“War without end”

30 April 1975 – a date that has little meaning for many people in our part of the world. For the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, it was a day of hope and a brief turning point in decades of suffering: It was the official end of the Second Indochina War, which lasted from 1955 to 30 April 1975.¹ But for the people of Vietnam, the suffering continued even after 1975, and it continues to this day.

The Journalist Peter Jaeggi and the photographer Roland Schmid, who have been in Vietnam repeatedly since 1999, have turned against this forgetting. They documented the consequences of the massive use of Agent Orange and other highly toxic herbicides but also poisonous gases.
  Their work is currently being shown in a photo exhibition (with the telling title “War without end”) at the Photobastei Zurich. On 17 walls, it deals with various areas in which the lives of people in Vietnam (and also Laos and Cambodia) have been severely affected since the end of the war. The exhibition is complemented by Peter Jaeggi’s highly informative and readable book “Krieg ohne Ende. Chemiewaffen im Vietnamkrieg” (War without end. – Chemical weapons in the Vietnam War).²

The second Vietnam War –
on the backs of the civilian population

When the second Vietnam War came to an end in 1975, two decades had passed. Officially, North Vietnam (and the Viet Cong or the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam NLF, founded in December 1960) and South Vietnam, supported by the USA, had faced each other. The communist-ruled North Vietnam and the military dictatorship in South Vietnam were the two parts into which the country was provisionally divided along the 17^th latitude at the Geneva Indochina Conference in 1954. Free elections were planned for 1956, but were rejected by South Vietnam (with the support of the USA).
  In 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, the United States began to increase its involvement. The first military advisers were sent to Vietnam. In August of the same year, the US Army was authorised to use herbicides. The official government explanation was that the defoliant, which contained highly toxic dioxin, was intended to destroy the enemy’s camouflage and food sources. “We’re going to blow the damn country to hell,” President Nixon declared in 1971. This had already begun under the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969). Richard M. Nixon (1969–1974) escalated the conflict until 1971. The USA temporarily supported the South Vietnamese government with more than 16,000 military advisers. After the Tonkin incident, which later turned out to be a deception, the US intervened directly in the war in August 1964. At the height of the war, more than 500,000 US soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. Widespread herbicide spraying began in 1965 – despite knowledge of the dangers of the herbicide manufactured by Dow Chemical, which was used as a chemical weapon!
  In 1973, Henry A. Kissinger, who had played a central role in US foreign policy during the Vietnam War, and Le Duc Tho, the head of the North Vietnamese military operations, finally met in Paris for peace negotiations. They were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year. Le Duc Tho rejected it because there was still no peace. The war continued for another two years and ended with the first military defeat of the United States of America.³ Once again, it was a proxy war between East and West. It was fought on the backs of the civilian population on foreign territory and left millions of dead in a country smaller than Germany, which was littered with around 26 million bomb craters at the end of the war.

Agent Orange – the everlasting poison

“Wars don’t end when the bombs stop falling and the fighting stops. The destruction lasts much longer, in the landscape as well as in people’s memories and bodies.”⁴ In today’s tourist destination Vietnam, the terrible consequences of the war are not obvious – even though fifty years after the end of the war hundreds of thousands of people in this country are suffering as a result – because the families affected hardly show their faces in public. At least eighty million litres of toxic herbicides, mainly Agent Orange (the military name for the poison), were sprayed by the US armed forces and their allies between 1961 and 1971 from aircraft, boats or containers carried on their backs over South Vietnam and across the border over Laos and partly Cambodia. During its production by Monsanto (now Bayer), Dow Chemical and around thirty other companies, the chlorine-containing toxic substance TCDD (tetrachloride benzo dioxin) was created due to excessively high temperatures – production was to be accelerated. It is considered one of the most toxic chemicals and later became notorious as the Seveso poison. They knew that Agent Orange was dangerous, but played it down. The soldiers were told that it was an anti-mosquito agent. In 1966, 5,000 scientists, including 17 Nobel Prize winners and 129 members of the National Academy of Science, petitioned against this gross deception and demanded an immediate end to the use of herbicides in Vietnam. “The continued extensive use of chemicals and gas in Vietnam sets a dangerous precedent,” they rightly warned. The letter was ignored by the government, and the war continued for nine years. Today, the US government recognises dozens of physical and psychological injuries caused by this poison.⁵

Two different standards –
two different kinds of people?

