Vietnam's forgotten victims of Agent Orange

[Paul Rigby]

http://uruknet.com/index.php?p=m64760&hd=&size=1&l=e

Vietnam’s forgotten victims
Four decades on, Agent Orange continues to ravage the children of those exposed.

By Geoffrey Cain

GlobalPost, April 2, 2010

Danang, Vietnam - At 46, each year of misery seems to have etched new wrinkles around Tran Thanh Dung's angry gaze.

When he was child in the early 1970s, Tran says he witnessed U.S. soldiers shoot his parents — both of whom were communist Viet Cong soldiers during the Vietnam War. Bent on revenge, he joined the guerrilla group within hours.

To this day, Tran weeps over the memories of bloodshed and the hellish cries of his dying friends. But one bizarre memory will haunt him forever. "The American airplanes came right toward me and dropped a mist in the jungle, and the next day, the trees were dead," he recalled. "We weren't scared. We were confused."

Thanks to that experience, his son has been unable to walk since birth.

Tran was sprayed with dioxin, codenamed by the military Agent Orange — an herbicide that the U.S. Army used to kill off shrubbery in central Vietnam during the 1960s and early 1970s, so the Viet Cong would have no place to hide.

The defoliant is known to cause a myriad of birth defects in the children of those exposed. Today, Tran's 18-year-old son suffers from a spinal disorder called spina bifida, an ailment Tran's doctor said was caused by his contact with dioxin four decades ago.

"It makes all of us sad, our family and the Vietnamese people," Tran said, adding that he wants the U.S. government to reimburse the families of Vietnamese soldiers for the effects of the spraying. "The problems of war will never leave us."

During the Vietnam War, the United States sprayed up to 18 million gallons of Agent Orange around Vietnam, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of the U.S. Congress.

The Vietnamese government, meanwhile, estimates that as many as 400,000 Vietnamese have died from illnesses related to exposure to dioxin, such as cancer. It also claims that up to 500,000 children have birth defects, such as spina bifida, because their parents were exposed.

The U.S. government insists the direct spraying of Agent Orange onto people — like in Tran's case — cannot be linked to any illnesses in Vietnam. It does admit, however, that when the defoliant seeps into local water and food sources, people can get sick.

"The United States Government advocates the use of sound science," said Jim Warren, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Hanoi, referring to an alleged lack of evidence for a link between certain illnesses and dioxin exposure.

Critics point out that this claim rests on an inconsistency: that former American soldiers who suffer from illnesses related to Agent Orange are eligible for veterans' benefits.

Even though critics say the U.S. remains sticky on that one point, others say it's making progress. In 2007, the U.S. government and the Ford Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit, began funding a clean-up effort at Danang airport, a brutally contaminated site in central Vietnam.

During the 1960s, pilots stored dioxin at the airport, which then leeched into the local water supply and soil. Farmers have been unable to grow certain crops for decades. But a 2009 assessment by a Canadian contractor determined the clean-up reduced human exposure "significantly." The main bulk of the cleaning project is expected to start this year.

Still, that doesn't wipe away the existing human toll that dioxin has created. Thanks to the contamination at that airport, the city of Danang and surrounding countryside are thought to have among the most dangerous dioxin levels in all of Vietnam.

About 5,000 people in Danang might be ill from exposure to dioxin, and about 1,400 of them are children, according to the Danang Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin, a Vietnamese NGO that runs two rehabilitation buildings for disabled children. Those are significant numbers for Danang's total population of 752,000.

For an organization that runs the only center for handicapped children in the city — housing 100 children while turning away the other 1,300 — the issue is that it doesn't get the funding it deserves, said Nguyen Thi Hien, the group's president.

"We need far more help from foreign donors," she said, adding that she's disappointed the U.S. "is not putting enough funds directly to helping the victims." (USAID allocated $1 million of its initial $3 million aid package to helping victims.)

Some groups have already taken matters into their own hands, but without much success. In 2007 a U.S. appeals court in New York upheld a 2005 ruling by a judge to throw out a dioxin suit filed by the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin, based in Hanoi.

The group claimed in the lawsuit that several American chemical companies which produced Agent Orange during the war, including Dow, Monsanto, and Diamond Shamrock, were liable to reimburse victims for their suffering. But the appeals judge ruled the U.S. government had intended to use dioxin on foliage, not humans, and therefore its deployment did not meet the definition of "chemical warfare" under international law.

