Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam

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On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese tanks smashed into the grounds of the presidential palace in Saigon. Vietnam lay in ruins, its towns and cities bombed to rubble, the countryside seeded with unexploded mines, cluster bombs, and artillery shells. A decade of chemical warfare had reduced majestic triple canopy jungles to toxic graveyards. Mangrove forests, habitats for songbirds and vital to coastal ecosystems, had turned into eerie moonscapes.

Agent Orange, the most widely used herbicide in Vietnam, was named after the orange stripe painted around the fifty-five-gallon barrels in which it was stored. It was a fifty-fifty combination of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T, two commercial herbicides used widely in the United States. The 2,4,5-T in Agent Orange was contaminated with TCDD-dioxin, a carcinogenic, fetus-deforming, and quite possibly mutagenic chemical. Nearly forty years after the last spray mission, scientists continue to find high levels of dioxin in the food and water near abandoned military bases and in the blood, fatty tissue, and mother’s milk of the Vietnamese who live near these installations.

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