Whatever the verdict ends up being, she won't give up. "I'm on a mission, and as long as I can breathe, I'll continue the fight," Tran To Nga insisted. For almost 10 years, this 83-year-old French-Vietnamese woman has been the standard-bearer for the victims of Agent Orange, the highly toxic herbicide used by the US Army during the Vietnam War (1955-1975).

It's from Ho Chi Minh City – where she answered our questions by video, wearing pink glasses and with a serene look on her face – that she will learn the outcome of the historic lawsuit she brought in 2014 against 14 multinational companies (including Monsanto and Dow Chemical) that sold the chemical. The Paris Court of Appeal will announce its decision on August 22. For her and for all victims, it will be an important moment.

Tran remembers vividly that morning in 1966 when she saw a strange cloud forming in the sky over Cu Chi, northwest of Saigon. At the time, she was a 22-year-old trainee journalist with the press agency of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, the communist fighters opposed to the pro-American regime in power. Her head and body were suddenly covered in a wet powder.

She didn't know it yet, but thousands of liters of defoliant were being sprayed by the American army facing challenges from the Vietnamese guerrillas (more than 68 million liters between 1962 and 1971). Operation Ranch Hand's military objective was to bring the Vietcong within firing range by destroying their natural shield of forests and mangroves while also wiping out future harvests to starve the combatants. As her work left her no time to think about it, Tran took a shower and forgot about it.

The following year, she gave birth to her first child, who had a congenital heart defect. The little girl survived only 10 months. Tran made no connection with Agent Orange, which is named after the color of its storage cans. After the war, when she became a school principal in Ho Chi Minh City, she met veterans and their families who had become disabled because of the chemical.

Then, the doctors discovered several conditions, including breast cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis. The two daughters she had after the death of her eldest also suffered from heart defects. In the 1970s, Tran followed the work of scientists from afar and discovered the harmful effects of Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, a carcinogenic endocrine disruptor.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, became alarmed by its environmental consequences: This poison contaminated groundwater and wreaked havoc on the living world. It was in reference to this tragedy that biologist Arthur W. Galston first used the term "ecocide" at a conference on war in February 1970.

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