"This is a very sad situation," Nguyen said.

The parents of afflicted children have similar complaints about inaction. "The [Vietnamese] government has done a lot to help us, but overall our country just doesn't have enough money," said Huynh Dang Eu, 41, who did not fight in the Vietnam War but says she was exposed through a local water source.

Her 10-year-old son, who also suffers from spina bifida, lies on a rug all day, arms and legs contorted in all directions. "The [Vietnamese] government gives us $30 a month to take care of him," she says. "The hospital is an hour away."

She goes on. "My husband and I have to work on the farm every day. We can't hire a caretaker. When we get old and die, our child might have nowhere to go." she said. "We're poor, and I don't think the American government realizes it, or even wants to know about this. So, do you think we're being taken care of enough?"

Article nr. 64760 sent on 03-apr-2010 16:43 ECT

http://www.uruknet.info?p=64760

[Keith Millea]

Here is a map that shows the areas sprayed with Agent Orange.

http://www.lewispublishing.com/map1.htm

This map is a representation of herbicide spray missions in Vietnam. The dark areas represent concentrated spraying areas. This map only represents fixed-wing aricraft spraying, and does not include helicopter spraying of perimeters, or other spray methods.
The III Corps area received the heaviest concentations of spraying, followed by I Corps, II Corps and IV Corps.

[Magda Hassan]

Keith, do you know if the birth defects for the children of the US service men in those areas corresponds to the level of exposure to AO? Also the health out comes for the service men themselves in those areas? That is, if those from III Corp suffer more health issues related to exposure to dioxins that say II Corp ?

[Keith Millea]

Magda,
I would be surprised if there was any definitive data on those particular areas of concern.Firstly,how do you accuretly diagnose what is an agent orange illness?The VA has a handfull of illnesses that can qualify you for disability payments.It's a tricky issue.Prostate cancer is one such illness.Agent orange may or may not be the cause of the cancer,but the VA will allow you the disability.So,there is a subjectivness that is inserted into the data.I really don't think we will ever know what the total effects will finally be when it comes to the widespread use of this deadly poison.

:dong:

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zay0zcC0...re=related

"Agent Orange" Vietnam

[Keith Millea]

The Alsea study was the death of 2,4,5-T spraying in the National Forests of America.This study originally came from a couple of remote valleys of the Central Oregon Coast Range Mountains.I lived in one of these valleys for 25 years.Carol Van Strum was one of the leading researchers for this study.

http://www.greens.org/s-r/078/07-22.html

Melyce

by Carol Van Strum

In the rainforests of coastal Oregon, berry vines and alder trees spring up almost overnight on untended clearings. Dense jungle quickly swallows abandoned homesteads and orchards, where only daffodils and an occasional apple tree remain amid the ferns and saplings, blooming tributes to years of human toil. Vast thickets of brush carpet the scarred earth of clearcuts and old logging roads. By the 1970s, the dioxin-tainted herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D had become indispensable tools for replacing such "unwanted vegetation" with plantations of Douglas fir seedlings.

The US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 1979 emergency ban of herbicide 2,4,5-T sent shock waves through the timber and chemical industries, which predicted the loss of 20,000 timber jobs and blamed marijuana growers for the ban. In heavily sprayed coastal Lincoln County, which had comprised most of the Alsea Study area, a county commissioner vehemently denounced the 2,4,5-T ban, suggesting on local radio programs that the ban was prompted by marijuana growers to protect their illegal crops. Echoing earlier Dow Chemical Company statements, the commissioner proclaimed that any health problems attributed to herbicides were actually caused by smoking marijuana.

Driving along the coast with her two small children, Melyce Connelly heard the commissioner's radio broadcast. His words rankled during the forty-mile drive inland to a home and sanctuary that no longer promised safety.

A single mother at age 22, Melyce clung doggedly to the log house she and her ex-husband had built themselves, determined to wrest a living from her few cleared acres along the river. With help from neighbors, she plowed the land, drove truckloads of manure, and coaxed a small paradise out of forest soil. Her garlic field paid the mortgage, and beds of herbs—sweet basil, lemon thyme, rosemary, dill, sage, parsley, shallots, sold fresh to coastal restaurants—supplemented her winter income from teaching exercise classes. For herself, she grew flowers, and from March to November the log house basked in a sea of holly-hocks, roses, lilies, cosmos, daisies, narcissus, columbine, dahlias, tulips, and daffodils. Her business card was a photo of herself, laughing under a cascade of flowers on her porch, with a giant hibiscus blossom in her hair.

