An Agent for Change –
Susan Hammond and
the War Legacies Project

By Roberta Nubile

For many, the Vietnam War is now relegated to history textbooks. While Americans might be aware of how it affected U.S. veterans, less is known here of its impact on the Vietnamese people. And we’re rarely reminded that the latter still suffer from one aspect of the war in particular: the use of Agent Orange.

Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. sprayed 21 million gallons of Agent Orange over southern Viet Nam, as well as Laos and Cambodia, to defoliate dense forests and improve visibility for planes. The toxic herbicide contained TCDD, the most dangerous form of dioxin, which is itself “among the most toxic anthropogenic substances ever identified,” according to a 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences. The side effects of exposure include increased rates of premature births, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, a range of birth defects, and uterine cancer.

According to the War Legacies Project (WLP) – a non-profit now based in the southeastern Vermont town of Bartonsville – approximately three million Vietnamese currently suffer from Agent Orange-related illnesses or disabilities, including 150,000 children affected by their parents’ exposure.

WLP Director Sue Hammond has made it her life’s work to raise public awareness of the lingering effects of Agent Orange on the Vietnamese people, as well as increase direct aid to them.

“Vietnam is not taught in some high schools. It is a war people know about but don’t understand,” Hammond says. “Now, forty years later, the [war is] still killing hundreds of people a year. Most don’t hear about that and don’t understand how a decision to go to war [years ago] can still have an impact today.”

That impact was measured in a 2001 study of residents of the southern Vietnamese city of Bien Hoa, jointly conducted by University of Texas professor Arnold Schecter and Hanoi Red Cross executive director Le Cao Dai. The study found that, 30 years after the end of Agent Orange spraying, residents exhibited highly elevated levels of dioxin in their blood – even those who didn’t live there during the Vietnam War or were born after the hostilities ended.

In the U.S., veterans of the Vietnam War may be eligible for disability compensation and health care benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs for diseases associated with exposure to this and other herbicides. According to Hammond, however, the U.S. does not officially recognize similar diseases and birth defects as linked to dioxin exposure when they occur among the Vietnamese population.

“The prevailing attitude of the U.S. government is that you can’t trace disabilities directly to Agent Orange, that there is not enough scientific evidence. That is partly the way dioxin works,” Hammond explains. “But we see pockets of people in Viet Nam with much higher numbers of severe disabilities, whether it’s [because of] the A.O., or also those areas food was targeted, or the malnutrition stress of living in a war environment. I see it as one of many parts of the puzzle [of] how war can affect a population even a generation later.”

A lawsuit filed in 2004 by the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange against the U.S. companies that manufactured the herbicides did much to energize grassroots efforts in Viet Nam, says Hammond, but it was dismissed at the Supreme Court level.

But some money is starting to come to Viet Nam from the U.S. government to address the effects of dioxin in that country. This initiative is largely due to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy’s efforts, Hammond says. Leahy earmarked $3 million in the 2007 Iraq spending bill for supporting Viet Nam’s dioxin remediation and public health programs.

Hammond has generated a number of support programs for the Vietnamese through WLP, with the help of volunteers in both the U.S. and Viet Nam. The list includes small-business and vocational training, home and classroom construction, surgery support, and early detection and prevention of birth defects. In addition, Hammond travels constantly to raise awareness through lectures and films.

“All of our work develops through direct relationships,” Hammond explains. In one instance, she put a New York Times journalist in touch with a forester in central Viet Nam who was working to reverse the effects of herbicides on mountainous areas. The story caught the eye of a Wall Street investor who, intrigued by one solution mentioned in the article, sent WLP $30,000. Hammond passed the money on to the forester, who planted an additional 20,000 seedlings and created a community composting and recycling project based on the harvesting of rattan.

Hammond has been less successful securing funding from non-governmental organizations. “While they do great work, they will look at cost-benefit ratios and want to develop projects with a larger on-the-ground impact, i.e. a city where you can reach thousands. The areas I work in, families [are] spread out over many kilometers. It’s mostly rural and very poor,” she explains.

Much of Hammond’s funding comes from individuals or small family foundations – even, in one instance, a Vietnam War veteran. Before he died, Bob Feldman and his wife Nancy sought out Hammond and asked how they could get his disability benefits to go toward helping people in Viet Nam. Hammond created the Bob Feldman Fund through the War Legacy Project. When Feldman died in 2006, Hammond was shocked to learn that the fund contained $30,000 from his benefits and an additional $50,000 donated by friends of the family. “This money directly helped 150 families in income-generation projects,” she says. Since then, Nancy Feldman has continued to donate her widow’s benefits to the War Legacy Project through her husband’s fund.

