Agent Orange

History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty

Edwin A. Martini

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781613762943
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Taking on what one former U.S. ambassador called "the last ghost of the Vietnam War, "this book examines the far-reaching impact of Agent Orange, the most infamous of the dioxin-contaminated herbicides used by American forces in Southeast Asia. Edwin A. Martini's aim is not simply to reconstruct the history of the "chemical war"but to investigate the ongoing controversy over the short- and long-term effects of weaponized defoliants on the environment of Vietnam, on the civilian population, and on the troops who fought on both sides.Beginning in the early 1960s, when Agent Orange was first deployed in Vietnam, Martini follows the story across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, looking for answers to a host of still unresolved questions. What did chemical manufacturers and American policymakers know about the effects of dioxin on human beings, and when did they know it? How much do scientists and doctors know even today? Should the use of Agent Orange be considered a form of chemical warfare? What can, and should, be done for U.S. veterans, Vietnamese victims, and others around the world who believe they have medical problems caused by Agent Orange?Martini draws on military records, government reports, scientific research, visits to contaminated sites, and interviews to disentangle conflicting claims and evaluate often ambiguous evidence. He shows that the impact of Agent Orange has been global in its reach affecting individuals and communities in New Zealand, Australia, Korea, and Canada as well as Vietnam and the United States. Yet for all the answers it provides, this book also reveals how much uncertainty—scientific, medical, legal, and political—continues to surround the legacy of Agent Orange.

CHAPTER ONE

ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT FORESTS

The Chemical War and the Illusion of Control

The planes came to Cat Son a little after six o’clock in the morning. The reconnaissance plane came first, followed by two fighter jets that strafed the village. Then came the big cargo planes, three of them, flying in formation, parallel and low to the ground, and spraying a fine mist that looked to the people below like white smoke. The planes sprayed the trees and fields surrounding Cat Son, including the villagers’ fruit trees and rice paddies. Upon surveying the damage three days after this mission in October 1965, one eyewitness to the attacks, a member of the main force unit of the NLF in Binh Dinh province and a former farmer himself, described the effects of what Vietnamese soldiers and civilians came to call the spray: “All the fields along the two banks of a small river were utterly destroyed. Even the people’s vegetables and fruit-tree gardens near the fields were ruined. According to the people, after the spraying, the tree leaves were wet as if soaked in oil. The water had a film on the surface, which looked like fat skim. A little while later, the leaves became dry and fell on the ground. Rice stalks turned dry, banana trees sank, potato and manioc became soft and rotten, the pineapple was tainted, the coconuts split, and the jet fruits fell on the ground.”¹ No eyewitnesses described any immediate health problems among the villagers after the attack, but locals refused to drink the water for several days. The rice seedlings, still fairly young, were destroyed. Most of the village’s fruit supply was rendered inedible, and the trees would have to be replanted.²

Scenes like this one were repeated thousands of times during the Vietnam War, as the modified C-123 aircraft of Operation Ranch Hand carried out herbicide missions across central and southern Vietnam in an attempt to defoliate the jungle and deny easy access to food to the revolutionary forces of Vietnam. Caught in between the various sides of this long, bloody conflict, millions of Vietnamese civilians watched helplessly as the spray destroyed their crops, trees, and much of the surrounding landscape. Looking back on these events with the hindsight of history and knowing what we now know about the scale of destruction of the Vietnam War, one might regard these chemical attacks as less than shocking. Images of the widespread bombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, of the massacre at My Lai, and of children burned by napalm running in the street remain familiar components of the cultural memory of the war. But the absence of televised images and immediate casualties from herbicide missions should not obscure the unusual, even radical, nature of these attacks. How and why did the United States come to carry out chemical attacks on the villages and surrounding areas of millions of peasant farmers half a world way? Why were chemical herbicides produced in places like Midland, Michigan, being sprayed over places like Cat Son village? Why did American planes destroy the crops of those they were ostensibly trying to protect and for whose hearts and minds U.S. forces were ostensibly battling?

Learning how the chemical war came to be requires understanding three unique, interrelated historical contingencies of the early 1960s. First, Operation Ranch Hand cannot be comprehended apart from the political and military circumstances in Southeast Asia and the world that the Kennedy administration faced when it took office in 1961. Both the Cold War and the decolonization of former European empires were at their height when Kennedy was elected. The war in Vietnam quickly took its place alongside Cuba and Berlin as the primary hot spots of the struggle between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. Kennedy’s decision to deploy herbicides and other chemicals in Vietnam has to be grasped within the context of its interrelated efforts at nation building and counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, efforts which policymakers at the time saw as part of a global struggle against communism. Just as important, however, as many within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were acutely aware, the potential fallout from this decision could not easily be separated from the Cold War. No sooner had Operation Ranch Hand begun than the propaganda battle ignited. From its inception the chemical war was intricately entwined not only with the battle for hearts and minds but also with the larger questions about American actions and intentions in the Cold War.³