Shortly before the commissioner's radio broadcast, Melyce had learned for the first time that the EPA had found dioxin in a neighbor's water supply directly upstream from her home. The neighbor had lost two babies through miscarriages, and had another child with multiple birth defects. As Melyce said, "You can't help but wonder if there's a connection."

After the 2,4,5-T ban, the Forest Service announced it would substitute 2,4-D in its spray plans for that year, which included the headwaters of Ryan Creek, the watershed for Melyce's farm. She and other neighbors met with the district ranger, who had them mark their water sources on his spray map and promised those areas would not be sprayed. Three days later, however, Melyce woke to the sound of a helicopter spraying Ryan Creek. Within the next few days, all her young chicks and ducklings died, and her six-month-old son developed persistent, bloody diarrhea. In the surrounding valley over the next month, every pregnant woman in her first trimester miscarried, and several children were hospitalized with near-fatal cases of spinal meningitis. Melyce carefully preserved the chicks and ducklings that had died, putting them in her freezer in hope that she could get them analyzed some day.

Alarmed by these events, the Lincoln County Health Department initiated a study of health problems following the spraying in the valley. The EPA had taken over the county's effort under the auspices of its Alsea Study. Publicity about the study had prompted the commissioner's remarks about marijuana growers.

Still fuming, Melyce took from her freezer some of the frozen bodies of her chicks and ducklings, and drove over 50 miles to the county offices in Newport. Carrying her infant son and the bag of frozen poultry, she marched unannounced into the commissioner's office and thumped the bag on his desk.

"Open it," she commanded. As the startled commissioner peeled tin foil from the small, frozen bodies, Melyce placed her son on his desk as well and took off his diaper.
"Now, sir," she said, "you tell me those ducklings died from smoking too much marijuana. You tell me those chicks died from smoking too much marijuana." Fighting back tears, her voice shaking, she thrust a bloody, soiled diaper at him. "You tell me this child has bloody shits day after day from smoking too much marijuana. Tell me to my face, Mr. Commissioner!"

The next day, the commissioner went on the air again with a public apology. Information had been brought to his attention, he said, that convinced him of grave health risks from herbicide exposure. For the rest of his time in office, Commissioner Andy Zedwick led a tireless campaign against the aerial spraying of herbicides in Lincoln County, joining the county medical society in sponsoring ballot measures to restrict such uses.

When the EPA took over the county's health study of her valley, Melyce accompanied researchers on their sample collection efforts, and gave them the bodies of her chicks and ducklings for dioxin and herbicide analyses. Promised results of the study within 90 days, Melyce hounded the agency for four years, only to be told finally that many of the samples—including her birds—had never been analyzed, and that results of others were inexplicably "mixed up" with Dow Chemical samples from Midland, Michigan.

In 1984, EPA researchers returned to the valley to resample a single site, the water supply of Melyce's neighbor, where dioxin had been found in 1979. In the five years since 2,4,5-T was banned, dioxin levels had increased four-fold in sediments upstream from Melyce's home. Despite the increase, to the highest dioxin levels in stream sediments ever reported in the Pacific Northwest, the EPA made no effort to collect further samples in the valley, and announced that the levels found presented no "immediate" health risk.

On July 4, 1989, ten years after Ryan Creek was sprayed with 2,4-D, Melyce Connelly died at age 32 of brain, lung, and breast cancer. Friends and neighbors gathered in Melyce's gardens for the last time to spread her ashes among the flowers and trees she loved. Shortly thereafter, the new owners of the property bull-dozed the gardens and garlic fields, and the house she had built burned to ground a few weeks later in an accidental fire. Berry vines and alder saplings now thrive in the clearing where her house and gardens once stood, the old pathways emerging ghost-like every spring in rows of bobbing daffodils.

Not until 1993, thirteen years after requiring manufacturers to test 2,4-D products for dioxin, did EPA admit that 2,4-D—which had been sprayed over Ryan Creek after the 2,4,5-T ban—was also contaminated with the most toxic form of dioxin, 2,3,7,8-TCDD. Yet according to Dr. Anthony Colluci, a former EPA official, the EPA had known of TCDD in 2,4-D by the early 1970s. The use of 2,4-D in forestry and on residential lawns, roadsides, golf courses, and school grounds continues to this day, with EPA approval.

