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US Is Finally Cleaning Up Agent Orange In Vietnam
derekmead writes "It only took 40 years. And yes, Washington still disputes Hanoi's claim that up to 4 million Vietnamese suffered contact with the defoliant, which was dumped en masse in a U.S. air campaign to scorch away the dense jungle cover under which guerilla fighters hid. But the AP reports that the U.S. is finally set to start cleaning up the mess. The numbers are staggering: Between 1962 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed some 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and a galaxy of other herbicides on nearly a quarter of former South Vietnam. The defoliant ate through about 5 millions acres – a tract comparable in size to Massachusetts – of forest. An additional half-million acres of crops were decimated."
I would think that the clean up was a pre-requisite to the large resort chains going in and buying up the beach front...I hear it's beautiful there.
So one acre in 10 was wiped out. Doesn't sound so bad.
Why do stupid bureaucrats keep spending our money on stupid stuff?
This money would be much better spent on NASA.
Why?
We never won that battle, so why should we pay to clean up the damages? Vietnam is still our "enemy" technically.
...but how much is a galaxy?
So there was still 450,000 acres of crops left?
Added a whole new dimension to the old tactic of slash and burn, didn't it?
I'm sure the "peace" treaty didn't include a herbicide clean up clause. War sucks, so why try to change that 40 years later? No matter what happens it will still suck.
Let them clean it up.
But what about our fathers who also had this shit sprayed on them and told to fuck off and die of cancer?
Created by responsible corporate citizens under the auspices of the Defense Production Act
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The US barely helps allies it bombed.
Unless Laos got a gift card I'm unaware of?
we can't afford to do these things
clean up Agent Orange in Vietnam good...but you know Iraq & Afghanistan will be in line next, demanding cleanup & reparations for Depleted Uranium scattered all over their countries. Unkle Skam has printing presses churning out more $USD to throw around the world, that will fix the problems har har!
I knew there was massive amounts of the stuff sprayed - but until now I thought it had a short-term effect. My thinking was along the lines of "sprayed a lot of round-up, but it's gone now."
To find out that it hasn't gone anywhere, and is still effective and still dangerous... not a comfortable realization to find that one little fact was omitted from every class, book or documentary I've ever seen about the war. Makes me wonder if it was something that was considered a "given" for Agent Orange - and the tidbit was never passed on, or if it was intentionally obscured.
Meanwhile, in the US, the FDA just approved this stuff to be sprayed on your vegetables...
They were the enemy. They won. If they didn't think (or weren't in a position) to impose terms requiring cleanup as part of a peace settlement, the US doesn't owe them anything now.
Plenty of liberal traitors would applaud the destruction of US agricultural. 10% would be a fine beginning in their eyes.
Such a judicial lot those liberals and progressives...
Haliburton must be getting thirsty or something.
Interesting that US WMDs are still poisoning a country half a world away, whilst US forces are in another country, nearly half a world away (other direction) on a hunt for bogus WMDs.
If I were cynical, I'd call that hypocritical.
What a waste.
Agent orange has poisoned the water supply and people of Elmira, Ontario to the point that for the past two decades the water supply is completely unusable in that city.
You would think the US would start with their friends up north before they start with the people they were trying to kill!!! WTF is wrong with your country?
i THINK tHE cLeAN uP OuGHT TO BE Done by A fUzzY kITTEH
kIttEh hAs Always Been A bIg PArt Of cLeaNiNG aGENT oRange fROM tHE kEYbOARD,
lOOK AT All thAT fUr In bETwEen ThE kEyS!
I was in Nam towards the end ('73) while in the Army, I was stationed at an abandoned
Air Force hospital (flush toilets, hot water, Hooch's) - a Mash unit at Tuy Hoa.
Apparently different companies "downsized" together into one. A conex that had
been some groups bagage had been sitting alone outside of our hospital since I'd been there.
Bored I poked through it one day. It was filled with stuff I couldn't explain then nor now. A lot
of atropine self injectors (they make lousy darts), cases of them and new rubber suits.
Imagine Dracula's cape with a hood, I wanted one for myself. It was made
entirely out of a thick soft rubber, with it and other items I found, one could be
completely covered and safe from nerve gas (my first impression).
I haven't heard of anything thing that could justify such an outfit, except agent orange.
If it were used in it's dispersion, Agent orange was seen as some nasty stuff
by those who used to own that conex.
Monsanto and Dow have been poisoning the U.S. population for decades - now under the disguise of "GMO"
What we don't break, we shit on.
Vietnam is opening up to foreign investors, and the United States is increasingly in competition against the Chinese in the influence game in South East Asia
While the Vietnamese communist government may want to get on the side of the US to counter the red China, most people of Vietnam just do not trust Uncle Sam
What took place in the village of My Lai and the Gulf of Tonkin incident have burned into the brains of many Vietnamese
BTW, the clean up of Agent Orange should not only be done in Vietnam, but also in Laos and Cambodia
Too many deaths, sufferings, and deformations had resulted from the Agent Orange - and Uncle Sam must be man enough to acknowledge what they had done, and to amend the damages that they had caused
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
You seem to be arguing that only America is responsible for the damage inflicted in war.