American soldiers suffering from one of the many recognised illnesses receive support. It is difficult to establish a direct causal link between disease patterns and exposure to Agent Orange, but it is obvious. The dioxin it contains can damage genetic material over generations. US veterans therefore only have to prove that they were in places where the poison was used.
  It is different for the Vietnamese dioxin victims. The Vietnamese Red Cross estimates that one million people are still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange in their country today. VAVA, the Vietnamese Association for Agent Orange and Dioxin Victims, estimates that around 4.8 million people came into contact with the highly toxic herbicide. Today, children are being born with birth defects even in the fourth generation. However, the American government denies a connection between the poison gas and the illnesses of the Vietnamese victims. Proof of this must be provided by the sufferers themselves. The reason given for this approach is that the herbicide was used to protect the American soldiers and that they did not realise at the time how dangerous Agent Orange and other herbicides were for people and nature …

Decontamination
campaigns and mine victims

One of the largest decontamination operations in history is currently underway in South Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of dioxin-containing soil are being decontaminated at the Bien Hoa airbase, once an Agent Orange transhipment point. More than a fifth of all Agent Orange victims in the area are considered to be severely disabled. The dioxin is to be eliminated by heating it to 300–350 degrees. However, the German environmental scientist Lorenz Adrian, professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, clearly questions whether this method works. Dioxin only burns into its components at 1200 degrees, otherwise it would even cause new dioxins to form, he writes.
  In addition to Agent Orange mines, the dangerous legacy of the US-Vietnam War includes hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordnances, especially in the central Vietnamese province of Quang Tri, where a temporary border once divided Vietnam. Farmers in this agriculturally utilised area can only use their land at great risk. Today, landmines and other unexploded ordnance are removed in the Project Renew, and children have to learn to recognise them. However, it is estimated that over 100,000 people have been injured or killed by landmines or other unexploded ordnance since 1975. There are hundreds of new victims every year (also in Cambodia and Laos). Then there are the napalm victims, provided they survived the severe third-degree burns. The USA dropped almost 100,000 tonnes of the chemical warfare agent on Vietnam.

‘Sometimes I am so tired’

During their work in Vietnam, Peter Jaeggi and Roland Schmid got to know many people whose fates were shaped by the long war. We get to know some of them in the exhibition and in the book mentioned above. They live away from the tourist stream in poor conditions. For example, Hoang The, who lives in the dark and damp rooms of a run-down house with a corrugated iron roof in a swampy outlying neighbourhood of Da Nang, together with her two grown-up children. Both children are severely physically and mentally handicapped and both are dioxin victims. Daughter Tran Thi Nga can barely get around with a kind of rickety rollator. Their son Tran Duc Nghia lies bent, completely motionless and paralysed. He has not been able to get out of bed for almost two decades. He has also lost his hearing and speech. His father often came into contact with the highly toxic Agent Orange during the war as a member of the resistance. He died in 2002. Jaeggi and Schmid met the mother again seven years later in 2022. She is now 84 years old. Her severely disabled son died in 2016 at the age of 42. The musty house was demolished. Her son from her second marriage built a beautiful new home for himself, his mother and her disabled daughter. But the task of caring for her severely disabled daughter remains. “Sometimes I’m so tired – I just want to die. But there is my daughter …” The war never ended for Hoang The.⁶

