Agent Orange- Chất độc màu da cam

Agent Orange- Chất độc màu da cam

This is the Persuasive Speech I have to do in my Speech 1A class. I just think that it would be nice if I post it on the internet. I don''t want to take cre*** for this topic, since I quote many parts of my speech from the sources I found online.

Please post it to the forums that you know, i want as many people to read it as possible, thanks!

This is the list of References:

"The Call"

Pictures borrowed from chatdocdacam.info

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The US Fund for Reconciliation and Development''s Main Site

The Amicus written to the U.S District Court at Brooklyn, New York.





Agent Orange

The pain that needs to be healed .
By Patmol Black




He is a boy born without arms..Everything he wants to do depends totally on his parents, from eating to going to bed, from moving to bathing. Life certainly plays a very hard time on him. However, he still lives for the love of his parents and also for his own sake even though the nightmare keeps going on and on day after day. He wants to go to school. But he has no hands to write, so, he thinks about using his toes to hold the pencil. At first it is very difficult, the muscle pain often occurs and it is so intense that he would never forget it until the end of his life. This is the kind of story you''d hear about most of the Vietnamese childern born without arms in Vietnam.

This disability is not natural. Along with various other kinds of birth defects and sometimes even blood cancer, it is caused by Agent Orange, the chemical herbicide used by America in order to kill plants which served as a camouflage for guerilla fighters during the Vietnam War.

According to Wikipedia, Agent Orange as a military defoliant was used from 1961 and discontinued in 1971, after over 6000 spraying missions in Vietnam and Cambodia, causing serious harms to the health of exposed Vietnameses, Cabodians and Americans, their children and grandchildren

An April 2003 report paid for by the National Academy of Sciences concludes that during this war, 3,181 villages were sprayed directly with herbicides. Between 2.1 and 4.8 million people "would have been present during the spraying". Furthermore, many U.S military personnel were also sprayed or came in contact with herbicides in those recently sprayed areas.

The American Government should be responsible for the pain of those still suffering from Agent Orange, the deadly chemical warfare.

What America with its Agent Orange has caused to innocent people:

Agent Orange. also know as "the fire that doesn''t burn", causes very serious health disorders.

Agent Orange is a colorless liquid. It got its name from the stripes on the barrels used to transport it. It is a product of America, produced under contract for the Army by companies such as Diamond Shamrock, Dow, Hercules, Monsanto, T-H Agricultural & Nutrition, Thompson Chemicals and Uniroyal.

Agent Orange which contains dioxin- the most toxic chemical known to science- disabled and sickened soldiers, civilians and several generations of their offsrping on two continents.

Medical evidence inidcates that certain cancers (for exmaple: soft tissue non-Hodgkin''s Lymphoma), diabete (type II) and in children spina bifida and other birth defects are attributable to the exposure of Agent Orange.

First, second and third generations of the Vietnamese population, those who participated to the war or belong to the village belonging to the spraying areas suffered these effects.

America created X Men, in which the mutation gives way to human evolution. You also have Daredevil in which the main character after somehow getting a biological substance in his eyes, became blind but with an extremely sensitive hearing capacity. Well, mutation in real life doesn''t fit into any of these fantasies.

Although powerful and touching, these pictures can never represent all of the suffering still going on.

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Imagine a young Vietname couple hoping to build a happy family after the war has passed. Either the husband has been soldier or they were present during the spraying of Agent Orange. Their first child had birh defects and died soon after being born. Their hope is still there so they had the second. But the same thing happened for the second and maybe even the third. And in Vietnam, because of superstition, people believe that when the kids have incurable sickness, it is because of all the wrong things their parents have been doing in this life or in their previous life.


These Vietnamese, yet poor and ignorant, are wrong. The culprit of this is neither God nor fortune. The American government should hold all the responsibility for this.

The American government has a moral and legal obligation, under international law, to compensate the people of Vietnam for the devastating impact of Agent Orange and to assist in alleviating its effect. Indeed, the U.S governent recognized this responsibility: in the Peace Accords signed in Paris in 1973, the administration of Richard Nixon promised to contribue $3 billions dollars toward healing the wounds of war, and to post-war reconstruction of Vietnam

Nonetheless, 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War, the government has yet to make good on its formal commitment and moral obligation to assist the Vietnamese people''s recovery from the chemical warfare waged against them and their land. Neither has it met its responsibility to the peoples of Laos and Cambodia, whose lands were also poinsoned by the same chemical weapons.

On January 31, 2004, a victim''s rights group, the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/ Dioxin (VAVA), filed a class action lawsuit in a US Federal District Court in Brooklyn, New York, against several US companies, for liability in causing personal injury, by developing and producing the chemical.

On March 10, 2005, the District Court judge dimissed the suit, ruling that there was no legal basis for the plaintiffs'' claim. The judge concluded that Agent Orange was not considered a weapon under international law at the time of its use by the US; that the US was not prohibited from using it as an herbicide; and that the companies which produced the substance were not liable for the method of its use by the governemnt. The US government, which has sovereign immunity, had not been a target of the lawsuit. However, in 1984, chemical companies that manufactured Agent Orange paid $180 million into a fund for United States veterans following a lawsuit.

Despite of the court ruling, campaign for Agent Orange court justice will be continued. The US Fund for Reconciliation and Development organization believe that "the ruling against the plaintiffs does not end the legal debate or absolve the chemical companies and the US Governent of responsibility. While waiting for an appropriate response from the government, what can we do to show our support for the Vietnamese people?

These are the possible solutions:

1- Signing the petition for justice for Agent Orange victim. The goal is one million signatures in this country. The petition will be presented to Congress and the President.

2- Educating our friends, co-workers and neighbors about the suffering caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam and in other wars our government has waged.

3- Public donations for Vietnamese Agent Orange victims.

Now that you''ve know about the Agent Orange problem, it is up to you to act upon your morale and responsibility.

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War do not end when the bombs stop falling and the fighting ceases. The devastation continues long after, in the land and in the minds and bodies of the affected population. It is unfortunate that the court has ruled in favor of the defendants and concluded that the chemical warfare was used in the name of battlefield efficiency after all these years, after international controversy, the contamination, the health effects and the litigation spawned by Agent Orange. One would hope, for the sake of our generation and future generations around the world, that such a morally relativistic attitude never again plays any part in wartime decision making here, or in any other nation.

Chẳng biết phải nói gì, chỉ cảm giác một sự đau xót.
Hồi sinh viên, có một lần tình nguyện vào Quảng Trị nửa tháng, giúp 1 gia đình có 4 người con bị chất độc da cam, giờ đã mất đi 2. Người cha thì thương binh, trở gió thế này chú T có còn đau nhiều không??