Retired Admiral Returns to Vietnam : Asia: American believes Agent Orange he ordered sprayed led to son’s death from cancer.

In a bittersweet journey after 25 years, retired Adm. Elmo Zumwalt Jr. returned to Vietnam on Friday for the first time since he ordered the spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange that he believes led to the cancer death of his son.

“It feels nostalgic,” he said. “It’s good to be back. I have for many years wanted to come to discuss important policy issues with the government of Vietnam.”

His mission during his weeklong visit, he said, is to complete an agreement with the Vietnamese to support joint research on Agent Orange and to “bind up the wounds of war.”

“The work I’m doing in the case of Agent Orange and as chairman of the National Marrow Donor Program are both my way of memorializing my son rather than trying to do it with bricks and mortar,” he said.

For Zumwalt, it was a strange feeling to be in the territory of his former battlefield foes.

As commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam from 1968 until 1970 and then as chief of naval operations until his retirement in 1974, he had seen the Communist North Vietnamese terrain through satellite photographs many times.

“But to be able to come in and meet with people who were adversaries for so long on policy issues of mutual interest is really an exciting experience,” he said.

The Vietnamese gave him a red-carpet reception that included scheduled meetings with President Le Duc Anh and with a legendary old battlefield foe, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, now 83. Giap held off half a million American troops and led North Vietnam to a victory over the U.S.-backed South.

Zumwalt, 73, of Arlington, Va., was accompanied by another son, James, also a Vietnam veteran, and by a leading U.S. expert on Agent Orange, Dr. Arnold Schecter.

Zumwalt’s eldest son, Elmo Zumwalt III, served in Vietnam from June, 1969, until August, 1970, as a lieutenant junior grade commanding a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta.

He died of cancer in August, 1988, at age 42. Agent Orange also was believed to have caused severe learning disabilities in his own son, Russell, now 16.

The younger Zumwalt was stationed in the region most saturated with Agent Orange to reduce vegetation and deprive the enemy of natural cover.

“I operated in areas that were so heavily hit with Agent Orange that they looked like burned-out World War II forests,” he said in 1985.

In January, 1983, lymphoma was diagnosed and Zumwalt says he has no doubt that Agent Orange was to blame for his son’s illness.

But neither ever had any guilt feelings, Zumwalt said.

“My son and I both believed to the day of his death that he was almost certainly alive as the result of the use of Agent Orange and the great reduction in casualties that stemmed from defoliation,” Zumwalt said.

“I would use Agent Orange again today in identical circumstances if we didn’t have non-carcinogenic defoliants, because we greatly reduced the deaths and woundings by using it,” he said. “Instead of losing or maiming 6,000 out of every 10,000, we’re now seeing six or eight out of every 10,000 come down with cancer.”