NICHOLSON: Vietnam-- the war was supposed to be over almost thirty years ago, but some believe it has never ended. Comparisons are being made with the war in Iraq, in fact one big difference is that here weapons of mass destruction were used for many years.

One was a defoliant called Agent Orange. Its crippling effects endure today.

Music

NICHOLSON: It's Nguyen van Quy's turn to feed Trung. His sixteen-year-old son needs constant care. MR QUY: When he was not so heavy, I could carry him. Now I'm sick, I can't.

NICHOLSON: Nguyen is a veteran of what the Vietnamese call the "American war". He's growing weaker by the day. Cancer pervades his stomach, liver and lungs. Heavy doses of chemotherapy have failed to stem its spread.

MR QUY: I'm not able to have any more transfusions. The hospital has stopped treating me.

NICHOLSON: Most of the daily caring of Trung and his 15-year-old sister, Nga, falls to Mr Quy's wife. Their daughter is deaf, cannot speak and like her brother, is intellectually impaired. They blame the deadly chemical dioxin in Agent Orange for blighting the family.

MR QUY'S WIFE: She has no feelings at all. Look at this finger - she has cut it several times. It wasn't until I saw blood all over her that I knew she had played with a knife.

NICHOLSON: Away from the public gaze in the back of his mother-in-law's shop in the northern industrial city of Haiphong, Nguyen explains why he has decided to join in the first law suit brought by the Vietnamese people against the American companies which manufactured the chemicals.

MR QUY: I tried hard to improve our life - but we cannot overcome the hardship.

NICHOLSON: For Phan Thi Phi Phi, the hunger and hardships of the war seem a life time ago. Yet this retired doctor and respected Hanoi academic has also put her hand up for the latest battle. This time in the courts.

PHAN THI PHI PHI: I lived in the zone with dead trees. I moved along the Ho Chi Minh trail, with dead threes on both sides.

NICHOLSON: From 1966, Dr Phi Phi manager field hospitals in central Vietnam treating civilians and soldiers. When bombing intensified the doctors, staff and patients were literally running for their lives, living constant on and around the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Nicholson: Why do you think you were affected by Agent Orange?
DR PHI PHI: We ate the manioc, the vegetables and the rice - and we drunk the stream water from the highland. We even washed in the stream water - but the stream water was contaminated also, by the spray.

NICHOLSON: Dr Phi Phi and her husband had a daughter before the war. She blames the effects of dioxin on her body for four miscarriages she had after the war.

Tell me what happened to you when you had that fourth miscarriage?

DR PHI PHI: Very early on the second day, from 5.30 the blood, the haemorrhage, became very severe and they had to act very quickly. And at night they had to take out my foetus.

NICHOLSON: The spraying had stopped by the time Nguyen joined the army in 1971.

Although, the evidence of Agent Orange was unmistakable,
at the time it wasn't the concern of the young soldier.

MR QUY: We were hungry, so we were only thinking about fighting and finding food.

One day he recalls finding some barrels. He thought they contained oil. In fact it was Agent Orange.

MR QUY: I used my dagger to open the barrel and held some powder up close to see what it was.

NICHOLSON: His health declined from then on. He experienced chronic headaches, skin rashes and weakness. He could no longer work and now, at forty-seven, may have only months to live.

Music

NICHOLSON: Professor Nguyen Trong Nhan heads the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange that is behind the class action. Although he is Vietnam's former health minister, he says the organisation is independent of the government. He has rubbed shoulders with two American presidents and tried to persuade them to compensate Agent Orange victims. They both failed to do so.

NICHOLSON: It has been so long since the war ended, why has it taken so long to launch this legal case?

PROFESSOR TRONG NHAN: The Vietnamese people have suffered, been patient, and wanted to resolve the problems with the U.S. Unfortunately, the Americans have avoided their responsibility. Our Agent Orange victims have been forced to take legal action even though they don't want to.

Music NICHOLSON: Beneath the often beautiful veneer, there are sinister reminders throughout Vietnam of the unfinished war.

American and Vietnamese scientists took blood samples from local people in the late nineties. They found extraordinarily high levels of dioxin. Nineteen out of 20 people had levels 135 times higher than Vietnamese from areas not exposed to
Agent Orange. We were told people were prohibited from catching and eating the fish from the toxic lake. But in just the short time we were there, we saw two people fishing.

NICHOLSON: How are you going to prove the scientific
link that says that these cancers and birth deformities were caused by Agent Orange?

PROFESSOR TRONG NHAN: We have investigated and compared samples from people in areas where chemicals were sprayed and where they were not. We found communities that had been sprayed had higher rates of diseases such as cancer.

