hidden victims of a u.s. war - the new york times

North Vietnamese Army to infiltratetroops into the South.

In one of the bamboo-and-thatch stilthouses, the ladder to the living quarterswas made from metal tubes that for-merly held American cluster bombs.

The family had a 4-year-old boynamed Suk, who had difficulty sitting,standing and walking — one of threechildren in the extended family withbirth defects. A cousin was born muteand did not learn to walk until he was 7.A third child, a girl, died at the age of 2.

“That one could not sit up,” theirgreat-uncle said. “The whole body wassoft, as if there were no bones.”

The women added Suk to the list ofpeople with disabilities they have com-piled on their intermittent treks throughLaos’s sparsely populated border dis-tricts.

Hammond, Chagnon and Sengthongmake up the core of an organization

It was a blazing-hot morning in October2019 on the old Ho Chi Minh Trail, an in-tricate web of truck roads and secretpaths that wove its way across thedensely forested and mountainous bor-der between Vietnam and Laos.

Susan Hammond, JacquelynChagnon and Niphaphone Sengthongforded a rocky stream along the trail andcame to a village of about 400 peoplecalled Labeng-Khok, once the site of alogistics base inside Laos used by the

called the War Legacies Project. Ham-mond, whose father was a military offi-cer in the war in Vietnam, founded thegroup in 2008. Chagnon was one of thefirst foreigners allowed to work in Laosafter the conflict, with the AmericanFriends Service Committee. Sengthong,a retired schoolteacher, is responsiblefor the record-keeping and local coordi-nation.

The focus of the War Legacies Projectis to document the long-term effects ofthe defoliant known as Agent Orange.Named for the colored stripe painted onits barrels, Agent Orange — known forits use by the U.S. military to clear vege-tation during the Vietnam War — is no-torious for being laced with 2,3,7,8-Tet-rachlorodibenzo-P-dioxin, or TCDD, re-garded as one of the most toxic sub-stances ever created.

The use of the herbicide in the neutralnation of Laos by the United States re-

mains one of the last untold stories of theAmerican war in Southeast Asia.

When the Air Force in 1982 releasedits official history of the defoliation cam-paign, Operation Ranch Hand, the threepages on Laos attracted almost no at-tention, other than a statement fromGen. William Westmoreland, a formerU.S. commander, that he knew nothingabout it — although it was he who hadordered it.

In the last two decades the UnitedStates has finally taken responsibilityfor the legacy of Agent Orange in Viet-nam. But Laos has remained a forgottenfootnote to a lost war.

While records of spraying operationsinside Laos exist, the extent to which theU.S. military broke international agree-ments has never been fully docu-mented, until now.

An in-depth review of Air Force LAOS, PAGE 6

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

Clockwise from top left: Bounta, Khao, Yenly, Choi, Nan and Bouam. They suffer from congenital defects linked to herbicides that were sprayed in Laos during the Vietnam War.

Hidden victims of a U.S. warFROM THE MAGAZINE

The toll of Agent Orange in Laos is an untold story of the Vietnam conflict

BY GEORGE BLACK

Sunny, driven and with a new engineer-ing master’s degree in hand, JoshuaMorgan was hopeful that he could find ajob despite the pandemic, move out ofhis mother’s house and begin his life.

But as lockdowns in Britain draggedon and no job emerged, the young mangrew cynical and self-conscious, his sis-ter Yasmin said. Mr. Morgan felt hecould not get a public-facing job, likeworking at a grocery store, because hismother, Joanna, had open-heart surgerylast year and Mr. Morgan was “excep-tionally careful” about her health.

He and his mother contracted the co-ronavirus in January, forcing them toquarantine in their small London apart-ment for over two weeks. Concerned bythings he was saying, friends raised thealarm and referred him to mental healthservices.

But days before the end of his quaran-tine last month, Mr. Morgan, 25, took hisown life. “He just sounded so deflated,”his sister said of their last conversation,adding that he said he felt imprisonedand longed to go outside.

Suicides are challenging to link to spe-cific reasons, but Mr. Morgan’s suddendeath has left his sister with a feelingthat is hard to shake. “The cost of thepandemic was my brother’s life,” shesaid. “It’s not just people dying in a hos-pital — it’s people dying inside.”

More than 2.7 million people havedied from the coronavirus — nearly127,000 in Britain alone. Those numbersare a tangible count of the pandemic’scost. But as more people are vaccinatedand communities open up, there is atally that experts say is harder to track:the psychological toll of months of isola-tion and global suffering, which forsome has proved fatal.

There are some signs indicating awidespread mental health crisis. Japanrecorded a spike in suicide among wom-en last year, and in Europe, mentalhealth experts have reported a rise inthe number of young people expressingsuicidal thoughts. In the United States,many emergency rooms have facedsurges in admissions of young childrenand teenagers with mental health is-sues.

