In the 1960s, Ernie Rivers taught
Navy flight students at the Pensacola Naval Air Station how to live off the
land if their plane was downed. He was the officer in charge of the survival
unit, overseeing 30 to 35
instructors, who taught more than
100 men a week how to survive with only a compass, map, and a hunting knife.
Every week groups of students would camp for three days, using different sites
on Eglin Air Force Base Reservation in Florida.
When the winds and clouds were
right, Rivers and his men would watch planes pass overhead, clouds of spray
coming from them. Several times he and his men were sprayed. “I’d say, ‘At
least we don’t have to use bug repellant,’” he noted, laughing, during an
interview. That was a big plus, they thought, for them as well as Army Rangers
who were also training out in the bayous of the Florida panhandle, where
mosquitoes and other bugs could make life miserable.
Rivers and the students thought
they were watching the Air Force spray DDT to kill mosquitoes. What was
actually being sprayed, he said, was Agent Orange. Documents show that gallons
of the defoliants Agent
Orange, Agent Purple, and Agent
White were sprayed at Eglin. In fact, according to officials overseeing the
program, the Air Force sprayed a test area on the base with more dioxin than
any similar area in Vietnam. The fact that Agent Orange was sprayed in Florida
for eight years was not widely known then or even today. Only in the last
several years has the documentation on the spraying been made publicly
available by Alvin Young, an Air Force scientist for more than 15 years at
Eglin. Young oversaw a huge research project evaluating how massive spraying of
Agent Orange at the Florida air force base affected its soil, water, plants, fish,
and animals.
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