20 Million Gallons of Agent Orange
|An arial herbicide spray mission in souther Viet Nam.|
August 10 marked the dark anniversary of the first US spraying of Vietnam with Agent Orange, containing the carcinogen dioxin, a defoliant that fell on millions of human beings, including American soldiers, causing a legacy of cancers and birth defects.
When I visited an Agent Orange conference in Hanoi in 2008, it was stunning to meet professionally attired, suitcase-carrying Vietnamese experts on Agent Orange who were themselves deformed by the effects of the carcinogen. With conspicuous dignity, they represented the cause of disability rights in their own country while demanding reparations for obvious crimes of war from the United States. For decades, the US has refused to recognize the health and environmental impacts of the spraying, while spending billions on health care and disability costs for former American soldiers harmed by the herbicide.
The US has since broke new ground by commencing a modest $43 million clean up of dioxin at one site near Da Nang, a fraction of the 5.5 million acres destroyed by the spraying during the war.