2,4,5-T and 2,4-D are the two ingreidients in Agent Orange.

2,4-D is still used to this day.........

[Keith Millea]

http://www.greens.org/s-r/078/07-25.html

Back to the Future:
EPA Reinvents the Wheel
on Reproductive Effects of Dioxin

by Carol Van Strum

In September, 1994, the US Environmental Protection Agency released its draft "reassessment" of dioxin hazards. The reassessment was initiated at the insistence of the chlorine industry five years ago. One of its inescapable conclusions is that, contrary to the industry hype surrounding the reassessment, dioxin is in fact worse than EPA suspected. In particular, EPA researchers now find that dioxin is even more potent a cause of reproductive and immune system effects than it is of cancer.
EPA's findings are hardly news to those familiar with the sordid history of dioxin research and regulation. Indeed, the current report merely confirms and reasserts conclusions reached decades ago, when the military banned Agent Orange and EPA initiated its first efforts to regulate domestic use of dioxin-laced herbicides.

By 1979, evidence of dioxin's extraordinary reproductive toxicity was strong enough to warrant emergency action by EPA on the basis of imminent hazard to humans. How that very evidence was subverted, covered up, denied, and ignored for fifteen years while dioxin sources proliferated is an important context for EPA's current research, lest history repeat itself yet again.

During the mid-1960s, as US defoliation campaigns in Vietnam were escalating, a government study conducted by Bionetics Laboratories revealed that dioxin-contaminated components of Agent Orange and other military defoliants caused severe birth defects in the offspring of exposed animals. The Bionetics report came to light in 1969, compounding reports of birth defects and other reproductive damage in Vietnamese populations exposed to Agent Orange. Public and scientific outrage, coupled with Congressional hearings on the subject, forced the military to ban use of Agent Orange in Vietnam in 1970.

That same year, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in what Nixon described as a "delaying action" to protect business from environmentalists. Despite the military ban on Agent Orange, and despite an urgent warning by the US Surgeon General that dioxin-laced herbicides "may present an imminent hazard to women of child-bearing age," domestic uses of Agent Orange chemicals continued and expanded over the next decade. From its very beginning, the fledgling EPA yielded to manufacturers' repeated calls for further study of whether dioxin could be found in the environment and what levels constituted a hazard.

Cooperating with industry in such studies, EPA's own laboratories by 1975 reported frightening levels of dioxin in tissues of animals and birds from sprayed roadsides, in beef cattle grazed on sprayed range land, and in human mothers' milk from sprayed areas of Oregon, Texas and Vietnam. EPA took no action, however, until a group of rural Oregon residents, disturbed by birth defects, miscarriages, and illnesses in their families, livestock, and local wildlife following aerial defoliation missions by the US Forest Service, filed a lawsuit that forced EPA's suppressed dioxin studies into the open; on the basis of these studies and the government's failure to determine the safety of chemicals before using them, the Oregon Citizens Against Toxic Sprays (CATS) in 1977 won a landmark federal court decision banning the use of dioxin-contaminated herbicides on national forest lands.

...a "no safe level" dioxin policy would literally halt manufacture of plastics, pulp and paper, wood preservatives, gasoline, solvents, pharmaceuticals, etc., and would create liability for the government against the claims of Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

Following the court order in the CATS case, EPA began a study of human miscarriages in the sprayed forest area of Oregon involved in the CATS case. This study, known as the Alsea study after a small town within the 1600 square mile study area, became the heart of EPA's regulatory effort on dioxin—and earned the dubious honor of becoming the most influential unpublished, unfinished study in EPA history.

The Alsea Study was an attempt to correlate human miscarriages with the time, amount, and location of aerial herbicide applications, as well as with actual dioxin levels in the locations where the miscarriages occurred. In early 1979, a preliminary report on the statistical correlation of miscarriages with spraying showed an overwhelming surge of miscarriages during the two months following herbicide applications. On the basis of this preliminary report, EPA issued an emergency suspension of forestry and rights-of-way uses of 2,4,5-T and silvex, without waiting for the results of dioxin sampling in the study area.

