In 1961, South Vietnamese president
Ngo Dinh Diem asked the United States to help defoliate the lush jungle
that was providing cover to his Communist enemies. President John
Kennedy acquiesced and formally launched Operation Ranch Hand,
the United States Air Force’s program of systemic defoliation with the
chemical compound Agent Orange. So many years later, we’re still coming
to grips with the devastating effects of Agent Orange on troops and
civilians alike. Decades of the government dragging its feet on dealing with the Agent Orange issue in any comprehensive way has delayed a full reckoning.
New information about diseases caused by the defoliant trickle in year
by year while clean-up efforts continue in Vietnam itself. The entire
Agent Orange saga provides a casebook study in how not to deal with the
health and environmental fallout of combat.
Agent Orange use was revolutionary in
scope, not concept. During and after the Second World War, Allied
forces collaborated in exploring the potential of using defoliating
agents in Southeast Asia. The British put those experiments to practical
use when they used pesticides and poisons to clear brush and kill crops in a counterinsurgency campaign against Communist guerrillas during Operation Malayan Emergency
in the 1950s. American leaders then, in a leap of playground logic,
made the dangerous assumption that such a close, English-speaking ally
using defoliating agents in war meant that it was morally and legally
justified for us to do the same.
According to The New York Times,
“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.” This ecocide, as some have called it, wasn’t meant
to just clear jungle space for patrols and reconnaissance; it was also
part of the larger strategic goal of forced urbanization.
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