Customer Reviews

Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Vietnam

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For those already committed to voting for the so-called 'antiwar' candidate, I recommend putting this book in front of Sen. John Kerry and demanding to know what he will do as president to address American responsibility and pay reparations for the genocidal assault on the people of Vietnam. Such action will constitute a litmus test for this candidate, his "band of brothers" and future warriors about how the USA intends to solve the problem of terrorism. Will they acknowledge international law and prosecute the guilty parties including politicians, bureaucrats, executive military officers and defense contractors? Will they honor, finally, the Paris Accords and repair the ecocide brutally wrought upon the Vietnamese by their chemical weapons? Or will they continue to cover up a deliberate, malefic genocide by honoring war criminals like Kissinger and McNamara who now cries cinematic tears while his Pentagon successors plan the mass destruction of any nation that dares to oppose American hegemony?

Philip Jones Griffiths's AGENT ORANGE, COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN VIETNAM is a complex, dense statement that can be viewed and read several ways. Foremost, it is unquestionably the greatest work of photojournalism ever published. I do not make this statement lightly or without professional judgement. For twenty-five years, I edited the work of distinguished photojournalists -- Capa, Richards, Salgado, Peress, and Nachtwey among many others. Comparable only to W. Eugene Smith's MINIMATA: LIFE -- SACRED AND PROFANE, a passionate chronicle of the devastating effects of post-WW II industrial pollution on a Japanese town, AGENT ORANGE surpasses all previous attempts to synthesize the medium of still photography with historical documentation. Griffiths's masterly images unselfconsciously insert readers into the scene of an historical crime and guide them through the evidence page by excruciating page as a means to elicit direct testimony from the perpetrators and their victims. With the possible exception of Erich Maria Remarque' s ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, no other monograph so successfully confronts citizens with the folly of leaders who commit atrocities in their name. The stares of genetically deformed children struggling to articulate humanity across the threshold of pain and disability give absolute lie to the facile excuses of national security used by politicians to conduct high tech assault-and-battery on unwitting, innocent populations. Then it was Vietnam, today Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beginning with his eloquent book, VIETNAM INC. first published in 1971, Griffiths has pursued an unrelenting inquiry into the truth of violence and war. He reported from the Mekong Delta battlefront and also the brothels of Saigon. Returning years later, he earned the trust of farmers who had rebuilt their devastated villages with the detritus of war. Pushing his inquest further he located and photographed war orphans, now shunned as the miscegenated offspring of foreign invaders (DARK ODYSSEY, 1997). Infrequently supported by the mass media, Griffiths parlayed his skills as a commercial photographer to raise the cash necessary to return periodically to Southeast Asia, as if excavating its pitted landscape for some fragment of reason that might explain the macabre body counts and haunting trans-generational birth defects. Some photographers are celebrated for their commitments in documenting a family coming of age or the rise and fall of a nation. Journalism schools promote the virtues of in-depth or extended coverage (sometime a whole week!) while network and cable news personnel embrace the fame of sticking with a big story only to defer, in the final analysis, to the desire of corporate sponsors. By contrast Griffiths has the determination of a seasoned forensic scientist. Although no maverick, he has paid the price of banishment from the newspapers and magazines "of record" whose editors remain too frightened by management to commission or publish his work. Why would they want to remind subscribers of their own inaccuracies and slavish pandering to the official story?

In this respect, AGENT ORANGE can also be read for its scholarship because it presents new historical research about the manufacture and deployment of chemical weapons during the Vietnam era. It has been almost twenty years since American courts acknowledged the gravity of dioxin poisoning in rulings on lawsuits filed by military veterans. Yet companies who supplied the military with these chemical defoliants continue to falsify experimental data on their products' potential for birth defects. Our government stands mute on the issue of "peace with honor" and refuses to contribute any meaningful economic assistance, nonetheless stipulated in the treaty with Hanoi. The war's apologists and neoliberal ideologues continue to deride Vietnam as a failed socialist experiment. Griffith's photographs and words rip their lies to shreds and dissolve their chauvinism in the cold truth of twisted limbs, hare lips, and hydrocehpalic fetuses preserved in formaldehyde. AGENT ORANGE is the black book of American infamy, its author has given citizens a priceless instrument to test their politicians sincerity and commitment to peace. Buy a copy and ask Kerry for a clear statement of conscience!

In September, 1976, just back from eight years helping homeless streetchildren in Viet Nam, I wrote an Op/Ed piece for the New York Times ( "Learning From the Vietnamese -- And Giving", 12/04/76) that concluded: "And I'm at a loss how to tell my own people that Vietnam's needs are our remedy - to say that what the Vietnamese people have to offer us - as they did me - is so great that for our own sake we must help them." I was attempting to make a connection between the spiritual strengths the people of Viet Nam had to offer us and the technological assistance we, in turn, could give them. Philip Jones Griffiths, in his book "Agent Orange, 'Collateral Damage' in Viet Nam" has made an even more compelling, if depressing, case for interdependency, i.e., because of the American military's chemical spraying in south VN during the war years there are now thousands of people in both the U.S. and Viet Nam who are dealing with deformities and death because of a ticking "time bomb" planted in Indochina decades ago. Griffiths, author of "VIETNAM, INC.", an award-winning photography book on America's longest war, has included here some unsparing images of humans beings brutally deformed by man's more fiendish dalliance with Weapons of Mass Destruction. Here is a "legacy" that must give all of us pause by a brilliant photographer's tireless effort to bring almost unbearable evidence to us of man's inhumanity to man. Like the Holocaust itself, the full impact of these atrocities took years to come to the fore, but "Agent Orange" makes a compelling case that two countries once at war remain linked in a tragic bond that will not soon go away. This is not an easy book to read or, should I say, to view, but I think we ignore it at our peril. Griffiths knows what of he "speaks", having spent years in Indochina and seen un-speakable carnage firsthand. Here he has placed the evidence before us, as well as a precious opportunity to understand where we have gone wrong and how we may become better human beings in the future. "Agent Orange, 'Collateral Damage'", it almost goes without saying, may be the ultimate brief on America's own WMDs. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------

Philip Jones Griffiths is among the unsung heroes of our time, photographing the otherwise untold, unsavory aspects of a mean-spirited war completely lacking in human decency. Agent Orange is masterfully conceived, researched, photographed and written in prose that at once is dark, beautiful poetry.

