It was as if we were passing through an alien landscape. On
each side of the dirt road, for maybe 75 or 80 yards, trees had become ghostly,
wooden skeletons and all green undergrowth was gone.
It was the first time I had witnessed the dramatic results
of the chemical, dropped by C-123 planes to deny the enemy cover along roads
such as this one, places where ambushes, of the very close kind, were denied.
It was only later on, after I returned home, that I learned
about what Agent Orange did, beyond the obvious aims of the defoliant. Of
course, I was exposed to the chemical, manufactured by Monsanto, a company with
a dark history of developing products that have a propensity for killing things
or drastically altering the ordinary processes of nature. We now know that tens
of thousands of Vietnam veterans and their children are believed to be
suffering from the effects of Agent Orange.
After a long and bitter fight by veterans’ organizations,
the Veterans Administration has recognized the connection between Agent Orange
and the diseases that have stricken veterans and their children. They include
birth defects, infantile tumors, Hodgkin’s disease, respiratory cancers, prostate
cancer, spina bifida, diabetes and more. The VA has found an unusually high
number of birth defects among children born to Vietnam veterans who were
exposed to Agent Orange.
Meanwhile, the people of Vietnam suffer to this day. In
September 2017, The New York Times focused on the hell we brought to that
country in an article, titled, “The Forgotten Victims of Agent Orange.”
It said: “The history of Agent Orange and its effects on the
Vietnamese people, as well as American soldiers, should shame Americans. Fifty
years ago, in 1967, the United States sprayed 5.1 million gallons of herbicides
with the toxic chemical dioxin across Vietnam, a single-year record for the
decade-long campaign to defoliate the countryside. It was done without regard
to dioxin’s effect on human beings or its virulent and long afterlife.”
And this: “Vietnamese soldiers, from both sides, with
perfectly healthy children before going to fight, came home and sired offspring
with deformities and horrific illnesses: Villages repeatedly sprayed have
exceptionally high birth-deformity rates; and our own Department of Veterans
Affairs now lists 14 illnesses presumed to be related to Agent Orange.”
But how is this for irony? President Trump has nominated a
woman who is a former executive at Monsanto, the purveyors of death who dreamed
up Agent Orange, to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
No comments:
Post a Comment