In the opening scene of Poisoned Jungle, the platoon moved through a recently defoliated zone. Classified as herbicides, the chemicals, especially when sprayed at many times the recommended concentrations, killed more than vegetation. The stench of these “dead zones” sometimes included the animal life caught beneath the sprays. Herbicides became poisons to more than just plants.
A Viet Cong soldier, himself a farmer, in 1965 described a scene in Binh Dinh province in the immediate aftermath of a spraying operation. Quoted from a RAND interview in Edwin A. Martini’s Agent Orange: History, Science and the Politics of Uncertainty, his words are telling.
All the fields along the two banks of a small river were utterly destroyed. Even the people’s vegetables and fruit-tree gardens near the fields were ruined. According to the people, after the spraying, the tree leaves were wet as if soaked in oil. The water had a film on the surface, which looked like fat skim. A little while later, the leaves became dry and fell on the ground. Rice stalks turned dry, banana trees sank, potato and manioc became soft and rotten, the pineapple was tainted, the coconuts split, and the jet fruits fell on the ground.
When concentrations were closer to recommendations, accelerated growth killed the plants, which withered before death. Agent Orange overstimulated growth and the vegetation grew too rapidly.
Agent Orange was the most common of five chemical sprays the U.S. Military used in Vietnam. A 50/50 mixture of the common farm chemical 2-4-D, and 2-4-5-T, made more toxic by the dioxins formed through its manufacture. One of the most toxic substances identified by man, it is an undisputed carcinogen. Sprayed on 15% of the South Vietnamese countryside to deny cover and sustenance to the enemy, the dioxins were in two-thirds of all the chemicals used.
Created as an unintentional byproduct of the combustion process in manufacturing 2-4-5-T, dioxins were in the chemicals sprayed on the Vietnamese countryside. Told the herbicides were harmless to people, American troops were sometimes cavalier with their use. Agent Orange was utilized for the formation of base camps and compounds, and the perimeters which surrounded them. Preoccupied with other concerns during my tour, I never took notice of areas where not even a blade of grass grew until I viewed my photographs after the war. One picture shows a barbecue fashioned from a barrel cut in half lengthwise, spindly metal legs attached. Cooking meat scrounged or bartered in the war zone, was it a barrel originally utilized for shipping one of the chemicals with dioxins?
Photograph by James Ballard
The names of the herbicides originated from the identifying stripes around the middle of the drums they were shipped in, purple, pink, white, blue, and orange. In the macabre terminology of the war zone, they were known as the “rainbow chemicals.” Ranch Hand became the operational code for the military’s spraying program. “Only we can prevent forests,” a perverse motto derived from a play on words from the Smoky the Bear commercials to prevent forest fires in the U.S.
`I arrived in Vietnam in early December of 1968. “Winning the Hearts and Minds” of the Vietnamese was a publicly stated goal of the war effort by the U.S. government and military. Picture the scene quoted above of the sprays killing the rice, vegetables and orchards of the village in Binh Dinh. These actions could only incite hatred for the American presence in Vietnam by destroying food crops. Only the civilian war casualties created more animosity. We will get to that in subsequent posts.
Picture a foreign presence destroying corn crops in Iowa, wheat in Kansas, or apples in Washington state. Americans would be outraged. Think of some of the sprays fouling waterways and leaving permanent damage to the landscape. I always experienced this “disconnect” between the stated policies and the way the war was conducted. Imagine soldiers showing up unannounced on your street to search your home.
The tactics can be debated, and still are, in the context of veterans who had to face the possibility of their own death. Some will argue the defoliation helped them survive their tours. What is impossible to reconcile is how the use of Agent Orange won over any Vietnamese through the destruction of crops and altering 15% of their natural land mass. I don’t see how anyone could reasonably expect any other reaction than resentment and enmity.
Vietnam now marks August 10 every year as Agent Orange Day, coinciding with the date of the first use of sprays in Kontum Province in 1961. It is not surprising the country takes it seriously. Vietnamese doctors and researchers, often in conjunction with Western scientists, have documented how the dioxins have continued to cause cancers and birth defects. This collaboration makes it more difficult to dismiss this research as government propaganda by a communist state.
In perhaps the best detailed and up-to-date account of where the science stands, in 2017 Le Ke Son and Charles R. Bailey published From Enemies to Partners: Vietnam, the U.S. and Agent Orange. Son, a Vietnamese medical doctor who also has a PhD in toxicology, and Bailey, a public policy specialist with a PhD in agricultural economics, co-authored this remarkably concise and unbiased set of data and facts. It chronicles where the issue stands between the two governments and gives as unbiased an update on the state of Agent Orange problems in Vietnam as I have seen.
Dr. Son has long been involved with studying the issue in Vietnam. Dr. Bailey headed the Hanoi office of the Ford Foundation from 1997 until 2007, a nonprofit organization whose grants totaled 17 million dollars to assist the Vietnamese with public health projects, remediating dioxin-contaminated soils and informing the American people on the ongoing problems associated with Agent Orange.
We are barely scratching the surface of this lingering issue. In my next blog, I thought it would be appropriate to tell George Mizo’s story, a Vietnam Veteran who made a difference after the war. Never heard of him? Stay tuned.