When is a war really over? Is it when a ‘mission accomplished’ banner drops, when the remaining troops come home, or when the weapons we left behind stop hurting people?
Today’s Moment of Science… Agent Orange.
Chemical defoliants were a new technology in the 1940s when they were first used in agriculture to kill broadleaf weeds. Two of the earliest defoliants, 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T) and 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic (2,4-D) were found by the US Army to pack quite the punch when combined into a mixture that would be known as Agent Orange.
2,4-D is still used today. As a former pesticide researcher, I’ve worked with it. I have not worked with 2,4,5-T, nor would I. In the synthesis process, a nasty little fucker of a contaminant is produced. A dioxin called 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD), particularly cranky even for a dioxin, is the reason why Agent Orange was such a goddamn nightmare.
What are dioxins and what do they do, exactly? The TL;DR version is that they’re a class of chemicals that attach to aryl hydrocarbon receptors (a protein that regulates gene expression). In doing so they seriously fuck with the activation or silencing of genes that can cause everything from cancer to neurological disorders to birth defects.
To be clear, dioxin in the mix or not, you shouldn’t spray herbicide willy-nilly all over a country even if you think it’s gonna help you fight communism.
Speaking of.
After WWII, the US got a bit touchy about that time we teamed up with the USSR to fight the Nazis. We couldn’t just shake hands and part as friends, no. Truman had to sign a whole ass doctrine to declare the US would fucking fight communists everywhere.
(Except, you know, that one time we really needed them).
Known as French Indochina since the 1880s while under French occupation, there was a gaping power vacuum in Vietnam after the war when the people had a chance to seize freedom. Ho Chi Minh himself had worked with the US during the war, being recruited as an intelligence asset. The US fought along with him, sending in a medical and training support unit in the waning days of the war. But after the Axis countries surrendered and the victory beers ran dry, the US was all “so uuuh, aren’t you over your communism trip yet, Minh?”
(He was not).
Though ground troop fighting wouldn’t start for a few more years, the US military sent their finest chemical defoliants ahead of them in 1962. Because fighting in the jungle is hard, so may as well dump imperial assloads of herbicide on the place to make it less jungle-y. You know, to let the people of Vietnam know we cared.
US troops weren’t given safety equipment to handle the herbicide. They weren’t told shit.
It’s estimated that a fifth of the country was blanketed with as much as eighty million liters of Agent Orange in arguably the biggest chemical warfare campaign in history.
Then the reports started. In areas that had seen heavy spraying, birth defects and cancers were at “epidemic” levels. The US response? The illnesses and children being born with health issues were from communist North Vietnam, you see, so the suffering of those children was easily relegated to propaganda.
Then the US veterans started getting sick.
In one report written by a major in the Air Force, it was suggested that vets weren’t really sick because it seemed kinda like bullshit that they were complaining ten years after all the chemical warfare. No, they were driven to “seek public recognition for their sacrifices in Vietnam and, on the other hand, to acquire financial compensation during economically depressed times”.
The thing about dioxin is it doesn’t give all that much indication that it’s hurting you while you’re touching it. It hangs out in your system for years, silently. Then it hits you.
Or your children.
A ProPublica investigation published in 2016 found that troops exposed to Agent Orange were about a third more likely to have children born with birth defects. Dow Chemical, one of nine contractors that manufactured it during the war, issued countless denials, claiming they only knew it could cause a minor skin rash. However, documents showed that they knew by 1965 that it was “exceptionally toxic,” potentially fatal.
It took until the Bush administration for the United States to- sorta- acknowledge the damage that Agent Orange had done. Over the last decade, the US has started working with Vietnam to clean up these sites. With an estimated three million still suffering in Vietnam and the long shadow of dioxin’s effects looming over future generations, the war is still not over.
This had been your daily Moment of Science, a little horrified that I could find denials from chemical companies about Agent Orange as recently as 2004.
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My service in RVN was along the DMZ (1966-1967), and MCNamara was determined to make the DMZ uninhabitable or even transitable. To that end we watched our planes swoop low over the jungle and dump AO. Sometimes we’d catch a wif. When we had to on patrol or sit through a night ambush site, we were told to be sure to wear a poncho and keep the hood up and snugged tight. At night your primary survival sense is hearing which you can’t do with the damn poncho hood up. Both of my children had minor birth defects, and I had what was once an admirable body destroyed (heart issues in my 30s led eventually to a quad bypass and multiple stents), diabetes, parkinson’s like palsey, et.al..
Did our defense department learn one thing from AO, I think not. In the Gulf and Afghanistan the cheapest way to get ride of poisonous substances was to burn them in pits, in camps where troops couldn’t help breathing that crap. Now they’re falling all over the place.
Please, America, stop the idiotic hawks who cannot fight wars without collateral casualties, civil and military.