Vietnam veteran James Kaelin stands on a dirt road staring into an
empty scrub forest once part of Fort Chaffee, a U.S. Army Training camp
east of Fort Smith, Arkansas.
“They won’t even admit to this
being a test site to anybody,” Kaelin says. “But I have information
showing the Army tested Agent Orange, Agent White and Agent Blue on
seven different locations on Fort Chaffee in 1966 and 1967 without
knowledge to the general public. It was top secret.”
Kaelin
has brought with him a stack of white papers a half-foot deep, still on
the floorboard of his burgundy pickup, military documents proving that
Fort Chaffee was a chemical weapons proving ground. Cicadas trill this
hot August morning as military aircraft buzz overhead. Kaelin frequently
pauses while telling his story to identify the make of each plane going
by, without looking up.
“Rumor has it that pine trees were
planted along the perimeter of this one test site,” Kaelin says, “in
order to camouflage all the dead foliage inside.”
During
the Vietnam War, U.S. military forces decimated jungles occupied by
North Vietnamese with tactical defoliants. The chemical agent mixtures,
categorized by colorful code names, were tested on U.S. national forests
as well as more than a dozen rural military bases including Fort
Chaffee, a 75,000-acre Army post straddling Sebastian and Crawford
Counties in west central Arkansas.
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