CAROL VAN STRUM
Carol Van Strum is a writer, ruthless editor, and seasoned troublemaker. During the 1960s she was co-publisher and editor of Oyez Press and co-owner of Cody's Books in Berkeley, California. Publications include “A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights” (Sierra Club Books, 1983, 2014), "The Oreo File" (Jericho Hill books 2016), “No Margin of Safety” (Greenpeace 1987), and “The Politics of Penta (Greenpeace 1989). She has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, and other publications. The People vs. Agent Orange draws heavily from her experience and book, A Bitter Fog, about the battle to stop U.S. Forest Service aerial spraying of Agent Orange in our forests. She has been a toxics and legal researcher for environmental lawyers since 1975, was sole editor for The Department of the Planet Earth, and until recently copy editor for Mongabay.com, and Tropical Conservation Science Journal. In 2018 she was awarded the international David Brower Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding environmental and social justice work.
TRAN TO NGA
Tran To Nga was born in 1942 in Soc Trang, south Vietnam. At least three generations of her family resisted occupiers. Her mother, Nguyen Thi Tu, operated a bakery in Saigon that became a center of information and aid for the resistance to the French occupation. She also led the Women’s Union for the Liberation of South Vietnam, hardly endearing her to the ruling regime. When her mother’s safety was threatened, Tran was sent to the north to finish her schooling while her mother went through several rounds of imprisonment. Tran graduated with a degree in chemistry from the University of Hanoi in 1965, and returned to the south, reuniting only briefly with her mother for a dramatic few hours before her mother disappeared forever. She is believed to have been buried alive by the South Vietnamese. After working as a war reporter for the Giai Phong (Liberation) News Agency, Tran became an underground officer for the Commission of Intellectuals of the National Liberation Front in Saigon. Her two daughters who survived were born in 1971 and 1974, the latter while Tran was in prison. After her release in 1975, Tran To Nga became the principal of the Lycée Marie Curie and the director of the Normal Technical School of Ho Chi Minh City. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for enhancing French and Vietnamese rapprochement by supporting tourism and humanitarian initiatives to aid Agent Orange victims. Her memoir, Ma terre empoisonnée, published in France in 2016, was translated into Vietnamese a year later. Madame Tran currently lives near Paris where she is receiving treatment for illnesses including cancer and tuberculosis.
DR. JAMES CLARY
Jim Clary has published more than twenty-five scientific papers and books and co-authored over eight hundred articles on outdoor equipment and his adventures in the great outdoors with Mary, his bride of 33 years. Jim has concentrated his life on being outdoors for sixty years. He worked as a commercial fisherman for five seasons and earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in fisheries and wildlife biology from Michigan State University and his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. He served as an officer in the United States military during the Vietnam War and was honorably discharged as a Major in 1975. He is a 100% disabled veteran and a life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans. He has taught as a professor on several university faculties including the US Air Force Academy. He says the filmed interview he granted for The People vs. Agent Orange was his first and will be his last. A heart attack in 2018 slowed him down a bit, but at 81 years young he is still working.
DARRYL IVY
Darryl Ivy was unaware of the potential environmental and health consequences when he signed on to a 17-day stint servicing spray helicopters in Oregon. During his "acute chemical exposure", he became aware of the damage being wrought on what he now calls "my Mother Earth." With his own skin and lungs becoming progressively sickened, he started making short cell phone videos to share the destruction he was facilitating with the world. Some of those videos were posted on the website of the Portland-based newspaper, The Oregonian. After quitting his job with the aerial spraying contractor, it took many months to detoxify his body. But he does not want to be viewed as a victim. He wants to produce podcasts to guide people to avoid eating and drinking chemicals.
WILLIAM BOURDON, BERTRAND REPOLT, AND AMÉLIE LEFEBVRE
A world-renowned human rights attorney, William Bourdon is the founding partner of the Paris law firm, Bourdon & Associates. He has been a member of the Paris bar since 1980. Bourdon's practice involves major international civil and commercial litigation and arbitration. He often serves as a consultant with foreign governments, NGOs and institutions.. His partners, Amélie Lefebvre and Bertrand Repolt joined the office in 2013. Lefebvre worked with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Repolt worked previously at the European Union Court of Justice. The team filed Tran To Nga’s lawsuit against 23 American chemical manufacturers of Agent Orange in the High Court in Evry, south of Paris, in 2014. Since then they have been representing their Vietnamese/French client through a persistent and often delayed series of procedural hearings involving several lawyers from each chemical company. The final pleadings in the case are scheduled for January 25, 2021.
