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As Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn notes at CommonDreams, “Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government.” More than 3 million people, including Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, US veterans, and their children have either died, sickened or been disabled, and their children may, too, as the result of the wide-scale use of chemical agents by US forces during the Vietnam War.
From 1961 to 1971, approximately 19 million gallons [80 million liters] of herbicides, primarily Agent Orange, were sprayed over the southern region of Vietnam. Much of it was contaminated with dioxin, a deadly chemical. Dioxin causes various forms of cancers, reproductive illnesses, immune deficiencies, endocrine deficiencies, nervous system damage, and physical and developmental disabilities.
Among the many war crimes conducted by the United States, its use of biological agents in Vietnam may have been the worst. According to a 2008 report in The Globe and Mail, “Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed by the defoliants, 500,000 children have been born with defects from retardation to spina bifida and a further two million people have suffered cancers or other illnesses. Yet they have received no compensation from those who produced the chemicals and those who made them a weapon of war.”
When the white powder started falling from the sky, the soldiers were puzzled. Usually the American planes dropped bombs. Now, they were unleashing clouds of something that looked like fog, smelled like garlic and burned their eyes.
“The whole earth was covered with it,” remembers Tong Van Vinh, who was a 26-year-old truck driver in the North Vietnamese military at the time. “We thought they were dropping smoke bombs on us. We didn’t know it was a chemical”….
First sprayed in 1968, Mr. Vinh was plagued by muscular and skeletal disorders. But after the war ended in 1975, his health deteriorated rapidly. By 1994, he was paralyzed and spent six months in hospital, being fed liquids through his nose. He recovered, but not enough to work on his rice farm. Today, his voice is hoarse, he can’t swallow solid food, his spine is numb and often he is too weak to walk or even to turn over in bed.Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2011
Now, Cohn reports, Congressman Bob Filner has introduced House Resolution 2634, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2011. The bill would “provide crucial assistance for social and health services to Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American, and U.S. victims of Agent Orange.”
According to a press release by Vietnam Veterans of America:
“On August 10, 1961, the U.S. Air Force began spraying chemical defoliants, dessicants, and herbicides over wide swaths of land in South Vietnam. This was done, first and foremost, to protect our troops – to clear vegetation from the perimeter of fire bases and other outposts, to deny those we were fighting cover and concealment, and to deny food to our enemy,” said John Rowan, National President of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA)….
“We, as a nation, need to accept our responsibility and address both the ecological destruction and the human agonies that resulted from our spraying of defoliants in southern Vietnam ,” Rowan said. “Maybe then we can finally have some closure to our war.”
U.S. interest in the use of biological and chemical weaponry goes back decades. Much of our knowledge regarding this remains hidden behind the wall of ongoing classification of military secrets. Interestingly, controversies over the use of biological weapons by the US during the Korean War was the impetus for the US brainwashing program that became MKULTRA, as it was reported that US airmen captured by the North Koreans and the Chinese had told their captors of US use of biological weapons during the Korean War.
Whatever the past history might be, there is no dispute about the terrible effect of chemical warfare conducted by US forces in Vietnam, including its blowback effects on US troops there. While no high-level US official has ever been held accountable for these or other crimes inflicted upon Vietnam, we have a moral obligation to help the victims who still suffer daily.
Cohn explains:
There has been some compensation for U.S. veteran victims of Agent Orange, but not nearly enough. In spite of President Richard Nixon’s 1973 promise of $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid to Vietnam “without any preconditions,” the Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American victims of the disgraceful chemical warfare the United States conducted in Vietnam have not seen one penny of compensation.
Fifty years is long enough. It is high time to compensate the victims for this shameful chapter in our history. H.R. 2634 will go a long way toward doing just that.
9 Comments
I saw the inventor of Agent Orange speak when I was in college, around 1980. He was very regretful. According to him, he did not invent it for use in warfare.
Yes, you’re right.
Arthur Galston was the inventor of Agent Orange. He did the research at the University of Illinois prior to the Second World War. According to the Globe and Mail article, it “was the last and most potent concoction employed in the defoliation campaign initially called Operation Hades (later renamed Operation Ranch Hand).”
From his Yale bio:
Interesting. Thanks, Jeff.
Thanks for helping to ensure that ALL the people affected by Agent Orange are not forgotten and for calling for their compensation. Some young people don’t want to hear about events from so long ago, perhaps feeling its not relevant to their generation simply because of the time elapsed. But it’s very pertinent because the US policy of using soliders and then throwing them away once they return is still in practice. And it seems to me that the war mongerers have never taken any responsibility for people in other countries affected by their agents of destruction, whether it be Agent Orange or drones.
It is sad that there does not appear to be much interest. The use of chemicals in US warfare continues, as the deployment of white phosphorus during the battle of Fallujah demonstrates.
The failure of accountability for past war crimes has ensured that criminals run the government. The thieves who are stealing trillions and crashing the economy are the same people who run a torture government, rains chemical death and disfigurement upon millions.
It seems that in every major conflict, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, some new ‘weapon’ is developed, and without fail gets used on the ‘enemy’. I suspect that once developed, these weapons then get used in lesser conflicts as well. And governments have no qualms about using these weapons – whether the harmful side effects are known or not, it is of no consequence to them. The people in government who make the decisions to use these weapons have no qualms about ‘experimenting’ on the enemy.
Mustard gas, although invented in the 1800′s, was first used in warfare during WWI by Germany, and then Britain. Chlorine and Phosgene gas were also used in that war. Germany developed Zyklon B in the 1920′s, and the Nazis used it in WWII on concentration camp victims. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were partly an experiment to see what the effects would be on cities, though the official reason was that they were used to hasten the end of the war with Japan.
Napalm (actually Napalm B) and Agent Orange, used by the United States against the Vietnamese. White phosphorous and depleted uranium (DU) munitions, used by the United States in Iraq. Basically experiments, when you get down to it, to test the destructive power of new weapons. Without concern for the long-term side effects. And the poisoning side effects are some of the worst kind of war crimes, IMHO.
We know the horrible side effects of Agent Orange. We are now realizing some of the effects of depleted uranium – birth defects, various cancers – but the full ramifications will not be known, or acknowledged, for a while, I’m afraid.
Agent Orange Song
I think Fritz Haber, the originator of chemical warfare, lived to regret what he had done. (Even at the time of his World War One work, that work led his wife to commit suicide. At that time, Haber was proud of his work.)
Agent Orange was not the only use of chemicals in Vietnam.
The VA jerked me around for 30 years about my poisoning. First, I couldn’t have been somewhere that was sprayed. Second, I couldn’t have been in the new areas admitted to. Third I could show no contact with Agent Orange.
I was not allowed to put my name on the Agent Orange registry with the VA. No reason, if I couldn’t prove it then I didn’t have it. They did not accept outside testing.
Google Camp Granite + Vietnam + II Corp + Qui Nhon.
I slept on a compound for three months that dispensed 28 freaking tons of Agent Orange. They, also, dispensed Agent White and Agent Blue. I have not been able to look up what chemicals for hell those were.