



Link Copied



KAMPOUT TUK, Cambodia—Paris Dauk’s left arm lies close to her chest, reminiscent of how a bird bears a broken wing. She’s talkative and has a propensity to fill her face, itself marked by abnormal growths, with a toothy grin. Yet while the bird’s wing may eventually heal, Dauk’s limb will not, remaining forever crumpled, underdeveloped, and, ultimately, deformed. Dauk, 24, is among several people in border villages in southeast Cambodia who, despite being born to families with no history of deformities, came out of the womb with defects that include missing or shortened limbs, abnormal head growths, and developmental disabilities. These deformities, earlier reported by The Phnom Penh Post, appear only in those born after 1970––the year elders say the United States sprayed parts of their village, which sits about a mile from Cambodia’s border with Vietnam, with a powder that irritated their eyes and killed surrounding plants. Residents, and some researchers, now say this powder was likely Agent Orange, the U.S.’s favored dioxin-laced Vietnam War defoliant, which scientists say causes cancer and heart disease in those directly exposed and an array of birth defects in their descendants. President John F. Kennedy approved the first defoliant-spraying missions in the early 1960s, a period during which tens of thousands of Communist Vietcong guerrillas had infiltrated and begun recruiting forces within U.S.-aligned South Vietnam. Until 1971, aiming to decimate the vegetation that provided the Vietcong with cover and sustenance, the U.S. sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of defoliants, at least 11 million gallons of which was Agent Orange. But the guerrillas’ infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail jutted into Cambodia and Laos; where it did, American bombs and Agent Orange often followed.

Critics say American assistance for the 4.8 million affected Vietnamese is even more lacking. A single 2010 congressional earmarking provided more than $13 billion for dioxin-affected Americans; the same body has, in sum, appropriated only $255 million to address the chemical’s effects on the Vietnamese. And while the U.S. has offered at least some support to dioxin-affected Vietnamese, no American governmental body has appropriated any funds for similarly suffering Cambodians and Laotians—even though U.S. records, along with academic analyses, detail what the VA calls “heavy” defoliant spraying in parts of those countries. For example, scientists from institutions including Columbia University and the Institute for Cancer Prevention analyzed U.S. records in a 2003 Nature article and found that the U.S. dispersed approximately 475,500 and 40,900 gallons of Agent Orange in Laos and Cambodia, respectively. They deemed the documentation of spraying in Laos to be “incomplete” and noted that undocumented spray drift may also have occurred in Cambodia. Elders in Koki Som, a Cambodian commune I visited in mid-April, uniformly claimed in interviews that in 1970, the U.S. sprayed chemicals there, or close enough across the border that the wind carried it into the village. The year stuck in their memory because it remains marked nationwide as “the year of the coup,” in which U.S.-allied General Lon Nol ousted King Norodom Sihanouk––a political development that set the stage for the Khmer Rouge’s takeover and subsequent reign of violence.

Read: How young Vietnamese view the Vietnam War “They sprayed it, not during daytime, but when the sun was almost set,” Sarun Khoun, Dauk’s 67-year-old grandfather, told me. He said that his eyes burned for days, and that he now suffers from constant chest pain and coughing fits. Thon Bun, a village chief, said it was “as if someone rubbed chili in your eyes.” Bun, who, like many other rural Cambodians, responded to American bombardment by enlisting as a soldier in the Khmer Rouge, told me that he and his grandchildren, along with about 40 other villagers, suffer from constant respiratory distress. “We hear from locals in the heavily sprayed regions of Savannakhet and Salavan in Laos who describe exactly the spray formations,” said Susan Hammond, the founder and executive director of the War Legacies Project, an NGO dedicated to supporting those affected by the Vietnam War’s legacy on the ground. But, she told me, those Laotians’ accounts do not correspond with official U.S. records of so-called spray runs. Despite lacking American recorded validation, dioxin’s legacy in Koki Som is inescapable. Khen Kim, Koki Som’s commune chief, told me that though his family had no history of deformities, two of his grandchildren were born with such ailments: His granddaughter cannot speak clearly, and her legs, he said, “end at her ankles,” while his grandson has clubbed arms and a large lump where the bridge of his nose and forehead meet. One village official told me that his brother died after coming out of the womb without a uvula; another said two of his grandchildren were born with deformities—one without a uvula, the other without a nose—and both died hours after birth; two teenage girls I met function mentally as infants.

Because of the covert nature of U.S. operations in Cambodia and Laos, historians told me it’s even unclear how many veterans served in those countries without entering Vietnam. But there are certainly some: Gary Beatty, a retired lawyer and the president of the Thailand-Laos-Cambodia Brotherhood, a veterans’ service group, told me that he served in Laos and Thailand without stepping foot in Vietnam. The Vietnam War historian H. Bruce Franklin said in an email that many veterans fought in Laos exclusively, but that estimating how many remains difficult “because some who were on active duty were dishonestly masked as civilian contractors.” Agent Orange outlived the borderless Vietnam War and, by skulking hereditarily, will outlive the conflict’s veterans to endow not only Vietnamese, but also Cambodians, Laotians, and Americans, with lifelong defects. “What is needed the most is health care,” Kim, the commune chief, told me, explaining that families with affected children spend at least $2,000 on treatment for each child, an exorbitant sum, given that the median annual income in Cambodia is just $1,300. But in Koki Som, where everyone older than middle-aged either took part in or suffered from the Khmer Rouge’s regime of violence, anguish is normalized. Residents whose lives have been marked by American bombardment, genocide, foreign occupation, civil war, and now contemporary poverty and dictatorship know that life has not been and will not soon become easy. They expect no reprieve; looking into the past, despite its impact on the present, does them no good, they say. “It took place in a long-gone past,” Khoun, Dauk’s grandfather, told me when asked whether he blames the U.S. for his granddaughter’s defects. “I do not think of what happened in the past.” Chan Muyhong contributed reporting and translation.