It was just a spray mist

Not even for Tran To Nga, born in 1942, who was also a former resistance fighter and later an Agent Orange victim. Her first child, a girl, had breathing problems and purple discoloured skin just a few months after birth. She died of a heart defect at 17 months. An operation could have saved her – but was not possible in the jungle. The second child, another girl, had a spinal deformity, the same incurable blood disorder as her mother and breathing problems. The reason for this was the dioxin contained in the genetic material, which can lead to deformities, as was later the case with the second daughter’s children. Despite her difficult fate, Tran To Nga remained a courageous fighter. She sued fourteen chemical companies that had produced the highly toxic defoliant. In May 2021, the six-year trial ended in the Evry district court near Paris. During this time, the Vietnamese-French woman had to endure insults and verbal abuse from the chemical companies’ lawyers. She was told that her Agent Orange stories were lies: “The woman said that the spray from the aeroplane that I fell into at the time didn’t even hit the ground, that the droplets were so tiny that they didn’t even reach the ground,” Tran To Nga quotes a lawyer for the opposing party.
  The court case ended with a scandalous judgement. After all these years, the court declared that it had no jurisdiction and dismissed Tran To Nga’s lawsuit. She appealed, but in 2024 the 2021 judgement was upheld and the companies were granted immunity. At the end of the trial, she was asked by the court president whether she would like to speak again. But this did not happen. The lawyer for an American chemical company jumped up. “Madame Nga has spoken enough,” he said, although she had mostly remained silent. “To me, this reaction was evidence of fear. He was afraid of the older woman standing there all alone in court,” the courageous woman categorised this belittlement.⁷

The other America

Many American soldiers who returned from Vietnam were severely affected in their attitude to life. They suffered from depression, had sleepless nights and were unable to find their way back to an orderly life. Others, each in their own way, endeavoured to make amends for what they had done as soldiers in Vietnam. One of them was George Mizo, who had enthusiastically joined the Vietnam War. Having narrowly escaped death himself, he became a prominent peace campaigner and, together with his wife and former enemies in Vietnam, built an entire village for war victims – Làng Hữu Nghị, the Village of Friendship.⁸ Shortly after its inauguration, he died from the long-term effects of Agent Orange. – David Edward Clark was prepared to die for his country during the Vietnam War. He wanted, as the government said, to defend the freedom of the USA. On his 17^th birthday, he therefore enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and went to war for his country. He survived. “When I came home to the USA from the Vietnam War at the age of 21, I never wanted to go back. Never again. […] I had simply seen too much. I didn’t want to go back. You know, I … I had seen too many people die. I … I had seen too many dead children,” he said in an interview with Peter Jaeggi.⁹ Today he lives with his Vietnamese wife Ushi in Da Nang in central Vietnam, not far from his former battlefield. He uses humanitarian work to counteract his war experiences. – Chuck Searcy, an American war veteran, joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and Veterans for Peace. After the war, he returned to Vietnam, where he now lives and works with other US veterans in the former enemy territory to alleviate the consequences of the war. He helps Agent Orange victims and is a co-founder of Project Renew, which defuses unexploded ordnance. In 2022, he said in an interview: “I believe that the war in Vietnam was wrong in almost every respect, that it almost destroyed Vietnam and caused serious damage to the USA. We should have learnt many lessons from that experience, and we didn’t. Since 1975 we have continued these military blunders in more than thirty countries that the US military has invaded or occupied or attacked. We have not learnt much from that experience”.¹⁰ •

¹ The first Indochina War lasted from 1946 to 1954, when France fought against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DPR), founded in 1945, and did not accept the independence of Vietnam proclaimed by Ho Chi Minh, which signalled the end of French colonial rule.
² The following account is mainly based on the exhibition guide, the media dossier for the exhibition and the book by Peter Jaeggi,  Krieg ohne Ende. Chemiewaffen im Vietnamkrieg – Agent Orange und andere Kriegsverbrechen (War without end. Chemical weapons in the Vietnam War – Agent Orange and other war crimes). Basel: Lenos-Press 2024. 408 pages with more than 100 photos and graphics.
Unspecified quotations are also taken from these sources.
³ For a detailed chronology of the events of the war, see Jaeggi, p. 215f.
⁴ Stockholm Declaration on the long-term consequences of the war in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, July 2002.
⁵ Jaeggi, p. 36ff.
⁶ Jaeggi, p. 24
⁷ Jaeggi, p. 164ff.
⁸ https://dorf-der-freundschaft.de/
⁹ Jaeggi, p. 290
¹⁰ Jaeggi, p. 301