David — WMD — Spectre Orange
Topic(s): US Analysis | Comments Off on David — WMD — Spectre OrangeSpectre orange
Nearly 30 years after the Vietnam war, a chemical weapon used by US troops
is still exacting a hideous toll on each new generation. Cathy Scott-Clark
and Adrian Levy report
Saturday March 29, 2003
The Guardian
Hong Hanh is falling to pieces. She has been poisoned by the most toxic
molecule known to science; it was sprayed during a prolonged military
campaign. The contamination persists. No redress has been offered, no
compensation. The superpower that spread the toxin has done nothing to
combat the medical and environmental catastrophe that is overwhelming her
country. This is not northern Iraq, where Saddam Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds
in 1988. Nor the trenches of first world war France. Hong Hanh’s story, and
that of many more like her, is quietly unfolding in Vietnam today. Her
declining half-life is spent unseen, in her home, an unremarkable concrete
box in Ho Chi Minh City, filled with photographs, family plaques and yellow
enamel stars, a place where the best is made of the worst.
Hong Hanh is both surprising and terrifying. Here is a 19-year-old who lives
in a 10-year-old’s body. She clatters around with disjointed spidery strides
which leave her soaked in sweat. When she cannot stop crying, soothing
creams and iodine are rubbed into her back, which is a lunar collage of
septic blisters and scabs. “My daughter is dying,” her mother says. “My
youngest daughter is 11 and she has the same symptoms. What should we do?
Their fingers and toes stick together before they drop off. Their hands wear
down to stumps. Every day they lose a little more skin. And this is not
leprosy. The doctors say it is connected to American chemical weapons we
were exposed to during the Vietnam war.”
There are an estimated 650,000 like Hong Hanh in Vietnam, suffering from an
array of baffling chronic conditions. Another 500,000 have already died. The
thread that weaves through all their case histories is defoliants deployed
by the US military during the war. Some of the victims are veterans who were
doused in these chemicals during the war, others are farmers who lived off
land that was sprayed. The second generation are the sons and daughters of
war veterans, or children born to parents who lived on contaminated land.
Now there is a third generation, the grandchildren of the war and its
victims.
This is a chain of events bitterly denied by the US government. Millions of
litres of defoliants such as Agent Orange were dropped on Vietnam, but US
government scientists claimed that these chemicals were harmless to humans
and short-lived in the environment. US strategists argue that Agent Orange
was a prototype smart weapon, a benign tactical herbicide that saved many
hundreds of thousands of American lives by denying the North Vietnamese army
the jungle cover that allowed it ruthlessly to strike and feint. New
scientific research, however, confirms what the Vietnamese have been
claiming for years. It also portrays the US government as one that has
illicitly used weapons of mass destruction, stymied all independent efforts
to assess the impact of their deployment, failed to acknowledge cold, hard
evidence of maiming and slaughter, and pursued a policy of evasion and
deception.
Teams of international scientists working in Vietnam have now discovered
that Agent Orange contains one of the most virulent poisons known to man, a
strain of dioxin called TCCD which, 28 years after the fighting ended,
remains in the soil, continuing to destroy the lives of those exposed to it.
Evidence has also emerged that the US government not only knew that Agent
Orange was contaminated, but was fully aware of the killing power of its
contaminant dioxin, and yet still continued to use the herbicide in Vietnam
for 10 years of the war and in concentrations that exceeded its own
guidelines by 25 times. As well as spraying the North Vietnamese, the US
doused its own troops stationed in the jungle, rather than lose tactical
advantage by having them withdraw.
On February 5, addressing the UN Security Council, secretary of state Colin
Powell, now famously, clutched between his fingers a tiny phial representing
concentrated anthrax spores, enough to kill thousands, and only a tiny
fraction of the amount he said Saddam Hussein had at his disposal.
The Vietnamese government has its own symbolic phial that it, too,
flourishes, in scientific conferences that get little publicity. It contains
80g of TCCD, just enough of the super-toxin contained in Agent Orange to
fill a child-size talcum powder container. If dropped into the water supply
of a city the size of New York, it would kill the entire population.
Ground-breaking research by Dr Arthur H Westing, former director of the UN
Environment Programme, a leading authority on Agent Orange, reveals that the
US sprayed 170kg of it over Vietnam.
John F Kennedy’s presidential victory in 1961 was propelled by an image of
the New Frontier. He called on Americans to “bear the burden of a long
twilight struggle … against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty,
disease, and war itself.” But one of the most problematic new frontiers,
that dividing North and South Vietnam, flared up immediately after he had
taken office, forcing him to bolster the US-backed regime in Saigon. Kennedy
examined “tricks and gadgets” that might give the South an edge in the
jungle, and in November 1961 sanctioned the use of defoliants in a covert
operation code-named Ranch Hand, every mission flown signed off by the
president himself and managed in Saigon by the secret Committee 202 – the
call sign for defoliating forests being “20” and for spraying fields “2”.
Ngo Luc, 67, was serving with a North Vietnamese guerrilla unit in the
Central Highlands when he saw planes circling overhead. “We expected bombs,
but a fine yellow mist descended, covering absolutely everything,” he says.
