Britain
was the first to use defoliants as a war tactic in Southeast Asia. That
was in the early 1950s in Malaya, then a British colony, before it
became the independent Malaysia. British planes sprayed Malayan jungles
with chemicals to strip trees bare and deprive communist guerrillas of
cover. They also destroyed crops that the insurgents relied on for
sustenance. A decade later, in what was then South Vietnam, United
States armed forces resorted to precisely the same methods on an
enormous scale in their long struggle against Viet Cong and North
Vietnamese fighters.
From
1962 to 1971, American C-123 transport planes sprayed roughly 20
million gallons of herbicides on an area of South Vietnam about the size
of Massachusetts. Code-named Ranch Hand, this operation reached its
peak from 1967 to 1969. (Some members of the Ranch Hand team adopted
Smokey Bear of forest-fire awareness fame as a mascot. “Only you can
prevent a forest” was their twist on Smokey’s slogan.) To the political
and military strategists in Washington, using vegetation-killing
chemicals was a legally sound and necessary way to save American and
South Vietnamese lives. They cited the British precedent.
This week’s video documentary from Retro Report,
a series that re-examines major stories from the past, returns us to
Vietnam and to the chemical most commonly and most notoriously used
there: Agent Orange. Named for the color of a stripe girdling the
barrels in which it was shipped, it combined two herbicides, one of
which turned out to be contaminated with a highly toxic strain of
dioxin. No need for alarm, Washington officialdom and chemical company
executives insisted at the time. Agent Orange did not harm humans, they
said. As the 1960s wore on, those assurances increasingly rang hollow.
Researchers found evidence of birth defects in lab animals. American
scientists and others began to speak out against the spraying.
Opposition to the herbicide campaign mounted, arm in arm with spreading
protests against the war itself. In 1970, the Agent Orange spraying
stopped. Other chemicals continued to be used until Jan. 7, 1971, when
the entire herbicide program was scrapped after a final Ranch Hand run.
But Agent Orange’s legacy was only beginning. More than 40 years later, it still casts a long shadow.
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