One evening in April 1973 when it was announced that the last American combat troops had left Vietnam, I remember sitting on the porch of the farmhouse that my wife and I rented near Penn State University, where I had been hired to teach after returning from the war. Sitting next to me was Bui Ngoc Huong, who, after four years and four surgeries to repair his destroyed mouth, was staying with us before undergoing his last reconstructive procedure in Philadelphia. It had been a warm day after a spring rain, and at dusk our empty little valley had begun...

Between August 10, 1961, and January 7, 1971, the United States military sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of chemical defoliants on roughly 6,000 square miles of Vietnam’s jungles, croplands, and waterways, exposing millions of people to the defoliants’ toxic byproduct, dioxin. Many of those sprayed directly were poor, rural people, ethnic minorities living in Vietnam’s highlands or the Vietnamese soldiers and youth brigades operating in the Southern jungles and along supply routes from the North. But others sprayed included U.S. soldiers themselves and their allies from South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines. Still more were exposed in the...

Late in the afternoon, Tu rode his bicycle home slowly, enjoying the golden light. With his three children gone to the countryside to live with their grandmother for the summer, Tu felt like a free man. He pushed the bicycle up the rear steps to the kitchen of his top-floor apartment, and when he heard his wife speaking with someone in the apartment’s front room, he quietly remained in the back to keep from interrupting.

Having two rooms was lucky. Either he or his wife could entertain a guest without disturbing the other. Out of courtesy, he would usually greet...

I took a new wife for my husband.

Maybe the strangest thing ever to happen at Yen Ha village, I chose my good friend to be the bride, a woman who had passed the age for marriage but for a long time had desired a child and wanted a husband. Besides making the match, I helped my husband’s sister and mother during the engagement ceremony and wedding, preparing dishes for their celebration.

Of course, for the others, the wedding had its share of happiness, but for me it held only humiliation and sorrow. Just at the moment when my husband...

It took more than half their lives just to meet each other again. Perhaps it was not uncommon. After a twenty-one gun salute, thousands of husbands and wives reunited after decades of separation. Husband in the North, wife in the South, husband in an American prison and wife waiting somewhere outside, from in the jungles and under the sea, now finally embracing in joy and sorrow. These reunions were fortunate; too frequently just one meter remained between couples, enough earth to keep them from ever embracing again.

He searched for her in Nha Trang and Phan Thiet and didn’t find...

I was researching an essay about Tet for a magazine when my Aunt Thao came to see me. With her eyes swollen and face pale, it seemed like she’d been up all night.

“What’s wrong, Auntie? How are Duyen and Mung?”

Aunt Thao covered her face with her hands and wept. “I don’t know what to do. You have to help me.”

“What is it?” I said impatiently. “My article . . .”

“What article could be as important as helping your aunt?” she snapped. “Oh god! I’ll carry this on my face. It’s so disgraceful . . .”

Feeling...

One year after the Liberation of the South, Cuong finally returned to his village from military service. A year was a long time for his family to wait, even for everyone in the village, but what they did not know was that Cuong had spent that year in a military hospital. On the very last day of the war, as Cuong and his unit marched to Saigon from the southwest under the command of the 232 Front, a wicked piece of shrapnel severed his right arm. But, in war, such a wound does not cause a big fuss. And Cuong’s...

The staff at the hospital all said Khang was a man deeply in love with his wife. Everyone was impressed with how he cared for Tra during her long, six-month recovery, and the female medical students in particular enjoyed telling the couple’s romantic love story. He was a young man from Da Nang who had moved to the North in ’66 and had studied in the Soviet Union. She was a famous fighter in Saigon who began working undercover at the age of twelve. Late in the war, the Saigon government imprisoned her in Da Lat until the day of...

Shabby and strange in strength and appearance, more than anything else Thay* Phung looked like a hollow peanut shell. His small frame measured less than five feet and under ninety pounds. Worse still, he often wore a broad-brimmed conical hat pulled down low on his overly large head, and his short legs splayed like a Chinese eight:

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On his feet he wore rough shoes with big toe caps, making him appear even smaller and more freakish.

Kop, kop, kop . . . Thay Phung plodded down the corridor of my province’s primary teacher’s training college. Certainly he wanted a...

The news of Thinh’s death from the Americans’ toxic chemical poisoning, delivered by phone by the old H15 guys, knocked K’sor H’Guonl for a loop. For many years H’Guonl had kept living because of her love for Thinh. Now that he was dead, she dreamed of him every night.

She dreamt that Thinh was holding her, and just as her lips touched his, helicopter rotors would begin to whir and startle him into running away. She tried to run after him but her legs seemed to wind together so tightly she couldn’t move. Then she’d wake, her legs stiff, and...

The girl who helped with my cooking and cleaning looked anxious when she opened the gate and said hello. “Maybe something serious has happened with your family,” she said. “Your uncle has phoned so many times, and he just called again. He said if I saw you come home from work to tell you you’ve got to go out there as soon as possible.”

My paternal grandparents had three children. Their eldest daughter, my aunt Ca Mau, went to work in a fishing village near the Tien Hai district at a very young age. Then they had my father, and...

As a reporter for a newspaper in Nam Dinh Province, I was sent to visit Tran Van Ngo’s family at seventh hamlet, Quang Minh Commune, to gather materials for a survey on the poor condition of veterans and their families who suffered illnesses caused by the war.

Mr. Ngo came back from the war thirty years ago. Nineteen years on the battlefield and he was never wounded, not even once. He always said his fate must be a great one since even during fierce fighting no bullet had ever hit him. After leaving the army, he worked hard in the...

“I’m going to die. You know? I’m falling apart . . .”

His pinched voice sounded like it came from hell. Surprised, I looked around, but there was only me and Huan in the bar. We sat on the low stools toward the back, near the rattan wall. He looked at me through a glass of coffee, one of the green ferns that hung from every rafter in the ceiling swaying above him.

I laughed. “Someone like you could live through a mortar attack.”

My words dissolved into silence, unable to penetrate his blank stare. Huan handed me the biopsy...

Any time the stress of the office got to be too much, Bich Tra would turn to her window on the eighth floor to gaze down at the city below. Whether mist enshrouded dawn or late afternoon sun, she always found something within her view to impress her; the streets, trees, and river reminding her of beautiful paintings. Each set of roofs became in her imagination another still life, the painted backdrop to the tumbled lives of the big city’s working class. It seemed each roof had its own level and building material. In the east, a square roof made...

A graduate of the Viet Nam Medical University operating in the jungle from 1947 to 1953 during the war of resistance against France, Le Cao Dai helped to establish Military Hospital 211 in the Central Highlands during the American War, serving as its first director from 1964 to 1969. He lived and worked in the A Sau and A Luoi areas of Thua Thien Hue Province for ten years. Since then, he has established himself as the most prestigious scholar researching the affects of Agent Orange/dioxin on humans and the environment.

In his words: “As a physician of the military...