The political and military components, however, cannot alone explain the material conditions through which the chemical war was prosecuted. Operation Ranch Hand was supported by a global infrastructure of chemical development, production, testing, and distribution that embodied what President Dwight Eisenhower had described as the military–industrial complex. Herbicides were produced, tested, and delivered to Southeast Asia via a network of industrial, corporate, and military connections that literally spanned the globe. The scope of this network underscores the common, widespread application of herbicides and other chemicals during the period in which the United States escalated the war in Vietnam and the ways in which a new environmental consciousness would coincide with that war. As the potential dangers of Agent Orange became known across equally global networks, individuals and communities in these disparate locations would come to have common concerns about the effects of exposure to these chemical agents.

Finally, the weaponization of herbicides in general and the use of Agent Orange in particular cannot be understood apart from the mindset Kennedy and his advisers brought to the White House. The best and the brightest, as they have been infamously labeled, practiced a technocratic management style paired with an air of idealism and superiority about their mission; they came to believe that a technologically advanced society like the United States could manage and control an environment like southern Vietnam and could, through the analysis and manipulation of data and the proper application of modern tools, including herbicides, impose its will on that environment and its inhabitants.⁴ This will to control was palpable not only in the White House, but also in the Pentagon under Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Alongside endeavors to control the movement of civilians and combatants, the U.S. military tried to manipulate and control the very environment through which its forces moved, most of which was densely vegetated jungle and forest. Throughout the war in Vietnam, the United States and the RVN used many chemical compounds as they strove to control insects, combatants, civilians, and even the jungle itself. American forces first sought to defoliate the forest in order to locate enemy forces more easily; when this proved insufficient, they tried to ignite large-scale forest fires to remove the forest altogether.

Herbicides were designed to kill vegetation, but the United States did not set out to destroy huge swaths of landscape in Southeast Asia any more than it willfully set out to kill more than two million Vietnamese. Herbicidal warfare and the use of chemical agents more broadly were initially conceived as a technological substitute for direct military intervention by American troops. Yet by attempting to impose their will on the people and landscape of the region, American war planners consistently and stubbornly refused to accept the limits of their power—political, economic, military, and technological. This intransigence resulted not only in an ultimately futile prolonging of the war effort, but also in efforts such as Operation Ranch Hand that would have a severe, longtime impact on the landscape and people of Southeast Asia and on all those who served there in the war.

The Origins of the Chemical War

By the early 1960s the Third World had emerged as perhaps the most important site in the Cold War. Although Western Europe would never be far from the minds of policymakers, the emergence of the Chinese as a major power in Asia and the rapid decolonization of former European colonies made places like Southeast Asia critical battlegrounds in the global struggle between capitalism and communism. President Kennedy had no intention of making Vietnam the primary battleground of the Cold War at the start of his presidency, but by the time he was assassinated in 1963 it had become precisely that. Faced with a growing insurgency in southern Vietnam, Kennedy authorized a number of steps that made Southeast Asia the testing ground for his new approach to foreign policy and for his commitment to combat worldwide communism.

Kennedy’s first year in office saw the situation in southern Vietnam deteriorate rapidly. The government of Ngo Dinh Diem, installed with the strong support of the United States in 1955, was not only failing to make political gains in the countryside but also alienating many potential constituencies, particularly students and Buddhist leaders in and around its urban strongholds, especially Saigon. Far from being the puppet of the United States he was often characterized as, Diem more often than not rejected efforts by his advisers from the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations on such matters as political and land reform.⁵ During this crucial period the NLF went from being a loosely affiliated network of political and military units nominally created in 1960 to a well-organized revolutionary force making huge gains in rural areas across central and southern Vietnam. The historian William Turley estimates that the armed forces of the NLF grew exponentially from about seven thousand to over one hundred thousand in 1960–64.⁶ Although he signaled increased American commitment to the Diem regime with an enhanced Program of Action for South Vietnam in May 1961, Kennedy also dispatched several advisers to Vietnam over the next several months to gain a better understanding of the situation.⁷

