Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Vietnam

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 bir

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.

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 of

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.