Influential State Department officials such as Roger Hilsman and W. Averell Harriman oppose the use of herbicides in Vietnam, warning that if civilians are harmed, the US might be perceived as a “barbaric imperialist.”3
Test runs demonstrate that herbicides are highly effective. No more hiding for the Vietcong. Herbicides will drive them into the open, where they will be obliterated. As the war escalates, the military expands the defoliation campaign, spraying enemy supply routes, footpaths, the Demilitarized Zone, the Mekong Delta, and the perimeters of US military bases.
By 1965, 45 percent of the total spraying is directed at crops. If the military suspects that the Vietcong are taking food from a particular area, those fields are completely destroyed. Fields used exclusively by civilians are also doused with herbicides, and in 1967 alone the military uses 20 million liters of herbicides—85 percent to kill forests and 15 percent to destroy crops.4
President Kennedy does not live to see the full-scale use of chemical warfare in Vietnam, and historians can only speculate as to whether he would have supported a campaign that clearly violated international laws such as the Genocide Convention, laws that forbid wanton attacks on civilians in times of war.
During the first year of the defoliation campaign, the White House has to approve all targets. Then, in 1962, the South Vietnamese government agrees to assume ownership of herbicides once they are delivered: a clever way of making it appear that the Diem regime, not the United States, is really responsible for and directing chemical warfare in Vietnam.
In 1963, journalist Richard Dudman publishes a series of articles in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers, calling the use of herbicides in Vietnam “dirty-war tactics.” He writes that the military is not only using herbicides to kill trees, but to poison rice fields. After reading Dunham’s articles, Wisconsin Congressman Robert W. Kastenmeier writes to President Kennedy, calling herbicides chemical weapons, and urging him to end the defoliation campaign.
In 1964, a Washington Post story describes the “accidental spraying of a friendly village in southern Vietnam which destroyed the rice and pineapple upon which people depended for their livelihood.” The next day, editorializing that herbicides pose a risk to Vietnam’s civilians, the Post calls for an end to the defoliation program.5
Commander of the US Air Force General Curtis LeMay wants to “bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.” Other people in and out of the government suggest turning the country into a parking lot.
By 1971, the US Air Force has run 19,905 spray missions, an average of thirty-four daily, over the forests, jungles, and fields of southern Vietnam.6
The defoliation campaign burns a 5 million acre parking lot, an area the size of Massachusetts, into Vietnam’s countryside.
Three administrations—Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon—continue the defoliation program. Attempts by congressmen like Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) and Charles Goodell (R-NY) to cut off funding for the use of herbicides in Vietnam fail by wide margins. From July 1966 to July 1973, Congress votes one hundred times for appropriations to continue the war in Vietnam, and never votes to curtail or prohibit spending for the herbicide program.7
In their pioneering work on the devastating effects of herbicides in Vietnam, Orville Schell and Barry Weisberg conclude that the United States sprayed thirty-seven of Vietnam’s forty-four provinces with Agent Orange during the first two months of 1969,
contaminating 285,000 people, with death resulting in 500 cases. In these raids, more than 905,000 hectares of rice, orchards and other crops were destroyed. Between late 1961 and October 1969, Vietnamese estimate that 43 percent of the arable land and 44 percent of South Vietnam’s tropical forests were sprayed at least once and in many cases two or three times with herbicides. Over 1,293,000 people were directly contaminated. Besides forest and mountain areas, large populated areas in the Mekong Delta have been sprayed as well, including the outskirts of Saigon itself.8
In some regions, defoliation changes the amount of rainfall, heat, and wind on the forest floor. Grasses, shrubs, and bamboo spread over the defoliated forests. Bamboo grows into high thickets, preventing hardwood forests from regrowing. Attempts to defoliate, burn, and cut bamboo do little to keep it in check.
Vietnamese report that chemicals entering the Mekong River upstream are killing biological life in the estuary. Herbicides are destroying the food wild animals depend on for their survival. Species such as the Javan rhinoceros, elephant, gibbon, and crocodile are in danger.
The destruction of Vietnam’s environment is so great that even before the war ends, some scientists are calling it “ecocide.”9
Operation Pink Rose, a “secret confidential” report from May 1967, confirms that herbicides were not only used to destroy Vietnam’s jungles and mangrove forests, but also to kill off row crops, particularly rice. Made public information in 1988, the report states that the “VC/NVA troops located in areas where crop defoliants have been used are often faced with a food crisis. The defoliant is nondiscriminate [sic] and it makes little difference whether the enemy produces its own food or relies on procurement from the local population.”10
Rural Vietnamese hate and fear herbicides, prompting US psychological warfare teams to shower the countryside with cartoon leaflets that show a bewildered peasant talking with a confident South Vietnamese government official.
MR. NAM (frightened peasant): “The Viet Cong say: ‘The Republic of Viet Nam army sprays on your farm a terrible poison to kill you.’”
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL: “The Viet Cong hide in bushes, robbing and killing people who travel on buses and trains. This is why the government sprays the foliage, so that the VC can’t terrorize citizens like Mr. Nam.”
MR. NAM: “But how about my crops? Are these sprays harmful to people, our animals, the soil or our drinking water?”
OFFICIAL: “Look at me. You see how healthy I am. Everyday, while performing my duties, I usually breathe in a lot of the spray. Look at me, do I appear sick to you?”
MR. NAM: (Greatly relieved) “I now resolve never to listen to Viet Cong propaganda.”
OFFICIAL: “Mr. Nam and all others understand the real reasons behind the Viet Cong’s false propaganda about the defoliant spray.”11
According to Operation Pink Rose:
The defoliant is usually 100 percent effective in the destruction of row crops and consequently the VC/NVA are denied such crops when they are sprayed. The only exceptions noted are certain tuberous plants such as potatoes and carrots… If there are crops to be salvaged, the VC press into service all workers available and begin harvesting as soon after the spraying as possible in order to save the maximum amount of the crop…. Careful timing of the spraying mission denies the VC/NVA the opportunity to salvage any part of the crop….
VC units also fear harmful physical effects as a result of spraying operations. This misconception on the part of VC/NVA troops developed as an adverse effect of an anti-herbicide propaganda campaign directed primarily toward civilians by the political cadre.
“Rice is the staff of life to the VC/NVA soldier,” continues the report, and the majority of rice is