The rest get their drinking and cooking water from a rank canal that serves as road, sewer and bathtub. Some of Vietnam's scars are as obvious as a legless victim of a land mine. Others emerge subtly from the outward beauty of the landscape. Down in a valley of the A Luoi district in Vietnam's central highlands, an airfield that stored Agent Orange near the village of Dong Son has all but vanished in a tangle of undergrowth. People here blame the defoliants sprayed from U.S. planes to strip the jungle hiding places of communist forces.
Officials warn against eating fish oils and fats, where the poison seems to linger.
Low green grasses wave on the mountains of A Luoi. The terraced rice fields built over lifetimes of backbreaking labor have long been abandoned, but hardy weeds have finally come back, overcoming the effects of toxic dousings. The villagers have no choice but to remain. There are no savings to start a new life, only the rice and cassava they can raise. Their water holes are old bomb craters.