Warrior Pose (20 page)

Asia's sex slaves are usually coerced into opium addiction, making them easier to control and manipulate. Thailand is a major producer of opium. My crew and I cover this next, beginning in Chiang Rai, a village on the northernmost border of Thailand. Nestled in rolling mountains with tropical forests, Chiang Rai is just what Mr. Weerasak Kowsurat is talking about: a mixture of ancient temples, thatched hut villages, rice fields, wilderness parks, tall mountains, and meandering rivers. It's also the gateway to the Golden Triangle with Burma and Laos. The region is home to warlords who oversee the vast, golden poppy fields and the production of heroin derived from the flowers' capsules. Just like cocaine from South America, most of the heroin is smuggled to the warlords' number-one customer: America.

Opium is the sticky, tarlike resin that comes from slicing the bulbous opium poppies. It's expensive when refined into heroin, but in its raw state it's a poor man's high. North of Chiang Rai, in a small village dating back thousands of years, we enter a dark thatched hut with the sweet smell of opium smoke permeating the air. Elderly men and women with sunken eyes and emaciated bodies are lying on bamboo mats in the dim candlelight, utterly stoned. Puffing long, thin bamboo pipes, they still wear the ornate and colorful outfits with patterns woven to articulate their tribal heritage, but the drug has destroyed their culture, ruined their lives, and stolen their Souls, just as it is now doing to thousands of girls in the sex-slave trade.

“What do you do with your life?” I ask a middle-aged man as he lies on his side smoking opium. Deep wrinkles cover his emaciated face like a network of rivers.

“Nothing,” he says, his yellowish eyes glazed into a blank stare, plumes of bluish-white smoke swirling around his head. “I just smoke and all my worries go away. There is nothing else to do.”

His simple words illustrate how helpless, resigned, and addicted the drug makes its victims, which is exactly what the slave-traders want.

The most beautiful Thai prostitutes are never found on the stages of Patpong. Instead, they're sold by the Thai-Chinese Gangs to the Yakuza, Japan's powerful organized crime syndicate. The Yakuza enslaves them in major cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama, forcing them to work in very private, very exclusive clubs. They are taught Japanese manners and dressed in expensive evening gowns, with their hair and makeup done by professionals. Then they are forced to serve the elite class of politicians and businessmen, who are willing and eager to pay thousands of dollars for an evening of sensual delight.

So our third and final stop in our coverage on sex slaves is Tokyo, where we locate some of the private clubs in the richest districts of the city. Getting inside these clubs would be impossible. They are guarded by heavily armed Yakuza, and our Japanese film crew wisely advises that we not even try. We shoot a few stand-ups outside the buildings for this element of the story, then interview a middle-aged Japanese woman devoted to helping locate and liberate these young women, after agreeing to darken her face and alter her voice during the editing process to conceal her identity.

“Their passports are taken away from them when they arrive,” she tells us with a look that blends anger with sadness. “They have no documentation to prove who they are or where they came from, no money, and no freedom. They are kept locked in small apartments all day long, as many girls as they can cram into a single room, and only brought out each evening to work at the clubs. Their only pay
is food…and drugs. If they cause trouble, they are beaten. If they get a disease from sex, they are isolated until they die and their bodies are disposed of by the gangs.”

Back in the Hong Kong Bureau we produce our reports, focusing on the lucrative conspiracy the sex trade has created between drug lords, gangsters, politicians, the wealthy class, and Western tourists addicted to exploiting young women for their sordid pleasures. As I view our segment on the Golden Triangle, I remember that, like heroin, morphine is also a derivative of opium. Gazing at the videotape of the opium addicts in Chiang Rai, I think about the day in northern Iraq when I almost stuck a needle filled with morphine into my shoulder muscle to alleviate the torment of my back pain.

Vietnam Twenty Years After the War

Quang Ngai Province, rural Vietnam, 1992. The long wooden shelves hold rows of tightly capped five-gallon glass jars filled with formaldehyde. The strong preservative is yellowed with age. It takes a while to realize what's floating in the murk. Then, as we peer closely, it becomes obvious. Each jar holds a deformed human fetus. Large clusters of reddish tumors visible on small, contorted faces. Tiny arms and legs deformed. Little bodies twisted in the agony of death. It's heart-wrenching to look at them. As my cameraman shoots closeups, we glance at one another, silently acknowledging that this is worse than much of the carnage we have seen on battlefields.

The fetuses were stillborn as a result of prenatal exposure to dioxin, an extremely toxic herbicide banned in much of the world, and a key component of Agent Orange. The United States sprayed 20 million gallons of it on the Vietnamese countryside during the Vietnam War.

“This is what Agent Orange has done to our people and continues to do to them,” Dr. Nguyen, whose name rhymes with
Win
, tells us as we walk down an aisle in his laboratory with cameras rolling. As a government scientist for Vietnam, Dr. Nguyen's life is devoted to documenting the ongoing effects of dioxin on the Vietnamese population.

The Pentagon dubbed the program Operation Ranch Hand. It was designed to defoliate rural villages and forests, denying the communist guerillas of North Vietnam food and cover as they surged south. The spraying of Agent Orange also helped create “forced draft urbanization,” a tactic the Pentagon deliberately concealed from the media. Destroying the countryside's rice and vegetable crops eliminated the ability of South Vietnamese peasants to support themselves, forcing them to flee to U.S.-dominated cities such as Saigon. Destitute, their only choice was to join the South Vietnamese Army and fight against their own countrymen from the North.