Based on the preliminary Alsea Study statistics and a Dow study showing effects of dioxin exposure over three generations of rats, the EPA Administrator took the strong position in suspending 2,4,5-T that no safe or no-effect level of dioxin exposure could be demonstrated, and that its reproductive toxicity presented an imminent hazard to exposed populations at any level:

In my judgment, the information which has recently come to my attention as a result of the Alsea study constitutes a dramatic and troubling new point of departure for analysis of TCDD exposure concerns. As indicated above, these data show a striking relationship between 2,4,5-T use and increased incidences of spontaneous abortions among women residing in the use area. As further developed above, this effect is an effect which one would have predicted as a likely outcome of human exposure, based upon a body of animal data of almost unprecedented conclusiveness. The Alsea study, to be sure contained no data showing actual exposure. However, concern for the health of humans who may be exposed to 2,4,5-T and its contaminant, TCDD, is heightened because scientists have not demonstrated that there is a level of exposure that has no adverse effects in humans. *

EPA's strong "no safe level" dioxin policy and its emphasis on reproductive toxicity immediately created a mare's nest of conflicts for the agency, which at that time was promoting waste-to-energy garbage incinerators that spewed out far greater amounts of dioxin than was found in 2,4,5-T. In addition, significant other industrial sources of dioxin were being discovered; a "no safe level" dioxin policy would literally halt manufacture of plastics, pulp and paper, wood preservatives, gasoline, solvents, pharmaceuticals, etc., and would create liability for the government against the claims of Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange.

Faced with such conflicts, EPA concealed from the public and from its own scientists the remainder of the Alsea Study, the exposure data showing dioxin residues in wildlife, deer and elk meat, human milk, drinking water sediments, and human tissue from a baby born without a brain. EPA not only concealed these results from its own scientists and lied about them to the sample donors, the agency further prevented the scientists conducting the Alsea Study from publishing their results or defending their conclusions at scientific or other public meetings. The only "published" version of the Alsea Study that exists to this day is a flawed and misleading "critique" of the preliminary data in EPA's suspension notice, published by Oregon State University. EPA never publicly defended its Alsea Study against the industry attack, and refused to fund or participate in a Centers for Disease Control study of the Alsea area after a preliminary CDC study found a 13-fold increase in neural tube birth defects in children born to women living in the area.

While keeping the "smoking gun" dioxin analyses from the Alsea Study covered up, EPA began closed door settlement negotiations with Dow in the opening months of the Reagan Administration. By 1983, a draft settlement had been drawn up that would allow 2,4,5-T back on the market with "allowable" levels of dioxin. This settlement was scuttled not by science or common decency, but by scandal. The "leak" of the Alsea dioxin analyses, compounded by EPA's preposterous claim that the leaked data had been "mixed up" with data from Dow's Midland plant, prompted Dow and EPA separately, on October 14, 1983, to announce final cancellation of all 2,4,5-T registrations. EPA's emergency ruling that dioxin posed an "imminent hazard" of reproductive harm at any dose level, along with the voluminous evidence supporting it, were thus relegated to EPA archives and conveniently forgotten.

The demise of 2,4,5-T allowed EPA—quietly and without public notice or comment—to replace its "no safe level" of dioxin policy with an exciting new technique in the field of numerology called "risk assessment." In theory, risk assessment correlated the toxicity of a substance with the amount of exposure in order to predict the casualty rate. In practice, EPA risk assessment reached a predetermined acceptable body count by substituting assumptions for actual data and cloaking the resultant nonsense in unintelligible algebraic formulas. Such legerdemain allowed regulators first to determine that a certain number of deaths was "negligible" and therefore acceptable, and second, to juggle toxicity and exposure data to fit into an "acceptable" model.

Discarding the human data on dioxin's reproductive toxicity developed in the 2,4,5-T proceedings, EPA numerologists assumed that its carcinogenic potency outweighed all other effects. Although dioxin was well-established to be an exquisitely potent carcinogen in laboratory animals, the elusive nature of human cancer suited the risk assessor's purpose admirably: because it takes decades to manifest itself in humans, pinpointing a causative agent is confounded by years of other exposures, lost records, the likelihood of subjects dying of other effects before cancer can develop, and, for dioxin, the fact that the few human studies available omitted women entirely. This dearth of human data enabled risk assessors further to assume that dioxin was a far less potent carcinogen in humans than in all other animal species.

