Times Online has posted this article about the remaining contamination from the Agent Orange defoliant that was used by the U.S. during the Vietnam war to deny jungle coverage to the Viet Cong.

The dioxins that remain at the former U.S. bases there from spilled Agent Orange chemicals have leached into the ground water, and at an average of 300 times the generally established safe level, are causing deformed foetuses and cancer deaths.

So far, we’ve only given the Vietnamese $6 million to deal with this and pretty much all of it has been spent on studies and environmental assessments. “Critics believe the U.S. is playing a grim waiting game: waiting for people to die in order to avoid potentially costly lawsuits”, according to this article.

That would be fair. The Vietnamese held hundreds of our soldiers in jungle labor camps who are likely all dead by now, because we never got them back. These are the American POWs who were held for ransom by the Vietnamese Communists, who demanded billions of dollars “war reparations” for their return.

Now it’s the Vietnamese who are dying because we won’t pony up the huge amount of cash to clean up those toxic sites. I am willing to bet that if those Reds had done the right and humane thing and given us back our POWs at the end of the war, as any normal, civilized nation would have done, we would have long ago cleaned up that dioxin.

Instead, many of us still grieve for those who will never return, and the Vietnamese Communists are stuck with land they can never use.

When wars end, everyone goes home. This includes the prisoners on both sides. You don’t hold them for ransom unless you’re a barbarous, uncouth people who don’t walk a path of common decency.

I just got off the phone with a neighbor and we were talking about the Christmas spirit of giving, and we both have concluded that it’s no fun giving to those who have no appreciation and never bother to say “Thank you”. I would say, clean up the dioxin anyway, if I thought for one moment that they would say, “We’re sorry about your POW’s and here is what happened to them”. But I know that wouldn’t happen because they don’t share that peculiar Western value of ours of give and take, and our government itself has long ago gone off that straight and narrow path.

This Christmas, more than any other, I’m forced to the conclusion that human decency is for the individual and not for the country. Nations no longer practice it and it will live on only as long as we as individuals are willing to have kindness and caring. The worse our world gets, the more we need to stay on that straight and narrow path and stay true to the better part of our natures. If we all go off that path, our world is lost.