JONATHAN MOORE
Jonathan Moore is Senior Partner at the New York law firm Beldock Levine & Hoffman, LLP. He has litigated many of the most noteworthy civil and human rights cases in recent years, including representing the estate of Eric Garner, who died from a choke hold at the hands of NYPD officers in July 2014 and the Central Park Five, who were five young men wrongfully convicted of the assault on the so-called Central Park Jogger and who spent many years in prison before they were exonerated. He also was the lead trial lawyer in the historic case that found the NYPD liable for a policy of racial profiling in how they executed stop, question and frisk in New York City. Moore represented Vietnamese nationals and the Vietnamese Association for Victims of Agent Orange (VAVA) in a landmark case in the United States seeking to hold the chemical companies who manufactured and supplied Agent Orange and other poisonous herbicides to the US Government during the Vietnam war liable for the harm created by the use of these toxic herbicides. He is currently on the board of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign (VAORRC), which advocates for justice for all victims of Agent Orange, both here and in Vietnam.
André Bouny
Author of the seminal resource, Agent Orange: Apocalypse Vietnam, André Bouny has been a noted authority on the history and legacy of the herbicidal war in Vietnam for several decades. He is an outspoken advocate for the care of Vietnamese Agent Orange victims, and for holding the manufacturers of the herbicides accountable. Bouny and his close colleague, the renowned French human rights lawyer William Bourdon, who wrote the introduction to his book, had sought to find a plaintiff for a case they hoped to file against the American chemical corporations for several years. They met Tran To Nga in 2009 and immediately recruited her for their lawsuit. Steeped in the scientific, medical, ethical and legal complexities of Agent Orange, Bouny has advised the Bourdon legal team through six years of protracted pre-trial hearings, procedural disputes and factual submissions before two magistrates. Mr. Bouny has travelled extensively in Vietnam. He lives in the south of France with his wife and two adopted Vietnamese children. He continues to follow developments related to Agent Orange closely, maintaining the highly informative website: https://www.agent-orange-vietnam.org/
BRUCE ANDERSON
The 1970s was the first complete decade of the entirely new legal practice of environmental law. After the C.A.T.S. case against aerial spraying of herbicides, Bruce Anderson represented community groups in lawsuits to prevent over development of fragile ecosystems in Oregon. His efforts were never fully remunerated and often the citizen groups held bake sales and worked other initiatives to try to raise funds for their legal fees. Anderson received an award in 1980 from the National Wildlife Federation for his public interest environmental work.
DAVID ZIERLER
David Zierler directs the Oral History program at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, MD. Previously he worked in the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State. David is the author the often cited book, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists who Changed the Way We Think About the Environment.
PETER SILLS
Peter Sills had already worked as a musician and an attorney when he decided to write a book about the use (and misuse) of Agent Orange in Vietnam. His law firm was tangentially involved in the class action litigation brought by Vietnam veterans against the federal government and the manufacturers of Agent Orange, giving him access to millions of pages of documents produced during the discovery phase of the long-running case. His book, Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange, demonstrates that veterans faced a previously unidentified enemy beyond post-traumatic stress disorder or debilitating battle injuries. In Vietnam many of them faced a new, more pernicious, slow-killing enemy: the cancerous effects of Agent Orange. He is currently writing a book about criminal justice -- Heart of Steel: Violence and Redemption in the Criminal Justice System.
RENEE STRINGHAM
Drs. Renee and Charles Stringham shared a practice in family medicine in Lincoln City, Oregon from 1975 until 1989. When they opened the practice they had no idea that Lincoln County would eventually be considered one of four primary hot spots in the nation for birth defects. Renee treated people who were directly sprayed by helicopters and followed those patients and their families for many years, writing a paper about her observations of patients who had been sprayed, considering the occurrences of birth defects, chemical sensitivities, bleeding, and other symptoms. Stringham soon became an activist, making great efforts to call public attention to timber industry practices she believed were endangering the health of those around her. She put forward a voters' initiative in Lincoln County to ban herbicide spraying within 100 yards of any running stream, school, playground or bus stops in Oregon. After her children were threatened by two men from the chemical and timber industry in the scene she describes in The People vs. Agent Orange, she gathered her research documents and donated them to the Northwest Center For Alternatives to Pesticides in Eugene. She then withdrew from public speaking and activism against herbicides. Today, she’s active once again in the peace and Black Lives Matter movements.
