Tran To Nga in Bretigny sur Orge, France on 13 Sep 2024.
Bastien Oheir and Hans Lucas / AFP via Getty Images

Vietnam is still plagued by the toxic legacy of the US chemical warfare.

27 May 2025 – It was Vietnam’s 50th anniversary on April 30—marked by millions celebrating the end of the US war, and a new era of peace, independence, and reunification.

But 83-year-old Tran To Nga, who over 50 years ago was a frontline journalist, is too busy fighting a last-ditch legal battle over the war’s toxic legacy to join in the celebrations. The festivities continued throughout last month, culminating in the historic collapse of US-installed South Vietnamese regime on April 30, 1975.

It defies belief that five decades later, Vietnam is still plagued by the toxic legacy of chemical warfare, and countless unexploded bombs, bomblets and land mines, scattered across many provinces.

These cruel legacies still haunt over 2 million Vietnamese victims of “Agent Orange.” The chemical war was not forgotten either by the victims and all those seeking accountability and justice led by the Hanoi-based Vietnamese Association for the Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA).

Is the Vietnam War over, without resolving the cruel legacies of war? I first met Tran To Nga at the VAVA forum in Ho Chi Minh City. “It was my work as a war correspondent role in the Cu Chi district. American helicopters sprayed it, and I was exposed to this substance many times.”

In her autobiography, she described how, in 1966 in the region of Củ Chi (north of Saigon), she saw a “white cloud,” a long trail in the wake of an American war plane C-123. “A sticky rain trickles down my shoulders and smears on my skin. A fit of coughing takes me.”

During her presentation, she explained she would never give up her campaign to keep the litigation going in France, despite a bitter trail of legal setbacks for Vietnamese litigants in both US and French courts.

Why has the last hope for Agent Orange accountability ended up in the jurisdiction of a French Court?

Nga is the only person who fulfills all the criteria that enable her to sue foreign companies. Only French citizens with a French residence are entitled to utilize a law that permits international lawsuits for victims of foreign companies.

Since her exposure to the chemical spraying, she has suffered from breast cancer, and, 59 years later, is ailing from type 2 diabetes, alpha-thalassemia, and recurrent tuberculosis—all conditions caused by Agent Orange.

With assistance from her three pro bono French lawyers, she has accused these corporations of choosing to manufacture Agent Orange herbicide laced with an extra dioxin contaminant that is the cause of the chronic health problems that have dogged her for many years.

The Aspen Institute reported that the dioxin in Agent Orange was “exceptionally toxic” to humans based on the chemical formula 2,3,7,8-tetrachloro-dibenzo-para-dioxin, or TCDD. It is a persistent organic pollutant.

Nga’s eldest daughter, Viet Hai, born in 1968, suffers from a heart defect, tetralogy of Fallot. Her daughter died at the age of 17 months. Tran To Nga has two other daughters, one born in 1971 and the other in prison in 1974. They both have heart and bone defects.

The US government and Pentagon exercise sovereign immunity, hence only the 14 US companies that manufactured Agent Orange could potentially be held accountable.

In 2005, many years before Nga’s lawsuit was filed in France, VAVA launched a class-action lawsuit in the US courts. The Vietnamese victims, nearly all civilians, were encouraged in their pursuit of global justice by the success of US war veterans (who had been exposed to Agent Orange contamination) in gaining recognition and support from the US government. The US War Veterans department had acted on a medical investigation that linked exposure to Agent Orange to 19 extremely serious diseases, documented in the 2018 report “Veterans and Agent Orange” (updated in 2004). Vietnamese investigators separately produced a similar list.

However, the class-action suit of Vietnamese suffering from many of the same diseases as US war veterans received far more hostile treatment in the US court, as if the Vietnamese were still the enemy. In 2005, the class-action lawsuit was rejected.

Fred A. Wilcox, author of Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam, told the Vietnamese news agency VN Express that “the US government refuses to compensate Vietnamese victims of chemical warfare because to do so, would mean admitting that the US committed war crimes in Vietnam. This would open the door to lawsuits that would cost the government billions of dollars.”

Hence, in 2014, the Agent Orange baton of US accountability and the legacy of chemical warfare ended up in the hands of Tran To Nga.

“My descendants and I are poisoned. Examination of the famous list of diseases established by the Americans allows us to say that.”

Between 1962 and 1971, the US army sprayed 80 million liters of herbicides. Agent Orange accounted for 60 percent of highly toxic dioxins sprayed over 78,000 square kilometers (30,000 square miles of South Vietnam).

