Agent Orange

This is the list of References:

"The Call"

Pictures borrowed from chatdocdacam.info

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The US Fund for Reconciliation and Development's Main Site

The Amicus written to the U.S District Court at Brooklyn, New York.

Agent Orange

The pain that needs to be healed .

By Patmol Black

He is a boy born without arms..Everything he wants to do depends totally on his parents, from eating to going to bed, from moving to bathing. Life certainly plays a very hard time on him. However, he still lives for the love of his parents and also for his own sake even though the nightmare keeps going on and on day after day. He wants to go to school. But he has no hands to write, so, he thinks about using his toes to hold the pencil. At first it is very difficult, the muscle pain often occurs and it is so intense that he would never forget it until the end of his life. This is the kind of story you'd hear about most of the Vietnamese childern born without arms in Vietnam.

This disability is not natural. Along with various other kinds of birth defects and sometimes even blood cancer, it is caused by Agent Orange, the chemical herbicide used by America in order to kill plants which served as a camouflage for guerilla fighters during the Vietnam War.

According to Wikipedia, Agent Orange as a military defoliant was used from 1961 and discontinued in 1971, after over 6000 spraying missions in Vietnam and Cambodia, causing serious harms to the health of exposed Vietnameses, Cabodians and Americans, their children and grandchildren

An April 2003 report paid for by the National Academy of Sciences concludes that during this war, 3,181 villages were sprayed directly with herbicides. Between 2.1 and 4.8 million people "would have been present during the spraying". Furthermore, many U.S military personnel were also sprayed or came in contact with herbicides in those recently sprayed areas.

The American Government should be responsible for the pain of those still suffering from Agent Orange, the deadly chemical warfare.

What America with its Agent Orange has caused to innocent people:

Agent Orange. also know as "the fire that doesn't burn", causes very serious health disorders.

Agent Orange is a colorless liquid. It got its name from the stripes on the barrels used to transport it. It is a product of America, produced under contract for the Army by companies such as Diamond Shamrock, Dow, Hercules, Monsanto, T-H Agricultural & Nutrition, Thompson Chemicals and Uniroyal.

Agent Orange which contains dioxin- the most toxic chemical known to science- disabled and sickened soldiers, civilians and several generations of their offsrping on two continents.

Medical evidence inidcates that certain cancers (for example: soft tissue non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma), diabete (type II) and in children spina bifida and other birth defects are attributable to the exposure of Agent Orange.

First, second and third generations of the Vietnamese population, those who participated to the war or belong to the village belonging to the spraying areas suffered these effects.

America created X Men, in which the mutation gives way to human evolution. You also have Daredevil in which the main character after somehow getting a biological substance in his eyes, became blind but with an extremely sensitive hearing capacity. Well, mutation in real life doesn't fit into any of these fantasies.

Although powerful and touching, these pictures can never represent all of the suffering still going on.

Imagine a young Vietname couple hoping to build a happy family after the war has passed. Either the husband has been soldier or they were present during the spraying of Agent Orange. Their first child had birh defects and died soon after being born. Their hope is still there so they had the second. But the same thing happened for the second and maybe even the third. And in Vietnam, because of superstition, people believe that when the kids have incurable sickness, it is because of all the wrong things their parents have been doing in this life or in their previous life.

These Vietnamese, yet poor and ignorant, are wrong. The culprit of this is neither God nor fortune. The American government should hold all the responsibility for this.

The American government has a moral and legal obligation, under international law, to compensate the people of Vietnam for the devastating