In May, Vice President Johnson flew to Saigon, followed later by the economic adviser Eugene Staley and, in October, Deputy National Security Adviser Walt Rostow and the military adviser Maxwell Taylor. Each of these missions confirmed that the situation was indeed getting worse and that the Diem regime was losing the battle against the NLF. What had been a minor concern in Eisenhower’s outgoing security briefing with the new president—Laos was thought to be the most pressing crisis in Southeast Asia—suddenly became a major focus of the incoming administration and a test case for its new approach to foreign policy. James Brown of the United States Army Chemical Warfare Center at Fort Detrick in Maryland, a leading figure in the development and evaluation of the defoliation program who oversaw the early herbicide testing programs in Vietnam, accompanied Taylor and Rostow on their trip and helped make the case for the use of herbicides as a potential counterinsurgency tool. Brown’s involvement with what would come to be known as the Taylor–Rostow report, which was instrumental in Kennedy’s decision to increase American financial and military commitments to Diem, helped ensure that Vietnam would become the test case for herbicidal warfare.⁸ What made Southeast Asia a true test for Kennedy’s vision, however, was that it offered a chance to take the best-equipped, most well funded military in the world into a situation defined by unconventional warfare and counter-insurgency. While U.S. forces were not particularly well prepared for such a task, the president felt this was the type of new challenge the country would have to meet in the developing world.

Kennedy’s “flexible response” approach to foreign policy was designed first by Taylor as a response to what he saw as the flawed framework of the Eisenhower administration. Implemented in the Pentagon by McNamara, the new plan was designed to modernize the U.S. military to meet a more diverse series of threats and included an emphasis on chemical and biological alternatives to nuclear weapons. The architects of flexible response sought a range of approaches that made innovative uses of technology, a variety of “techniques and gadgets” that could reduce the NLF’s advantageous use of the natural concealment of the forest and limit their food supply.⁹ Fortunately, the military had been working on this technology: chemical herbicides that could be sprayed over large areas of forest to defoliate the landscape and deny sources of food to the NLF.

After seeing the domestic uses of chemical herbicides and pesticides, the U.S. military during and after the Second World War accelerated programs to develop delivery systems that could be used to clear vegetation around military installations and to control insects and thereby the exposure of troops to diseases like malaria. They could also be used to target enemy supply routes and food supplies.¹⁰ As the historian David Zierler points out, however, this latter issue marked a major shift in thinking about the use of chemicals in a military context: “Whereas early research in plant growth manipulation required a cognitive leap to shift the field from growth promotion to weed killing, the idea that herbicides could become a military weapon necessitated a similar reorientation of the social function of plant physiology in a time of total war. Just as the idea to favor herbicides over growth promoters required new ways to unlock the potential of biochemistry, so did the notion of herbicidal warfare require innovative thinking about national security and the environmental dimensions of battle.”¹¹ The line between military and civilian herbicides, however, was never clear-cut. Civilian scientists worked closely with both chemical companies and the military to research, develop, and test a variety of chemicals that had potential military uses.

An early report from the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) noted that the choice of chemicals for such operations was somewhat limited but that the problem was largely one of testing, not availability. There were “a large number of compounds that could be screened,” the report claimed. The Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) had “for years been screening new chemicals emerging from the laboratories through the United States, including industrial, government, and college sources.” The CWS was in possession of more than twelve thousand of these new compounds and planned to closely coordinate the development and testing of them with the chemical industry.¹² Ultimately, more than sixty distinct chemical combinations would be used as herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, rodenticides, and riot control agents during the Vietnam War.¹³

In the late 1950s scientists had developed several herbicide combinations that had proven effective in defoliation and crop destruction. Most of these were based on the herbicides 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). Both of these herbicides were in wide use in the United States and around the world. Throughout the 1950s the domestic use of herbicides grew exponentially. Domestic production of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T increased from fourteen million to thirty-six million pounds and from virtually zero to ten million pounds, respectively, between 1950 and 1960. By the end of the fifties American companies were producing more than seventy-five million pounds of herbicides annually, bringing in well over one hundred million dollars per year. In 1959, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, American farmers treated more than fifty-three million acres with herbicides.¹⁴ That same year the military began large-scale efforts to develop effective aerial delivery systems for herbicides.

TABLE 1. PRIMARY RAINBOW HERBICIDES USED IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1961–71

MILITARY NAME	COMBINATION	PRIMARY YEARS USED
Agent Pink	60% n-butyl ester 2,4,5-T 40% isobutyl ester of 2,4,5-T	1961–64
Agent Green	100% n-butyl ester, 2,4,5-T	1961–64
Agent Purple	50% n-butyl ester of 2,4-D 30% n-butyl ester of 2,4,5-T 20% isobutyl ester of 2,4,5-T	1961–64
Agent Blue	100% sodium salt, cacodylic acid	1962–71
Agent White	80% triispropanolamine salt of 2,4-D 20% triispropanolamine salt of picolram	1965–71
Agent Orange	50% n-butyl ester of 2,4-D 50% n-butyl ester of 2,4,5-T	1965–71

The herbicide combinations produced for the military were variations on combinations of these and other chemicals. The six mixtures were given color-coded names by the military according to the color of the band placed on the drums in which they were shipped (table 1). Together, the six agents became known as the rainbow herbicides. Herbicides Purple, Pink, and Green were the fir...