. She is impressed by something else. Despite his success, he “is the
most humble man I’ve ever known,” Schneider says. She’s also struck by how
respectful of people he is. All this may hark back to his days at Swarthmore,
where, Bailey says, he was strongly influenced by Quaker tradition.
Bailey
was on campus at the height of the Vietnam War, which he examined in Professor
Kenneth Waltz’s international relations seminar. Concluding Vietnam was not a
just war, he joined an antiwar demonstration in Washington, D.C., and
considered becoming a conscientious objector. As it happened, when he joined
the Peace Corps, his draft board continued his student deferment, and when the
lottery replaced the draft, he lucked out with high numbers. Bailey maintains
his affinity with the College as the proud father of Eliza ’14 and member of
the Parents Council.
A
SOLID CLEAN-UP PLAN
In
2010, the Dialogue Group proposed a 10-year plan for the two countries, calling
for a humanitarian effort to make major inroads against Agent Orange. The
plan’s goals are to clean up all the remaining 27 hot spots and restore damaged
ecosystems and to expand services to people with disabilities. The plan sets
the cost at $300 million and calls on public and private donors to help the
United States fund it. No one claims the plan will eliminate the problem
completely, which Berresford says probably will take 30 years.
Bailey
says the Dialogue Group’s “unique contribution” has been to transcend the
endless controversy over whether dioxin harms human health. “Its members,” he
says, “agree we should respond to the actual humanitarian needs today of people
with disabilities and stop arguing over causes.”
A
MEDAL FOR HIS METTLE
Over
time the U.S. government has moved closer to this position. Bailey’s Dialogue
Group probably has had something to do with this. He likes to say he took the
aftermath of Agent Orange “from barren ground to common ground,” from a dead
zone to practical action involving Vietnamese and Americans. This no doubt
helps explain why last fall Vietnam presented him with its highest honor for
foreigners, the Order of Friendship medal.
It
can’t hurt that Bailey immersed himself in learning Vietnamese and speaks it
fluently enough that he can run a meeting in the language. Bailey himself says
he speaks it “well enough to move comfortably around the country talking with
people in different walks of life.”
What
has kept Bailey doggedly trying to settle the war’s unfinished business since
1998? Three factors: a sense of obligation to act when he sees a problem he can
do something about; optimism about his ability to do so; and a sense of urgency
about the need to lighten the burden on the Vietnamese. He says Nguyen Trong
Nhan, a physician and former president of the nation’s Red Cross, taught him
“what it meant to live with disability and disease.”
LIVING
UP TO THE CHALLENGE
From Nhan, he learned
that the disabled and their families bear “a burden from which there is no
escape.”
“Disability,” Bailey likes to say, “never takes a holiday.”
Bailey
admired the doctor’s fortitude despite personal losses in the war and felt he
had to live up to the challenge of Agent Orange as a matter of humanity and his
responsibilities as an American. Also, he says, “once begun, it was impossible
to stop.”
The
Ford Foundation left Vietnam in 2009, but Bailey has returned frequently to
work on Agent Orange. In May 2011 he joined the Aspen Institute, where he
continues his mission. He does not expect, however, to still lead the way when
the 10-year plan ends. It is younger people, he predicts, perhaps Vietnamese
Americans, “who will finally make Agent Orange history.”