NICHOLSON: At Ho Chi Minh's largest maternity hospital, parents taking their healthy new born babies home shield them from the public gaze to protect their beauty. They're the lucky ones. In the adjacent Lang Hoa Vinh village are other children born here who never leave. The rooms of the orphanage behind these locked doors, are home to sixty children with physical and intellectual problems. Dr Nguyen Thi Phuong Tan believes two thirds of the problems were caused by Agent Orange and says they've been left here because their parents are poor and can't look after them. When I asked Dr tan to separate out those children in this cot room she believed were affected by dioxin, she selected four out of twenty. They included two year old Tranh Thuong Sinh. Born in a province heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, the girl has no eyes and can't walk. And she's the first child they've seen like this.

DR THI PHUONG: There is an eyeball on this side.

NICHOLSON: For some here life will be short - perhaps only five years. For a few it will also be painful.

Yet others overcome. Another claimed Agent Orange victim, Duc arrived here when he was three years old. Twenty years on, he is employed as the home's computer administrator. His agility belies his early childhood. He and his brother Viet were among an unusually high number of conjoint twins born in Vietnam in the eighties the boys were joined at the pelvis and were filmed in 1983 by the ABC's Four Corners program. When they were seven they were separated. The elaborate series of operations left Viet, seen here on the right, brain damaged. He now lives downstairs from Duc.

DUC: My brother Viet is bound to his bed. I feel sorry for him. I am one of the victims of Agent Orange, I think the

U.S. should pay compensation. They Americans should help those people who are still suffering from the war.

NICHOLSON: Duc passes his computer skills onto the other children including ten-year-old Linh. With no arms but a sharp mind, she is said to be a third generation Agent Orange victim.

Her grandfather was a soldier in the south Vietnamese army and handled the chemicals with the Americans. He died of cancer. Now Linh's father also has cancer.

We have noticed that Agent Orange is causing problems down to the third generation.

Nobody can tell how many more generations will be affected.
Downstairs from the maternity wards of the same hospital is a room that would give any prospective parent nightmares. The bottles contain severely malformed foetuses - many of them twins or triplets - aborted mainly in the eighties and nineties. Dr Tan insists that these unborn babies were the victims of Agent Orange.

Music

NICHOLSON: The U.S. district court in Brooklyn, New York, is worlds away from the rice paddies and jungles of Vietnam. But this is where the Vietnamese are waging their legal battle against the American chemical companies. Dean Kokkoris heads the legal team that will allege violations of international law and war crimes.

KOKKORIS: If you're really interested in curtailing the use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare, one of the most effective ways of doing it is making the companies that manufacture these things, the chemical weapons, financially responsible because that will remove the incentive to even make the stuff and to sell it.

Since the United States lifted the trade embargo on Vietnam ten years ago, American companies have set up offices in Ho Chi Minh city.

Among them two of the twenty chemical companies being sued - Dow and Monsanto. The companies declined Foreign Correspondent's invitation for an interview about the legal action.

A statement from Dow chemicals said: We believe that it is the role of the U.S. government and the government of Vietnam to resolve any issues related to wartime activities. The U.S. Government compelled production of Agent Orange under the Defence Production Act, and controlled how it was produced and used.

Monsanto said: U.S. government contractors are protected from liability under U.S. law and civil claims were addressed in 1984.The government of Vietnam resolved its claims as part of the treaties that ended the war.

KOKKORIS: Since we're alleging violations of the laws of war or war crimes, it's not a defence to an allegation of war crimes that your government told you to do it. We know that from the Nuremberg trials.

NICHOLSON: What sort of compensation are you looking for the victims in Vietnam of Agent Orange? PROFESSOR NGUYEN: We think the compensation must be fairly large. People's health, their lives and their right to live are affected. The right to life is central to the U.S. Declaration of Human Rights.

KOKKORIS: We're also seeking money for the clean up of these, what they call hot spots, places in Vietnam where the herbicides are still found to be contaminating the soil and the ground water.

Whether Mr. Nguyen and his family will ever see any money is doubtful. It will be at least six months before the court case goes to the next stage and could take years to obtain a result.

MR QUY'S WIFE: Looking into the future; given our children are like this, we have nothing to look forward to.

DR PHI PHI: For justice, they must pay because they knew when they produced it, even with the order of the government, they knew from 49 to 50 years.

NICHOLSON: So you think that they knew what dioxin could do to human beings?

DR PHI PHI: They knew, they knew they knew.

NICHOLSON: The Vietnamese countryside is green once more - vegetation grafted over the scars left by Agent Orange. It's the human misery that is harder to camouflage - and the fear that damaged genes will be impossible to heal.

Reporter: Anne Maria Nicholson
Camera: David Leland
Editor: Kate Prevost