SUSAN SWIFT
Susan moved to the Siuslaw National Forest in the fall of 1972. She started a community newsletter called “The Five Rivers Runoff” and was part of a community group called FROG (Five Rivers Organizing Group), which rented a two-room schoolhouse from the county, and started their own preschool, holding potlucks, film nights and community gatherings. People began talking about roadside spraying, then aerial spraying. It was at such meetings that her lifetime friendship with Carol Van Strum began. Susan traveled all over the Pacific Northwest meeting with local Grange members and other community groups, sharing the same environmental concerns. She debated scientists and forestry experts from Oregon State in many public forums, wrote letters, and took phone calls from people who had just been sprayed. She served on the board of the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides (NCAP) for ten years. She now lives in Newport, Oregon and drives part time for a medical transport company, taking poor people to medical appointments in Portland, Corvallis, Salem or Eugene, getting them there safely.
HEATHER BOWSER
Heather Bowser is an Agent Orange activist and co-founder of Children of Vietnam Veterans Health Alliance (COVVHA) an organization that brings together the children of Vietnam Veterans who have been born, and live with, the debilitating birth defects that Agent Orange/Dioxin are presumed to cause. Collectively they feel abandoned by the U.S. government. Heather's father served in Vietnam from 1968-1969. He died at the age of 50 from illnesses attributed to his exposure to Agent Orange. Heather has travelled to Vietnam four times since 2011, grounding her understanding of the lingering effects of Agent Orange on the people and the environment there. She says one of her missions is to bridge understanding between the Vietnamese and American victims of Agent Orange. She is a practicing Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor in Poland, Ohio, diagnosing and treating mental health disorders with a concentration on trauma issues.
Judge JACK WEINSTEIN
When he retired in 2020 at the age of 98, Judge Jack Weinstein was the longest-serving Federal judge in the country. Named to the Federal bench by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967, Weinstein was an early voice speaking out against mass incarceration. “We continue using the criminal law to unnecessarily crush the lives of our young,” he wrote in 2013. A graduate of Brooklyn College and the Columbia University School of Law, Weinstein contributed research and briefs to support Thurgood Marshall’s successful argument before the US Supreme Court in the famed Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that segregation in American public schools is unconstitutional. "Unfortunately, it did not result in a vindication of African-American rights, particularly in New York City,” the judge later acknowledged. “The schools here are among the most segregated... It’s a great disappointment.” Weinstein's aggressive push from the bench brought about the $180 million settlement between the manufacturers of Agent Orange and the thousands of U.S. veterans who contracted illnesses attributed to their exposure to herbicides in Vietnam. Many veterans were excluded from the settlement benefits and many others complained that it gave them precious little for their care and suffering. When Vietnamese Agent Orange victims brought suit against the chemical companies decades later, Judge Weinstein’s dismissal of it was upheld on appeal. To this day, Vietnamese Agent Orange victims' organizations maintain that they never had a fair hearing in the American courts--finally shifting their hopes and focus to Madame Tran's case in France.
THOMAS A. DASCHLE
The eldest of four brothers from a working family in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Tom Daschle became the first person in his family to graduate from college when he earned a political science degree from South Dakota State University in 1969. After serving 3 years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, including duty in Vietnam, he spent 5 years as a Senate aide. In 1978, Daschle was elected and served four terms in the House of Representatives. In 1986 he ran for the U.S. Senate and won election in a very close race. A tireless fighter for working families in South Dakota and in national politics, Daschle steadily advanced in the Democratic party's leadership. He worked on getting health care protections for seniors and for Native Americans, many living in his home state. He concentrated on the economic development of farming. With little apparent political benefits to gain, Daschle fought a “ten year battle” within Congress to secure health care benefits for Vietnam veterans. He is recognized in the Congressional Record as the author of the Agent Orange Act of 1991. He also worked intensely to address the increasing incidence of birth defects in children of veterans exposed to the defoliants. As Senate majority leader, he steered the Senate, and helped steer the nation, through the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His office was mailed anthrax which was detected in security processing. Throughout his post-Senate career, Daschle has been a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. He now runs The Daschle Group, a lobbying firm with his son, Nathan Daschle.