Many a species: one alone

Jeopardizes itself.”

-W.H. Auden

The use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam Conflict was one of the worst examples of blatant disregard for human life and the environment in history. Agent Orange was a defoliant made by Dow Chemical for the U.S. military, one of many “rainbow herbicides” used during the Vietnam War to reveal enemy positions. They got their names from the colored stripes painted on the fifty-five gallon barrels used to identify them. The scary thing is, that the entire disaster could have been avoided, as the government knew of the dangers to humans before this poison’s wide use as a defoliant.

Agent Orange is one of a variety of defoliants, known as the “rainbow herbicides” because of the colored stripes on their containment barrels, used during the Vietnam War. These herbicides include Agent Orange, Agent Purple, Agent Pink, Agent Green, Agent Blue, and Agent White. All of the agents, excluding Agents Blue and White, which were arsenic based, contained the deadly chemical, known as 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, found in Agent Orange that caused all of the health effects. Surprisingly, Agent Orange was actually the weakest of the defoliants, containing only 13 parts per million (PPM) of the chemical. Agent Purple contained 45 PPM of the dioxin and, in an amazing display of disregard for human health; Agents Pink and Green were almost entirely composed of the deadly toxin. Effectively, this means that the deadly, horrifying, Agent Orange that still shocks us today was over three times less concentrated than Agent Purple and nearly eight times weaker than Agents Pink and Green. Fortunately, Agents Pink and Green were only used during early testing trials from 1962 until 1964. Agent Purple, on the other hand, is a totally different story.

Although not used as widely as Agent Orange, Agent Purple was used fairly generously. Side effects are nearly identical to those of Agent Orange, which include soft-tissue sarcoma, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease, chronic lymphocytic leukemia and diabetes as well as over one hundred and twenty five other physical and mental conditions believed to be caused by the toxic dioxin contained in most of the rainbow herbicides. This list includes such maladies as nearly every type of cancer known to man, post traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, ALS, also known as Lou Gherigs Disease, and horrifying birth defects in the children of people exposed to the toxin. These defects can range from simple skin defects to missing or extra limbs.

Not only did the military and the Agent Orange makers know of its danger to humans and the environment, they also willing and knowingly made it twenty five times as strong as necessary. Remember, that’s Agent Orange, the weakest of the group. Therefore, if you do the math, that makes Agent Purple seventy five times too strong, and Agent Pink and Green almost two hundred times too strong. Is it really any wonder that these chemicals do such horrendous things to our bodies?

Agents Blue and White are the least known of the herbicides used in Vietnam. This is because they are made of a mixture of two arsenic based compounds, Na-dimethyl arsenate and dimethyl arsenic acid. Therefore, although still toxic, as they also contain high levels of cyanide, they don’t contain the deadly 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, and consequently does not cause the shocking health effects the others do. This is not to say that any of the herbicides used during Vietnam were harmless, only some were less than others. In fact, Agents Blue and White are still used today as weed killers on golf courses, community parks, and some residential lawns. They are, however, believed to possibly be a carcinogen, although not as strong as Agent Orange or the others.

Most people believe that Agent Orange, or any of the other herbicides from Vietnam, were never used outside of Vietnam. They are wrong. Agent Orange was actually tested near a military base outside of Gagetown, Canada, the residents of which promptly developed cancer after the spraying. It was also used at Innisfall, Australia in testing trials. However the files about “Operation Desert” as it was called, have supposedly been lost. And not even the United States is safe. In 1969 the U.S. Forest Service sprayed millions of gallons of it outside Globe, Arizona to decrease plant overgrowth and increase water runoff. One woman who was affected by it wrote the book Sue the Bastards! about her experience. In it she claims that after being exposed to the spray, she experienced temporary blindness and skin irritation, and later developed, and died from, cancer presumed to be caused by Agent Orange. In 1966 several 55-gallon drums filled with Agent Orange were discovered in a BIA storage facility on the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation. Not surprisingly the inhabitants of the reservation have an unusually high rate of cancer.

The victims of Agent Orange exposure aren’t staying quiet. People in Vietnam, South Korea, Canada, and Australia have all filed lawsuits against the U.S. government and the makers of Agent Orange. On January 31, 2004, the Vietnamese Association for victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin filed a lawsuit against Dow Chemical, Monsanto Chemical and many other companies, most of which the lead makers of Agent Orange. On March 10, 2005, a U.S. judge dismissed the case, stating that under international law of the time when Agent Orange was used, it was not considered a poison, and that the companies who supplied the chemical are not liable for the way their government used it. In 1999 a large group of nearly 20,000 South Koreans filed lawsuits against Agent Oranges makers. This time the judge ruled in their favor, stating that by making the chemical stronger than necessary, the companies failed to ensure safety. Again in 2005 1100 Canadians living in and around Gagetown filed a lawsuit. The case has yet to be resolved.

Agent Orange is a testimony to mankind’s self-destructive destiny. There is a poem by W.H. Auden that reads:

“Fate succumbs

Many a species: one alone

Jeopardizes itself.”

Agent orange is just one way that men jeopardize their own well-being. And yet one thing the poem does not mention is that we do not contain our destructiveness to our own species, we tend to pill over and devastate others. Agent Orange again illustrates this, as it not only affected hundreds of thousands of people, but devastated the environment as well. With dioxins in the soil and water plants will still not grow on farm or forest land to this day. On top of that, there is little to no effort being put to try to restore the ecosystem. And with how long the dioxins in the rainbow herbicides last, sometime, millions and millions of years hence, after humans have finally and permanently destroyed them selves once and for all there will still be traces of them devastating the environment, a tribute to the careless civilization that created them.