Who Saved My Father? A Fieldnote on the Politics of Agent Orange Victimhood

From the desk of Phan Xuân Dũng, PhD Candidate, Legacies Member

This piece is co-published with our dear friends, War Legacies Project

I’ve been thinking a lot about questions of truth, memory, and care through two sets of observations that have stayed with me this year. The first is fieldwork: I have been conducting PhD research in Vietnam, interviewing people who identify as Agent Orange victims and the policymakers who work with them. In social protection centers across the country, I have sat with severely disabled residents whose conditions are attributed to dioxin exposure, and with the staff and officials who manage their care. I have spoken with stakeholders who navigate the gap between the scale of suffering they witness daily and the limits of what the state can formally recognise and support. Across these encounters, the same tension surfaces repeatedly: the gap between what people know in their bodies and their daily lives, and what can be proven to the standards that courts, governments, and scientific institutions demand. 

The second observation is personal: accompanying my father to veteran gatherings this year, watching him navigate memories of a war that left him, like so many others, with more gaps than certainties. I accompanied my father twice in 2025 to these gatherings: once to Quang Tri in June, the site of his former battlefield, and again in October to a meeting in Nam Dinh Province. For decades, my dad forgot most details of his wartime experience. He remembered a few key events — getting injured in Quang Tri, being transferred off the battlefield — but the rest existed in fog. Dengue fever during the war left him with memory loss, literal cognitive damage that erased whole stretches of time. After the war ended, perhaps escaping trauma through intellectual work, he threw himself into studies: two bachelor’s degrees in literature and Marxist philosophy, then a PhD, eventually becoming a lecturer. He didn’t spend much time looking backward.

My father and I at the Mine Action Visitor Center in Quang Tri, Vietnam

But around a decade ago, former comrades found him and started filling in blanks, telling stories from their shared past. These reconnections sparked something. Every year now, the surviving veterans organize gatherings. Through these meetings, especially this year, my father has recalled more details about his final battle in Quang Tri, the one where he was injured. At the most recent meeting, he learned about a veteran who claims to have carried him off the battlefield after the injury. My dad didn’t know this before. For years, he only remembered two nurses who helped evacuate him. Earlier this year he also learned that one veteran supposedly treated his wound, digging bullets out of his back with a pocket knife. Now, another veteran says he shouldered my father’s weight and moved him to safety.

Here’s the thing: my dad doesn’t know if these stories are true. He was unconscious during that time. It happened decades ago. There are hardly any witnesses left, and memories are notoriously unreliable. I’ve observed the veterans contradict each other repeatedly at these meetings. The veteran who claimed to remove bullets from my dad’s back was visibly surprised this year when he saw there were no scars on my father’s back. Maybe it was a different soldier he treated. Maybe the memory had merged with someone else’s story.

Yet my father has accepted these stories as truth. Not because he can verify them, but because disputing them serves no purpose. These claims, accurate or not, demonstrate that his former comrades care for him, remember him, love him. The question of who really saved him matters less than the fact that he was saved by fellow soldiers, and that he still gets to see these men, talk with them, share space with them while they’re all still alive.

Watching my father navigate these stories, I notice a parallel with my own research. Asking “who really are the victims of Agent Orange?” mirrors asking “who really saved my father?” Both questions demand objective certainty where it may not be possible— that with enough investigation and empirical evidence, we will arrive at definitive answers.

For most people recognised as victims of Agent Orange, it is impossible to prove definitively that a particular illness or disability resulted from dioxin exposure. Most people who were exposed to Agent Orange were not monitored at the time, leaving few reliable records of where, when, and at what dose they were exposed. An illness may not appear until decades later. During that interval, individuals encounter other environmental, occupational, genetic, and behavioural risk factors capable of producing the same condition. Even when dioxin is detected in the body, its presence does not necessarily reveal the source or timing of exposure, much less establish that it caused a particular illness.

Epidemiological studies may show that exposure increases the likelihood of certain diseases or birth defects within a population, but not that Agent Orange caused such a condition in any particular individual. The problem, then, is not an absence of evidence that Agent Orange is harmful, but the difficulty of translating population-level evidence into definitive proof of individual causation.

Chemical companies have used this scientific uncertainty to resist accountability and claims for redress in Agent Orange litigation. The burden of proof was placed on the claimant to demonstrate a direct causal link between a particular exposure and a particular illness, often half a century or more after the event. This requirement imposes an evidentiary threshold that is, in practice, almost impossible for most Agent Orange claimants to meet..

Just as it is now impossible to reconstruct exactly who pulled my father from that battlefield, we cannot easily reconstruct exposure histories and biological pathways with certainty for people claiming Agent Orange-related illness or disability. What happens if we test someone who has long identified as an Agent Orange victim and their illness turns out to have other causes? What about people genuinely harmed by dioxin exposure who refuse the “Agent Orange victim” label to avoid social stigma? What about the thousands of Vietnamese families registered in handwritten provincial ledgers, their children’s conditions documented without medical testing because no resources exist for it — are they to be excluded from care because they cannot meet evidentiary standards? The humanitarian field has treated these questions as secondary. What matters is supporting people in need, not endlessly debating evidentiary standards for suffering that were designed, from the beginning, to be unmet.

My father with the people who saved his life, returning to the site where he was wounded in Quảng Trị

This isn’t to say truth doesn’t matter. But at the level of care — how we treat people who suffer, who identify their suffering with Agent Orange — demanding absolute proof becomes a form of violence. It recreates the very burden that has allowed decades of inaction, placing the weight of scientific certainty on people least equipped to bear it: poor, marginalised, often illiterate victims navigating complex bureaucracies and technical medical systems far removed from the courts and laboratories where their fates have been decided.

My father and his fellow veterans don’t need forensic reconstruction of that day in Quang Tri. They need the story that honours their collective survival, their mutual care, their ongoing presence in each other’s lives. Those who suffer from conditions they associate with dioxin exposure need something similar: recognition that they suffered, that the war damaged them, that they deserve support regardless of whether we can draw straight lines from chemical exposure to current conditions.

My father sharing lunch with fellow veterans and reminiscing about their wartime experiences in Quảng Trị.

Being a Legacies Member with Legacies of War has also been deeply meaningful to my work. It has connected me to a community of advocates, researchers, and people directly affected by the enduring consequences of war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Through these relationships, I have gained a clearer understanding of how those working outside academia define the problems they face, what forms of redress they consider meaningful, and where scholarly research can contribute. They have also reminded me that writing about Agent Orange carries responsibilities to the people whose histories and experiences I seek to represent.