Just
before dawn on Nov. 18, 1967, the men of the Army’s 266th Chemical Platoon
awoke to reveille and assembled in formation. The platoon was attached to the
First Infantry Division, and the men were stationed at the division’s base,
deep in the red-clay hills north of Saigon.
The men
had a typically busy day ahead of them. Their tasks included obtaining 15 drums
of Agent Orange to defoliate the base perimeter, firing mortars at an area just
outside the base for an evening chemical drop, working at the bomb yard to
prepare 24 drums of CS tear gas, making 48 white phosphorus fuses to detonate
the drums, loading the drums onto a CH-47 cargo helicopter, and finally, that
afternoon, dropping 24 drums of the gas from the helicopter’s rear hatch onto a
target site. It was, by 1967, just another day in the life of the 266th
Chemical Platoon, and in the American war in Vietnam — a war that was, in many
respects, a chemical war.
It
didn’t start that way. But as the conflict deepened, it became obvious that
chemical weapons could play a critical role. In the case of the First Division,
that realization came as the Viet Cong dug in north of Saigon with a network of
underground bunkers and tunnels that were forbidding, dangerous spaces where
conventional weapons would have limited effect. That fall, the 266th and other
chemical platoons began training to use CS and other chemicals to support
combat operations.
CS
wasn’t the only tool in the platoon’s arsenal, and going after tunnels wasn’t
its only mission. It handled anything related to chemicals, from spraying for
mosquitoes to burning trash. It sprayed defoliants like Agent Orange and
prepared napalm. Chemicals were everywhere, and their proliferation in the
American war effort raised concerns that the United States was crossing a line
in Vietnam, violating the 1925 Geneva Protocol’s prohibition against the first
use of chemical weapons in war.