Mental health experts say prolongedsymptoms of depression and anxietymay prompt risky behaviors that lead toself-harm, accidents, or even death, es-SUICIDES, PAGE 4

Suicideshint at thepainful costof isolationLONDON

Issues of mental healthmay be hard to pin down,but signs of a crisis grow

BY ELIAN PELTIERAND ISABELLA KWAI

..

INTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 2021

NOT A ‘TIGRESS’A GOLF PRODIGYON WOODS’S PATHPAGE 15 | SPORTS

GARDEN PLANGROWING ROSESTHE SMART WAYPAGE 19 | LIVING

NEARING EXTINCTIONTHE DECLINE OF AFRICA’SFOREST ELEPHANTSPAGE 9 | SCIENCE

On the edge of a vast park in Tehran sitsa Neo-Brutalist structure the color ofsand. Inside is one of the finest col-lections of modern Western art in theworld.

You enter the Tehran Museum of Con-temporary Art through an atrium thatspirals downward like an inverted ver-sion of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggen-heim Museum in New York. Photos ofAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fa-ther of Iran’s 1979 revolution, and Aya-tollah Ali Khamenei, who succeededhim as the Islamic Republic’s supremeleader, glare down at you.

A series of underground galleriesawaits. There is nothing quite like thefeeling of coming face-to-face for thefirst time with its most sensational mas-terpiece: Jackson Pollock’s 1950 “Mural

on Indian Red Ground,” a 6-foot-by-8-foot canvas that was created with rustyreds and layered swirls of thick, drippedpaint and is considered one of his bestworks from his most important period.

Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec,Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Cha-gall, Klee, Whistler, Rodin, van Gogh, Pi-casso, Braque, Kandinsky, Magritte,Dalí, Miró, Johns, Warhol, Hockney,Lichtenstein, Bacon, Duchamp, Rothko,Man Ray — they are all here.

The museum was conceived by theEmpress Farah Diba Pahlavi, wife ofShah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, andopened to international acclaim in 1977.Just 15 months later, in the face of awidespread popular uprising, the coupleleft the country on what was officiallycalled a “vacation.” The revolution re-placed the monarchy with an IslamicRepublic weeks later.

The new regime could have sold or de-stroyed the Western art masterpieces.Instead, the museum was closed, itstreasures hidden in a concrete base-ment, and the shah’s palaces were pre-TEHRAN, PAGE 2

An American, an empress and a trove of art

Farah Diba Pahlavi, left, the empress of Iran, and Donna Stein, a curator, in 1977. Steinfeels robbed of the credit she said she deserves for her work at a modern art museum.

JILA DEJAM

Just before its revolution,Iran built an impressivemuseum. It’s still there.

BY ELAINE SCIOLINO

The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.

In the First Cold War, the United Statesand its allies had a secret weaponagainst the Soviet Union and its satel-lites.

It didn’t come from the C.I.A. Norwas it a product of DARPA or theweapons labs at Los Alamos. It wasCommunism.

Communism aided the West becauseit saddled an imperialist Russian statewith an unworkable and unpopulareconomic system that could not keepup with its free-market competitors.“They pretend to pay us and we pre-tend to work” — the quintessential

Russian joke aboutworking life in theworkers’ paradise —goes far to explainwhy a regime withtens of thousands ofnuclear warheadssimply petered out.

Now we are enter-ing the Second Cold

War, this time with China. That’s thetakeaway from this month’s U.S.-Chinasummit in Anchorage, in which bothsides made clear that they had notonly clashing interests but also incom-patible values. Secretary of StateAntony Blinken bluntly accused Chinaof threatening “the rules-based orderthat maintains global stability.” YangJiechi, his Chinese counterpart, repliedthat the U.S. had to “stop advancing itsown democracy in the rest of theworld.”

A few days later, China and Iransigned a 25-year, $400 billion strategicpact, including provisions for jointweapons development and intelligencesharing. As challenges to the U.S.-led“rules-based order” go, it’s hard to getmore frontal than that.

Maybe things will get better. But itwould be foolish to count on it, muchless suppose that conciliatory behaviorby the Biden administration will doanything other than embolden Beijing.Say what you will about either theTrump or the Obama administrations,but they did not provoke China tocrush democracy in Hong Kong, orbrutalize Uyghurs in Xinjiang, or vio-late international law in the SouthChina Sea, or help North Korea sub-vert international sanctions, or usemilitary force to bully its neighbors, orundertake campaigns of cyberwarfareand industrial espionage against

Strategizingin a SecondCold War

OPINION

PresidentBiden hasa chance toturn China’sstrengths intoweaknesses.

STEPHENS, PAGE 13

Bret Stephens

A TERRIFYING SIDE EFFECTDoctors report paranoia and otherpsychotic symptoms in patients whohave recovered from Covid-19. PAGE 9

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