The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago, but the battle with Agent Orange
continues
[April 28, 2025]
By ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL and HAU DINH
DA NANG, Vietnam (AP) — The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975, when
the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces. But
millions of people still face daily battles with its chemical legacy.
Nguyen Thanh Hai, 34, is one of millions with disabilities linked to
Agent Orange. Born with severe developmental challenges, it's a struggle
for him to complete tasks others take for granted: buttoning the blue
shirt he wears to a special school in Da Nang, practicing the alphabet,
drawing shapes or forming simple sentences.
Hai grew up in Da Nang, the site of a U.S. air base where departing
troops left behind huge amounts of Agent Orange that have lingered for
decades, leeching into food and water supplies in areas like Hai's
village and affecting generations of residents.
Across Vietnam, U.S. forces sprayed sprayed 72 million liters (19
million gallons) of defoliants during the war to strip the enemy's
cover. More than half was Agent Orange, a blend of herbicides.
Agent Orange was laced with dioxin, a type of chemical linked to cancer,
birth defects and lasting environmental damage. Today, 3 million people,
including many children, still suffer serious health issues associated
with exposure to it.
Vietnam has spent decades cleaning up the toxic legacy of the war, in
part funded by belated U.S. assistance, but the work is far from
complete. Now, millions in Vietnam are worried that the U.S. may abandon
Agent Orange cleanup as President Donald Trump slashes foreign aid.
Decades of contamination
When the war ended, the U.S. turned its back on Vietnam, eager to turn
the page on a painful chapter in its history.
But Vietnam was left with dozens of dioxin hotspots spread across 58 of
its 63 provinces.
Vietnam says the health impacts last generations, threatening the
children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of people exposed
to the chemicals with health complications ranging from cancer to birth
defects that affects the spine and nervous system.
But the science about the human health impact — both to those exposed to
Agent Orange and the generations that follow — remains unsettled. This
is partly because when the two countries finally started working
together in 2006, they focused on finding dioxin in the environment and
clearing it instead of studying the still-contentious topic of its
impact on human health, said Charles Bailey, co-author of the book “From
Enemies to Partners: Vietnam, the U.S. and Agent Orange.”
“The science of causality is still incomplete,” said Bailey.
Vietnam identifies Agent Orange victims by checking family history,
where they lived, and a list of health problems linked to the poison.
And Hai's disabilities were very likely linked to the spraying of the
defoliant, added Bailey.
The 34-year-old dreams of becoming a soldier like his grandfather, was
unable to leave home for years, waiting alone while his family went out
to work. It was only five years ago that he began attending a special
school. “I am happy here because I have many friends,” he said. Other
students at the school hope to become tailors or makers of incense
sticks.
The contamination also denuded Vietnam’s natural defenses. Nearly half
of its mangrove trees, which shield shores from strong storms, were
destroyed. Much of its tropical forest was irrevocably damaged, while
the herbicide also leached the soil of nutrients in some of Vietnam’s
most climate-vulnerable areas.
A massive cleanup begins
In the decades after the war ended, the recovering country fenced off
heavily contaminated sites like Da Nang airport and began providing
support to impacted families.
But the U.S. largely ignored growing evidence of health impacts —
including on its own veterans — until the mid-2000s, when it and began
funding cleanup in Vietnam. In 1991, the U.S. recognized that certain
diseases could be related to exposure to Agent Orange and made veterans
who had them eligible for benefits.
Since 1991, it has spent over $155 million to aid people with
disabilities in areas affected by Agent Orange or littered by unexploded
bombs, according to the U.S. State Department. The two countries have
also cooperated to recover war dead, with the U.S. aiding Vietnam’s
search for its own missing.
Cleaning up Agent Orange is expensive and often dangerous. Heavily
polluted soil needs to be unearthed and heated in large ovens to very
high temperatures, while less contaminated soil can be buried in secure
landfills.
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A woman walks next to a highly contaminated pond around the grounds
of the Danang airbase in Danang, Vietnam, May 21, 2007. (AP
Photo/David Guttenfelder, File)
 Despite years of work, large sites
still need to cleared. In Da Nang, where an air base was
contaminated during storage and transportation of Agent Orange, the
U.S. completed a $110 million cleanup in 2018 but an area the size
of 10 soccer fields still remains heavily contaminated.
Cooperation on war legacy issues also laid a
foundation for growing U.S.-Vietnam ties, culminating in 2023 when
Vietnam elevated the U.S. to its highest diplomatic status of
comprehensive strategic partner.
“The United States considers Vietnam a key partner in advancing a
free and open Indo-Pacific,” former U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet
Yellen said in Vietnam in 2023.
Anxiety about aid cuts
But Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID stalled key projects in Vietnam,
and while many have resumed, doubts remain about U.S. reliability.
Vietnam now has to negotiate a new reality where the U.S. president
says the country can no longer afford to help other countries.
The country can’t handle the toxic chemicals that still persist
without help, said Nguyen Van An, the chairman of Association for
Victims of Agent Orange in Danang. “We always believe that the U.S.
government and the manufacturers of this toxic chemical must have
the responsibility to support the victims,” he said.
He said he hoped that any stoppages to ongoing projects due to
shifting politics in Washington would be temporary.
Insufficient data means that experts can't definitely say when the
risk to human health will end. But the more urgent problem is if
that cleanup efforts are interrupted, the now-exposed contaminated
soil could get into waterways and harm more people.
A 10-year project to clear the some 500,000 cubic meters (650,000
cubic yards) of dioxin-contaminated soil — enough to fill 40,000
trucks — at Bien Hoa airbase was launched in 2020. It stopped for a
week in March and then restarted.
But Bailey, who worked on issues related to the Agent Orange in
Vietnam for years, said future USAID funding for the cleanup and a
$30 million program for people with disabilities was uncertain.
With federal cuts to USAID, most staffers in Vietnam are expected to
be gone by later this year, leaving nobody to administer funding for
remediation programs, even if it is not cut itself.
“This basically leaves a very large mountain of contaminated soil.
Only 30% of which has been dealt with and that is less
contaminated,” said Bailey.
He added that less than half of the soil at Bien Hoa had been
treated and much of the remaining soil was heavily contaminated and
needed to be treated in an as-yet unbuilt incinerator.
Tim Rieser, who was retired Sen. Patrick Leahy’s foreign policy aide
when the Vermont Democrat secured the original funding for Vietnam
War remediation projects and is now a senior advisor to Sen. Peter
Welch, said Congress still supports the programs but it would be
hard for them to continue without staff.
"For more than 30 years, the U.S. and Vietnam have worked together
to rebuild relations by dealing with the worst legacies of the war,
like Agent Orange,” he said. “Now the Trump administration is
mindlessly shutting everything down, with no concern for the impact
of their actions on relations with an important partner in the
Indo-Pacific.”
The U.S. embassy in Hanoi didn't respond to a request for comment.
Chuck Searcy, an American Vietnam War veteran who has worked on
humanitarian programs in the country since 1995, said he worries
that trust built over years could erode very rapidly. He pointed out
that those who benefit from U.S. funded projects to address war
legacies are “innocent victims.”
“They’ve been victimized twice, once by the war and the consequences
that they’ve suffered. And now by having the rug pulled out from
under them,” he said.
___
Associated Press journalist David Rising in Bangkok contributed to
this report.
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