> Hey everybody,
>
> It's 30 years since the liberation of Saigon!
>
> http://www.vnanet.vn/NewsA.asp?LANGUAGE_ID=2&CATEGORY_ID=29&NEWS_ID=149164
>
>
> - - - - - - - - - -
> John Lacny
> http://www.johnlacny.com
>
> Tell no lies, claim no easy victories
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
A Vietnam Vet friend once quipped (when he heard about a a UXO that became an "XO" in a Vietnamese schoolyard that killed a teacher and 5 or 6 students)...
"War, the gift that keeps on giving."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3798581.stm <...> In a small commune in the heavily sprayed Cu Chi district, the family of 21-year-old Tran Anh Kiet struggles with the problems of daily living. His feet, hands and limbs are twisted and deformed. He writhes in evident frustration, and his attempts at speech are confined to plaintive and pitiful grunts. Kiet has to be spoon-fed. He is an adult stuck inside the stunted body of a 15-year-old, with a mental age of around six. He is what the local villagers refer to as an Agent Orange baby. In Vietnam, there are 150,000 other children like him, whose birth defects - according to Vietnamese Red Cross records - can be readily traced back to their parents' exposure to Agent Orange during the war, or the consumption of dioxin-contaminated food and water since 1975. VAVA estimates that three million Vietnamese were exposed to the chemical during the war, and at least one million suffer serious health problems today. Some are war veterans, who were exposed to the chemical clouds. Many are farmers who lived off land that was sprayed. Others are a second and third generation, affected by their parents' exposure. Some of these victims live in the vicinity of former US military bases such as Bien Hoa, where Agent Orange was stored in large quantities. Dr Arnold Schecter, a leading expert in dioxin contamination in the US, sampled the soil there in 2003, and found it contained TCCD levels that were 180 million times above the safe level set by the US environmental protection agency <...>
Leigh