Pausing between trips to Asia and setting up a new office space in her rural Vermont hometown, Hammond told us more about the origins and objectives of the War Legacies Project.

Vermont Woman: How did you first become interested in Viet Nam?

Sue Hammond: In early 1990, my sister and I took off on a bike trip for 18 months through Eastern Europe, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. While in Thailand, we found it was possible to go to Viet Nam as a tourist, and we went for two months to Viet Nam and Cambodia in spring 1991. I was curious about going there because my father was a Vietnam War veteran with the Army Corps of Engineers. I remember the war occurring, but not much more.

After this trip I decided I wanted to somehow get back to Viet Nam, as the post-war reconstruction of the country was fascinating to me. I worked for a while, then went to graduate school for international education. In 1996 I returned to Viet Nam to study Vietnamese language.

I learned that the Vietnamese were so forward-looking. Though you could still see the scars of the war in 1991 on the landscape and beggars on the street without limbs, the people of Viet Nam held no animosity towards Americans. It took many years of living and working there before Vietnamese began to talk to me about the war’s impact. They are not ones to raise their pain and suffering publicly.

Then, in 1997, I took a job based in New York City with the Fund for Reconciliation and Development. FRD is a non-profit organization that acts as a catalyst to heal U.S. relations with Cambodia, Laos, Viet Nam, and Cuba.

VW: What did you do at FRD?

SH: I worked for the fund for nine years. In the early ’90s, FRD was the only place to get a lot of information about Viet Nam. At that time there was still a U.S. trade embargo against Viet Nam. Generally, FRD is involved with post-war relationship issues. I did much work trying to change U.S. government policies and increase the engagement of non-profits with Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam. I lived in Cambodia for two years, then Laos a year, and then New York City but with a lot of back and forth to Viet Nam for the first five years. I organized conferences to bring together non-profits doing work in Cambodia, Laos, and Viet Nam, exchange and training programs, and matchmaking non-profits to development needs.

We wanted the second conference to be in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I thought I was going for six weeks and ended up coming home two years later. I had just signed a lease with a roommate in New York City and had to tell her I wouldn’t be back for an indefinite time. The conference kept getting delayed and rescheduled because of the unstable government at that time. It was unusual to bring NGOs from three countries to one place – close to 500 people. That’s why the stay was two years. I kept that apartment for nine years, but travelled back and forth to Asia several times a year for about a month each time. Luckily, my roommate was very understanding.

VW: How did your specific interest in Agent Orange develop?

SH: FRD looked at all the various long-term impacts of war on populations. About four to five years into working for them, in 2001, I was introduced to the effects of Agent Orange through a program in Viet Nam that we ran. In 2002 we received a grant from Oxfam to start the first major Agent Orange project to raise awareness in the U.S. about the impact of A.O. in Viet Nam. This involved bringing Vietnamese environmental and medical specialists to meet with American specialists and congressmen on A.O. and dioxin. We also built up our own Web site on A.O. with this grant.

Prior to this time, until they’d normalized relations with the U.S., Viet Nam didn’t want to publicly address Agent Orange. They thought it would hinder full diplomatic relations with the U.S. Gradually, the people I met influenced me to work for the effects of Agent Orange, and it snowballed from there.

VW: How and when did the War Legacies Project originate?

SH: Part of the reason for striking out on my own with the War Legacies Project was structural: the commuting I was doing between New York and Vermont was hard. I realized I could do this work from Vermont and be near my family. At the same time, FRD was doing more work with Cuba, and I was doing more and more of my own projects related to Agent Orange and the impact of the war, so it made sense to move this work to Vermont. With my director’s and the board’s blessing I started the War Legacies Project in 2006 and we applied for and received our own 501(c)3 status. For the first number of years after I started WLP, I worked on a bare minimum salary. Thankfully my sister let me live in her house. I was also lucky that I had a small family foundation [the Bob Feldman Fund] that supported WLP as we were just getting up and running.

VW: Who influenced you along the way?