Should the U.S. clean up the shrapnel in Germany and the bomb fragments in Japan?
We're waiting for the clean up of the depleted Uranium bullets and shizzle that was dumped in Irak.
Privacy is terrorism.
Engrish? Ya don't say?
Since when are dioxins named exfoliants. Or is this just to make the American public feel better.
The exfoliants: highly carcinogenic and cause birth defects.
The dioxins: highly carcinogenic and cause birth defect. Plus they remain in the human body forever after exposure. Plus, there is no way to remove dioxins that have been sprayed all over. This is not some kind of small industrial accident or leak, but the us contaminating an entire country!!!
And it didn't stop there, the us stil releases toxic and carcinogenic chemicals in countries in its fight against terrorism and the wars that are supposed to bring freedom th the world. What a contradiction, wars for freedom...
Home of the brave and retarded. This much is clear!
Simple. Make it legal to confiscate all the wealth of the countries that goes to war. America has stolen assets that belonged to their enemies, make this the norm. So, the next time a country decides to bomb another, they will loose all their wealth.
A large portion of the trouble was/is caused by dioxin contamination. There was a lot of dioxin in the Agent Orange they were spraying and it's part of the legacy. There's no safe level for dioxin exposure.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
At least Agent Orange can be removed, Captain Scarlett is indestructible, he'll be around for ever!
Expand the idea I keep throwing about to anyone who will listen, that I stole from Frank Herbert.
I initially pilfered it while thinking about the overblown threat of Iran and nukes. Simply put, if any nation detonates a nuke in anger, every other nuke-bearing nation nukes said aggressor until their country is glass and glows in the dark.
This can clearly be expanded to general warfare. If any nation that hasn't been victim of an invasion within the past fifty years attacks another country, everyone(tm) declares war on them.
Everyone wins, really. First world nations maintain peace between each other, and the military-industrial complex is kept happy because you know some backwater dictator in Assbackwardsistan is going to start a tribal conflict sooner or later, giving plenty of opportunity to have wargasms with the latest toys.
As something like 95% of the worlds supply of illegal opiates comes from Afghanistan, and the opium trade the primary source of income by far for the Taliban, dump the Agent Orange and the other herbicides on the opium fields in Afghanistan. Give the farmers a chance to switch, but if they don't - kill their fields.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
The atrocities were just too many to be documented
Accounts such as
Rape
Women being gang raped
M-16 muzzle stuck into her private part
then trigger was squeezed
Cannibalism
G.I. cutting out hearts and livers of dead vietcon fighters
forced local food vendors to cook those organs
enjoyed cuisine made of cooked vietcon liver/heart
were very very common back then
As for the Western journalists who were stationed in Vietnam?
Even those who were anti-war - they got so horrified by what they saw they often "forgot" to report anything
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Nicely done.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
It would be nice to see a war crimes tribunal against some of the members of the US Regime
We (the USA, or rather the former Confedracy) last had a war on our soil in 1865 (if you don't count a few skirmishes in WW2), so we can't identify with the horror.
Ever heard of something called HISTORY? Do not say we. If you or the warmongers that start such things as Vietnam or the Iraq War bothered reading and accepting history, you would be able to relate. But then again, why bother? Isn't the adage these days that if you haven't experienced something first-hand that you couldn't possibly know what you're talking about? How smart this society has become.
And by the way, the parentheses that you randomly threw in there are entirely incorrect. You're really looking like kdawson when you do that.
Several million of us were sprayed with the stuff and are suffering a slow agonizing death from this crap and the US/VA is doing nothing about it. Charity begins at home, F the Vietnamese. We had no choice we were forced to attend that 'war'. john
This one needs to be seen
The Vietnamese are our best chances of obtaining access to the oil reserves in the South China Sea. And they need us to keep it out of Chinese hands. It won't be long before Vietnam is a regular port of call for the US Navy.
The health effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Health_effects Pretty horrible stuff
> An additional half-million acres of crops were decimated.
So that's 50,000 acres - or did you not mean 'decimated'?
I'll back up couchslug on the idea that the capes were probably part of an early form of MOPP gear. There are cape-style soviet designs, maybe some of these were captured?
Speaking of missing equipment, there should have been 2PAM-Chloride autoinjectors as well, they ought to have been packaged together (at least, they are today when distributed to soldiers). I hear that that the 2PAM vials get abused by snipers as muscle relaxants, though, so they may have walked away some time before your inspection...
Travel the Galaxy! Meet fascinating life forms...
When are you due? I'm guessing no more than seven months since you have already missed a couple of periods. Who's us kemosabe?
Cool, now all we have to do is have various scenes of American adventurism declared tourist areas for us to go in and clean up our land mines, depleted uranium warheads, cluster bomblets...
I wonder how long it'll take to clean up the depleted Uranium in Iraq...
So tell me again, how are these not considered war crimes and crimes against humanity?