“After more than 10 years of US chemical warfare in Vietnam, the impact on their health has been staggering,” is the assessment of Dr. Jeanne Mager Stellman and her fellow researchers. Between 2.1 and 4.8 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were directly exposed to Agent Orange.

Stellman’s report also lamented that nearby rice paddies, ponds, and rivers were poisoned, and residual dioxins were able to enter the food chain, causing future generations to experience grotesque childbirth deformities passed on to now the fourth generation. Despite the steady growth of evidence about this chemical defoliant’s pernicious and wide-ranging impacts, the Paris appeals court in 2024 ruled that it “did not have jurisdiction involving the wartime actions of the United States government, on whose orders the chemical companies supplied Agent Orange.”

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers and its members have challenged the French court’s interpretation of the Pentagon’s contract with these big corporations. “ADL believes the French court did not consider the fact that the production of the toxic chemicals for the US military in the Vietnam War was not compulsory for the chemical companies, but they were free to participate in tenders to produce toxic chemicals for profit. The Court also did not consider the fact that the chemical companies had known that dioxin was a highly toxic substance.”

The French Appeals Court failed to address the key issue of the dioxin selected by the private manufacturers as part of a tender 2,3,7,8-tetrachloro-dibenzo-para-dioxin, or TCDD. It is a persistent organic pollutant that contaminated Agent Orange. After the legal setback, Nga showed her tenacity in her press statement: “The legal struggle is not over yet. The road is still long, and I will go to the end, until my last breath!”

In Vietnam one year later, she repeated her determination to fight on all the way to France’s highest court. “This is not my trial alone, this is not my fight alone. By now, the name Tran To Nga should only be a symbol. This is a fight for the people, for truth. We will take our case to France’s highest court.”

Chuck Searcy, a US army war veteran who is now the coordinator of US war veterans’ Project Renew, clearing unexploded bombs in Quang Tri province, told The Nation that he is deeply moved by Tran To Nga. “Her struggle is an immense challenge, a David-and-Goliath struggle. She is going up against the international corporatocracy and the government’s that have been bought off by them. I admire her bravery and tenacity.”

How can it be that global justice has to depend on the extraordinary dedication of a frail and debilitated 83-year-old woman in order to prevent the issue of the largest chemical war ever waged, from being ignominiously buried forever as a footnote in history?

It took the US government 41 years to do something concrete about the huge area of contamination around their military bases. It was only in 2012 that joint US military and Vietnamese army teams finally started the cleanup operations at a former US air base in Danang.

In 2025, the largest remaining dioxin hotspot is the Bien Hoa air base. Shortly before Trump’s aid cut, USAID had secured an additional $130 million for the project. A book by Vietnamese expert Charles Bailey, From Enemies to Partners: Vietnam, the US and Agent Orange, is highly skeptical about the outcome. According to Bailey, “Much of the remaining soil was heavily contaminated and needed to be treated in an as-yet unbuilt incinerator. This basically leaves a very large mountain of contaminated soil.”

It appears that every possible obstacle has been put in the way of Agent Orange victims from Vietnam, to block any path to finding justice in US courts. Now Tran To Nga is going for a last-ditch legal challenge in France to the long-standing impunity of US Corporations.

Her last message to this correspondent was on May 4: “Je suis grièvement malade et suis hospitalisée” (I am very ill and admitted to hospital). Now the indomitable but seriously ill Tran Nga fights on from her hospital bed to bring the case up to the French Supreme Court.

Molecular geneticist Matthew Meselson of Harvard Medical School, one of the first scientists to visit Vietnam after 1975, denounced the poison in the strongest terms, saying, “An evil genius could not devise a toxin with more evil properties.”

Tran To Nga by challenging their claim to legal and moral impunity from the evidence of ecocidal destruction, the poisoning of farmers crops, and complicity in causing so many types of cancer, believes eventually truth will triumph.

For her, justice for millions of Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange is the driving force, the fire in her heart that gives her strength to overcome all difficulties and obstacles to continue the fight “till the end.” In her autobiography, she says, “That fire will never stop, and that is the path I am taking.”

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Tom Fawthrop has extensively reported in South-East Asia since 1979, filing stories for The Guardian, The Economist, and The Irish Times, and he is a contributor to the BBC World Service in Cambodia, Dili, Philippines and Thailand. In 2011 he founded Eureka Films, making a series of documentaries on the Mekong including, Killing the Mekong Dam by Dam and Where Have All the Fish Gone?

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