Agent Orange

A war's end is a time for celebration. People assume that the end of a war means an end to the suffering caused by war, and if not immediately, soon. They don't consider what will be left of the war thirty years after it ends; and indeed, now, thirty years having passed since the conclusion of the Vietnam War, we consider the war a thing of the past. This assumption makes us blind to the very real and undeniable suffering still inflicted by our violence of the past. The girl above, nine-year old Nguyen Thi Ly, photographed in 2010 by U.S. photographer Ed Kashi, was born with malformed eyes due to her grandfather’s exposure to Agent Orange while fighting in the Vietnamese Army. She and 150,000 other Vietnamese children suffer from disabilities like Fraser syndrome (what the girl in the photograph has) and other crippling birth defects that sometimes rob the children of their ability to walk or cause them to be born without eyes or noses. The birth defects and disabilities are all attributable to the spread of dioxin, known as Agent Orange, in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Its effects are genetic and continue to affect not only Vietnamese children but the descendants of U.S. veterans as well. I think the picture, as well as the general lack of recognition of the problems still effected by our involvement in the Vietnam War, speaks for itself. This simple photograph communicates much more than I could ever hope to about the atrocities humans can commit and subsequently turn their backs on.