The other reviewers have done a great job of describing this book so I'll keep my review short. I was not prepared for this book. I'm not sure anyone can be prepared. Halfway through I started crying and had to put it away for awhile. Our country is capable of doing some wonderful things. We (and yes I mean we, because the actions of our leaders and military represent all of us) are also capable of doing some truly horrible things. This book shines a light on one of the horrible things we did in Vietnam.

Received my book today. Looked through the first several photos and had to put the book down to wipe the tears from my eyes. Managed to look at all the photos, slowly flipping the pages over, a little scared to see what would be next. The photos make me sad for the people and sad that humans can do this to other humans.

You have to have a strong stomach to be able to handle this powerful book.

For as long as I can remember, the coffee table book has long been popular because of its large array of appealing photos or graphics based on a particular topic and the bare minimum of text. It used to be a book the whole family can look through at their leisure and then shelve to make way for the next new coffee-book-as-Christmas-gift. However, I've seen that more and more heady topics are being addressed, as photojournalists/essayists have taken on star status among the politically-aware crowd. With Agent Orange: "Collateral Damage" in Viet Nam, Philip Jones Griffiths, born in Rhuddian, Wales in 1936, seems to be one of those veteran photojournalists who has been able to plant himself in social turmoil and record the aftershocks.

This isn't Griffiths' first foray into (visually) documenting the Vietnam War. Before this book, he came out with another photo collection called Vietnam Inc. in 1971. Setting the tone of "Collateral Damage" is its cover, for what overwhelms you is the stark darkness of it. Gray vertical and diagonal lines crisscross each other and seem etched into the blackness. Look closer and it will become apparent that it's a satellite photo of South Vietnam and the gray lines indicate the Agent Orange spray patterns. "Collateral Damage" is not startling in an aesthetic sense, but rather in a morally-outraged sense, as it brings to bear (in print form) the consequences of that infamous chemical defoliant that was used to excess in South Vietnam.

From the outset, Griffiths introduces the aftermath of technological superiority with overhead shots of smoldering foliage. In the postwar photos "American grass" (the shrubbery that has now replaced the destroyed trees) sprouts decades later and children watch over newly planted tree saplings. The requisite photos of bloated baby faces on top of their malformed bodies suspended in formaldehyde at the Tu Du hospital are blown up for the audience's revulsion and inspection. Next in line are the living casualties of Agent Orange. The range of emotions that are expected to well up inside could fluctuate from lividness to sheer pity. Griffiths' camera captured his subjects face to face, obscuring nothing, their eyes (or what's left of them) appealing to the audience's decency. They reaffirm for the audience the monumental task of holding up a mirror to the past in order for the present to confront its selfish ahistoricism.

Each major section in the book has a brief introduction to prepare the audience for what they will see. At the end of the book, the story of how and why Agent Orange was developed comes into view. Once the audience has looked through all the photos of the stillborn, handicapped and suffering human beings, the majority of them children, then even more damning context is inserted. The audience finds out about dioxin, the lethal bi-product of Agent Orange, and how Dow Chemical Company and the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments teamed up to downplay and ignore the birth defects, liver cancer, skin ailments and other harmful effects on the public and military personnel that this omnipresent poison had caused.

Interestingly, all of Griffiths' photos are in black and white, even those that depict Vietnamese (and Cambodian) victims currently living out the legacy of Agent Orange. This anachronistic visual effect makes these people a permanent fixture of the past, forever indigenous to a war that they did not personally experience and yet are bearing the brunt of. Their physical deformities and chronic illnesses serve to underline a cruel karmic spiral that will not close until the crimes against them are redressed.

But, do they believe their lives are a crime? What becomes slowly evident is that the book lacks the photographed subjects' own accounts of their lives and how their debilitating medical conditions affect their self-worth and their outlook on life. Not to mention that those babies in jars have become icons to warn future generations of the costs of war and the lingering effects of Agent Orange in one part of the globe. But, to continually put these dead babies on display is to demean their shattered infancy and to excite an immature audience's proclivities toward gore. The fear is that these unwilling still-lives stop becoming teaching tools and start becoming objects of morbid entertainment.

I understand that Griffiths' intention for this book is to light a fire under (American) society and bring about debate on how we construct and deal with history and our national self-image. Perhaps I'm being overprotective, but I just do not want to see these controversial images become a feast for the eyes that attract/repel our imagination. Eventually, this book may lose its original attraction to the buyer, but will excite the dinner guests to no end. Because what is a coffee table book but something one can peruse, flip directly to the interesting sections and then leave on the table to collect dust?

What can I say about this book other than--like all of that which Phillip Jones Griffiths produced--it is excellent.

Shows the horrible chemical legacy of war, and leaves one asking, "Why does humanity do such unhumanitarian things?"

The amazing thing about it is that the country of Vietnam, now pushing 90 million population, is so big that it has largely swallowed all the suffering--portrayed so well in the pages of this book--up.

The war will soon be forgotten, and then it will be history's turn to repeate itself.