More than 10 years of U.S. chemical warfare in Vietnam
exposed an estimated 2.1 to 4.8 million Vietnamese people to Agent Orange. More
than 40 years on, the impact on their health has been staggering.
In the end, the military campaign was called Operation Ranch
Hand, but it originally went by a more appropriately hellish appellation:
Operation Hades. As part of this Vietnam War effort, from 1961 to 1971, the
United States sprayed over 73 million liters of chemical agents on the country
to strip away the vegetation that provided cover for Vietcong troops in “enemy
territory.”
Using a variety of defoliants, the U.S. military also
intentionally targeted cultivated land, destroying crops and disrupting rice
production and distribution by the largely communist National Liberation Front,
a party devoted to reunification of North and South Vietnam.
Some 45 million liters of the poisoned spray was Agent
Orange, which contains the toxic compound dioxin. It has unleashed in Vietnam a
slow-onset disaster whose devastating economic, health and ecological impacts
that are still being felt today.
This is one of the greatest legacies of the country’s
20-year war, but is yet to be honestly confronted. Even Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick seem to gloss over this contentious issue, both in their supposedly
exhaustive “Vietnam War” documentary series and in subsequent interviews about
the horrors of Vietnam.
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