EPA developed increasingly arcane risk assessments to justify continued dioxin pollution even as the evidence linking dioxin to cancer became overwhelming.

For fifteen years after its 1979 emergency "no safe level" action, as known sources of dioxin expanded to include uses of chlorine throughout commerce, EPA developed increasingly arcane risk assessments to justify continued dioxin pollution even as the evidence linking dioxin to cancer became overwhelming. Under pressure from the entire chlorine industry and its vast array of industrial customers, EPA, together with industry, spent billions of dollars on research to establish a safe level of dioxin exposure. The result, embodied in the current risk assessment, is a costly reinvention of the wheel, confirming what EPA knew in 1970 and took emergency action on in 1979: that dioxin is not only a potent carcinogen, but also that its reproductive toxicity exceeds its carcinogenic potency and that no safe or "no effect" level can be established.

Drafts of EPA's new risk assessment indicate that to evade the inescapable evidence of dioxin hazard, EPA will manipulate the exposure factor in its risk assessment formulas to minimize the resulting risk and allow dioxin pollution to continue. This will be accomplished by substituting computer models for actual exposure data, i.e., substituting "virtual reality" for real-world information. Instead of tracking chlorine and its inevitable dioxin spoor throughout the economy, EPA will "model"—i.e., guess—exposure from each source in isolation, without any means of calculating total cumulative exposure from all sources, past and present.

In summary, the reproductive effects of dioxin were known thirty years ago, were the basis for the 1970 ban of Agent Orange by the military in Vietnam, were the basis for EPA's 1979 emergency suspension of 2,4,5-T, and were deliberately suppressed and subverted in the elusive quest for carcinogenic evidence that would take decades to develop and would never be anything but equivocal. EPA has never taken emergency action on the basis of cancer.

Now that science has rediscovered the wheel on reproductive effects of dioxin, the precedent of the 1979 emergency suspension based on precisely those effects-and finding any level of dioxin to present an "imminent hazard"—should prompt immediate, emergency action on all dioxin sources.

* US EPA. Decision & Emergency Order Suspending Registrations for the Forest, Rights-of-Way, and Pasture uses of 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic Acid (2,4,5-T). 44 Fed. Reg. 15874 (March 15, 1979).

[Ed Jewett]

Time to Revisit & Confront Agent Orange

Sunday, 25. September 2011

[B]When it comes down to it We are the Number One Nation in Producing, Stockpiling, Exporting, and Actually Using WMD[/B]


I just discovered the following article at Eurasia Reviewon Agent Orange, its use as a weapon by the US war machine, and the forgotten victims who are still suffering the nightmare of its contamination. Those of you who have been visiting my site for a while know the importance of this topic to me. I spent the better part of the year 2008 in Vietnam. While in Vietnam, I travelled north to south, met with and interviewed activists, NGOs and doctors involved in Agent Orange cases, and of course, got to know a few of these victims. I am going to re-publish two of my own videos from Vietnam for those of you who are new to this website, and ask you to read the article, watch the videos, think, reflect, and help educate others on the war atrocities committed by our nation, and our established record as the number one nation producing, stockpiling and actually using Weapons of Mass Destruction.Here is the analysis by Ikhwan Kim at Eurasia Review:

Agent Orange, the notoriously toxic defoliant first used by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, has long been known to cause liver cancer, birth defects, leukemia, and other illnesses in people exposed to it. Although the U.S. military hasn't actively used the chemical since the 1970s, a number of forgotten victims are still suffering the nightmare of its contamination.Forty years after the Vietnam War, South Korea and Japan have been rocked by allegations about the use of the chemical on U.S. bases. A series of recent confessions by U.S. veterans has lent credibility to the allegation that a considerable amount of Agent Orange was illegitimately used and buried in both South Korean and Japanese soil.South Korea and Japan are thousands of kilometers away from Vietnam, and neither country has any jungle within its territory. This makes it hard to fathom why the chemical might have been used…

You can read the entire article here. And here are two clips I filmed while in Vietnam: First, Victims of Agent Orange, and the second, an interview I conducted (with Le Ly Heyslip) while in Vietnam on Agent Orange:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcHZQpu9d...r_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMyzoPmPb...r_embedded

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2011/09/...nt-orange/