SH: Dr. Le Cao Dai, who has since died, was very dynamic. He knew everything about the military history in the mountains, and through him I met other doctors. Dr. Dai was one of the first to speak on behalf of those affected by A.O. and established the Vietnam Red Cross Agent Orange Victims Fund in 1999. The Vietnamese government at this time was very hesitant to raise this issue because they were still in the early stages of reconciling relations with the U.S. and many did not want this issue of war legacies to interfere with this, but Dr. Dai and other doctors in Hanoi and in Saigon did not care about this and were very insistent and pushed their own government to pay attention to this issue, which they finally began to – but not until after the U.S. and Viet Nam normalized relations.

Through Dr. Dai I met a Vietnamese general, Nguyen Don Tu, who had retired to Hanoi. General Tu was active in a Vietnamese veterans organization and had written a letter to the army newspaper – the Nhan Dan, published by the military but nationally distributed and widely read – in the late ’90s requesting that the Vietnamese government be more responsive to those affected by A.O. The significance of the letter was that this was the first time anyone was so direct with their demands on the Vietnamese government to address the impacts of A.O. He could do this because he was a very well respected general.

I met General Tu’s wife and his youngest daughter, Nguyen Ha Lan, who’d been born after the war and was affected by A.O. with developmental disabilities. It was the first time I’d met someone affected by A.O. Prior to that, the information I knew about A.O. was through a newsletter I helped publish through FRD.

I already knew Generals Tu’s older daughter who lived and worked in New York. She was a very bright woman, the assistant to then President Madame Binh of Vietnam, and spoke several languages – the complete opposite of her younger sister. The contrast between the daughter born before the war and the daughter born after really struck me. I thought then, I’ve got to do something. I felt that responsibility.

After the visit with General Tu and his family I also visited some of the centers in Hanoi for children with disabilities who were believed to be affected by A.O. I met some very dynamic women doctors, and their determination to get help for these children was something that I could just not turn down. I had to get more involved.

Another story stands out for me. When I went to Hiep Duc, I met a father who’d been widowed. He had three daughters. The oldest had a learning disability, the middle was a deaf mute, and the youngest had severe developmental disabilities. He fixed bikes for a living, and I asked him what he needed most. He asked for a stool! It was getting harder for him to squat. He fixed bikes in his front yard. It struck me how little things make a huge difference. That little plastic stool cost one dollar. But through that, plus some other equipment we bought him, he was able to earn enough so the middle child could go to school and learn to read and write.

The people I meet inspire me. I know two boys in their mid-twenties who are both very bright but have severe physical deformities. Their mother would carry them to school until they became too heavy, then she tutored them at home. They both finished their degrees, and began to tutor other children for money. When I met them, they wanted computers to learn graphic design. I eventually got them a computer, and we talk on Skype now! I got them connected to an organization that empowers people with physical deformities.

When I went back and visited them, I found out that a Vietnamese businessperson had donated money to them to build a school, and a house for the boys to live separately from their mother.

VW: What do you know of your father’s tour of duty in Vietnam?

SH: It was never talked about. I knew that he was not in combat but worked as an engineer, so I did not think he was in any dangerous parts of the country where fighting was taking place. It was not until I was an adult and working in Viet Nam that he told me about the Tet Offensive in Saigon and how close he came to death, when the Jeep in front of him was bombed and two men he knew were killed.

He always made light of his service there, saying that while he was in Saigon he was ‘making sure the generals had ice for their martinis.’ I did not know that he was in charge of the military installations in Saigon and traveled all over the city. For most of the war this would not have been a dangerous area except for the Tet Offensive in ’68. And he was in Da Nang area in 1970-71 building and repairing roads and bridges. I did not know that he also traveled all over the Central Coast for this job as well. He now talks about the various towns he went to, many of the same towns I work in now.

My dad still does not talk much about the war. In fact I just recently learned that part of his job when we were living in Connecticut in 1969-70 was to go tell families that their sons had been killed in action. I had no idea that he had to do this. But he is very proud now of what I do to try to address the impacts of that war.

VW: What is your personal motivation for doing this work?

SH: My impetus for doing this work is to raise awareness in this country. We can’t just turn our backs and wash our hands of it. I operate under the precautionary principle that, even if you don’t know what the effects of a chemical are, you as a creator have the responsibility for its impact down the line. My work is to do what I can to raise awareness of how long-term and far-reaching the effects are.

I am a realist. I’d love to not have wars but we do. It’s not something you take lightly. If you are going to take action, you also have to take responsibility.

It’s hard to know the impact I have. Little things make a huge difference, though I may not realize it right away. But it’s great that I have the ability to bring these personal stories home.

For more information on the efforts of the War Legacies Project visit www.warlegacies.org

Roberta Nubile lives and writes in Shelburne.