Agent Orange

“Fate succumbs

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.