When she cannot stop crying, soothing creams and iodine are rubbed into her back, which is a lunar collage of septic blisters and scabs. She clatters around with disjointed spidery strides which leave her soaked in sweat. Here is a 19-year-old who lives in a 10-year-old's body. Hong Hanh is both surprising and terrifying. Her declining half-life is spent unseen, in her home, an unremarkable concrete box in Ho Chi Minh City, filled with photographs, family plaques and yellow enamel stars, a place where the best is made of the worst. Hong Hanh's story, and that of many more like her, is quietly unfolding in Vietnam today. Nor the trenches of first world war France. This is not northern Iraq, where Saddam Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds in 1988. The superpower that spread the toxin has done nothing to combat the medical and environmental catastrophe that is overwhelming her country. No redress has been offered, no compensation. She has been poisoned by the most toxic molecule known to science it was sprayed during a prolonged military campaign.
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