Operation Ranch Hand destroyed 5 million acres of forest and millions of acres of crops, and seriously polluted most of the waterways in the regions where it was sprayed. Widespread famine occurred, leaving hundreds of thousands of people malnourished or starving. According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, close to 5 million Vietnamese were exposed to Agent Orange attacks. Almost a half-million were killed or maimed. An even greater number of children were born with birth defects, and they're still counting. American soldiers were also hard-hit by the defoliants. Thousands of veterans reportedly contracted debilitating skin rashes, suffered neurological damage that triggered psychological problems, and developed cancer. Many also had children born with birth defects after the war.

Dr. Nguyen explains it matter-of-factly: “This is the legacy of the American chemical companies and the U.S. military, but they refuse to take responsibility even now. They must be held accountable.” Dr. Nguyen wants the military and the corporations to admit their wrongdoing and offer compensation. He is adamant that justice must be done, but any anger he once may have held has vanished with the passage of so much time.

The primary producers of Agent Orange were Monsanto and Dow Chemical. Both continue to deny their chemicals were to blame, but in one of the most heavily sprayed areas in Quang Ngai province, we are shown more of Vietnam's evidence of the devastation wrought by the herbicide. Portions of the tropical forest surrounding Quang Ngai are lush again, framing peaceful vistas over rice fields and
waterways. But in the villages, human deformities abound. In small, thatched huts we interview older men and women, sprayed during the war, with huge tumors deforming their faces into hideous masks. We film small children with unusable limbs, giant heads filled with fluid, tumors covering their bodies.

I remember opposing the war in my teens, shocked at the pictures of Agent Orange being sprayed from Army helicopters over villages such as this. I remember being sprayed with mace by the National Guard and smacked on the head with a billy club during protest marches. To me, loving one's country never means turning a blind eye to such horrors. It means seeking the truth and speaking out in the face of obvious injustice. Freedom of speech is one of the most powerful forces in democracy, and it has always been worth risking everything for. As we film these deformed children, I wonder: What were we doing? Where were the moral principles that gave our country its greatness? How could anyone not speak out?

From Quang Ngai we travel north to Hanoi, joining a delegation from the Select POW/MIA Committee, led by Senators John Kerry, Bob Smith, and John McCain, all of whom served in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. The senators are here on a historic mission. It's the first time an American political delegation has been allowed in the capital city, which served as the headquarters of the North Vietnamese Army during the war.

Unlike bustling, modern Saigon in the south, which was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the war in honor of North Vietnam's greatest hero, Hanoi offers a journey back in time to the era when Vietnam was a French colony. Many of its streets are lined with spacious three-story French colonial homes with finely carved facades, dormers, and sidegabled roofs that once housed the French elite. They're now occupied by government agencies or foreign embassies. Most Vietnamese here live in far humbler quarters and only a fortunate few can afford the luxury of a car. The primary means of transportation is bicycles, which creates a peace and quiet rarely found in a major Asian city.

The centerpiece of downtown Hanoi is Turtle Tower, an ancient, three-story stone temple sitting in Hoan Kiem Lake. The waters around the tower are covered with lily pads that blossom white each spring, sending their fragrance on gentle winds into the city. The Old Quarter, nestled on one edge of the lake, is a dense maze. Shops of furniture makers, silk traders, vegetable markets, artisans, and craftsmen are knitted together along narrow, twisting streets.

The American domino theory proved wrong. Vietnam never became a puppet of China or a rigid communist dictatorship. Instead, it has emerged as a major economic power in Southeast Asia, and American businesses are hungry for the same access their European and Asian competitors enjoy here. First, however, the U.S. delegation must close the book on the controversy over U.S. prisoners of war and those still deemed missing in action. The POW/MIA debate remains an emotional issue in the States and is the major roadblock to normalizing relations.

Following two decades of refusal, the Vietnamese have agreed to open their archives from the war, allowing senate aids and U.S. Army researchers to pore over old files, examine dog tags, helmets, uniforms, and personal effects of Americans who were captured or killed. At the government palace in Hanoi, our cameras are denied access to the actual negotiations, but we're allowed to film ceremonial meetings between the senators and top Vietnamese officials. Many of these officials fought in the war and were vilified in America at the time. Here in Hanoi, they're national heroes.

It's an intricate dance of diplomacy. McCain, Smith, and Kerry must find a way to close the POW/MIA cases without angering opponents back home, signal a formal government apology to Vietnam without it appearing so, and ultimately lay the groundwork for ending a terrible chapter in our history even though gaping emotional wounds remain on all sides. Like the United States, Vietnam recognizes the enormous economic and political advantages involved, and so the two countries finally hammer out an agreement that will have to be ratified back in the States.

After the senators depart Hanoi, my crew and I take a day trip into the nearby countryside to shoot what we call “color” to add
texture and context to our reports. The moment we leave the city, we're surrounded by lush rice fields. Small villages, with traditional huts made of grass and bamboo, integrate perfectly into the natural environment as if they grew here of their own accord. Even a bicycle is a luxury in the countryside, and most rural Vietnamese walk to their destinations. They are lean and strong from diets of rice and vegetables, and while their poverty is palpable, they carry themselves with a silent dignity and inner peace. Like their villages, they appear balanced and in harmony with the natural rhythms of life.