“We were soaked in it, but it didn’t worry us, as it smelled good. We
continued to crawl through the jungle. The next day the leaves wilted and
within a week the jungle was bald. We felt just fine at the time.” Today,
the former captain is the sole survivor from his unit and lives with his two
granddaughters, both born partially paralysed, near the central Vietnamese
city of Hue.
When US troops became directly embroiled in Vietnam in 1964, the Pentagon
signed contracts worth $57m (£36m) with eight US chemical companies to
produce defoliants, including Agent Orange, named after the coloured band
painted around the barrels in which it was shipped. The US would target the
Ho Chi Minh trail – Viet Cong supply lines made invisible by the jungle
canopy along the border with Laos – as well as the heavily wooded
Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separated the North from the South, and also
the Mekong Delta, a maze of overgrown swamps and inlets that was a haven for
communist insurgents.
A reporter for the St Louis Dispatch witnessed a secret spraying mission and
wrote that the US was dropping “poison”. Congressman Robert Kastenmeier
demanded that the president abandon “chemical warfare” because it tainted
America’s reputation. Instead, William Bundy, a presidential adviser, flatly
denied that the herbicide used by America was a chemical weapon, and blamed
communist propagandists for a distortion of the facts about the Ranch Hand
operation. Only when the Federation of American Scientists warned that year
that Vietnam was being used as a laboratory experiment did the rumours
become irrefutable. More than 5,000 American scientists, including 17 Nobel
laureates and 129 members of the Academy of Sciences, signed a petition
against “chemical and biological weapons used in Vietnam”.
Eight years after the military launched Operation Ranch Hand, scientists
from the National Institute of Health warned that laboratory mice exposed to
Agent Orange were giving birth to stillborn or deformed litters, a
conclusion reinforced by research conducted by the US department of
agriculture. These findings coincided with newspaper reports in Hanoi that
blamed Agent Orange for a range of crippling conditions among troops and
their families. Dr Le Ke Son, a young conscript in Hanoi during the war and
now director of Vietnam’s Agent Orange Victims Fund, recalls, “The
government proposed that a line of runners carry blood and tissue samples
from the front to Hanoi. But it was more than 500 miles and took two months,
by which time the samples were spoiled. How could we make the research work?
There was no way to prove what we could see with our own eyes.”
In December 1969, President Nixon made a radical and controversial pledge
that America would never use chemical weapons in a first strike. He made no
mention of Vietnam or Agent Orange, and the US government continued
dispatching supplies of herbicides to the South Vietnamese regime until
1974.
That year, Kiem was born in a one-room hut in Kim Doi, a village just
outside Hue. For her mother, Nguyen, she should have been a consolation
because her husband, a Viet Cong soldier, had been killed several months
earlier. “The last time he came home, he told me about the spray, how his
unit had been doused in a sweet-smelling mist and all the leaves had fallen
from the trees,” Nguyen says. It soon became obvious that Kiem was severely
mentally and physically disabled. “She can eat, she can smile, she sits on
the bed. That’s it. I have barely left my home since my daughter was born.”
By the time the war finally ended in 1975, more than 10% of Vietnam had been
intensively sprayed with 72 million litres of chemicals, of which 66% was
Agent Orange, laced with its super-strain of toxic TCCD. But even these
figures, contained in recently declassified US military records, vastly
underestimate the true scale of the spraying. In confidential statements
made to US scientists, former Ranch Hand pilots allege that, in addition to
the recorded missions, there were 26,000 aborted operations during which
260,000 gallons of herbicide were dumped. US military regulations required
all spray planes or helicopters to return to base empty and one pilot,
formerly stationed at Bien Hoa air base between 1968 and 1969, claims that
he regularly jettisoned his chemical load into the Long Binh reservoir.
“These herbicides should never have been used in the way that they were
used,” says the pilot, who has asked not to be identified.
Almost immediately after the war finished, US veterans began reporting
chronic conditions, skin disorders, asthma, cancers, gastrointestinal
diseases. Their babies were born limbless or with Down’s syndrome and spina
bifida. But it would be three years before the US department of veterans’
affairs reluctantly agreed to back a medical investigation, examining
300,000 former servicemen – only a fraction of those who had complained of
being sick – with the government warning all participants that it was
indemnified from lawsuits brought by them. When rumours began circulating
that President Reagan had told scientists not to make “any link” between
Agent Orange and the deteriorating health of veterans, the victims lost
patience with their government and sued the defoliant manufacturers in an
action that was finally settled out of court in 1984 for $180m (£115m).
It would take the intervention of the former commander of the US Navy in
Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, for the government finally to admit that it
had been aware of the potential dangers of the chemicals used in Vietnam
from the start of Ranch Hand. The admiral’s involvement stemmed from a
deathbed pledge to his son, a patrol boat captain who contracted two forms
of cancer that he believed had been caused by his exposure to Agent Orange.
Every day during the war, Captain Elmo Zumwalt Jr had swum in a river from
which he had also eaten fish, in an area that was regularly sprayed with the
herbicide. Two years after his son’s death in 1988, Zumwalt used his
leverage within the military establishment to compile a classified report,
which he presented to the secretary of the department of veterans’ affairs
and which contained data linking Agent Orange to 28 life-threatening
conditions, including bone cancer, skin cancer, brain cancer – in fact,
almost every cancer known to man – in addition to chronic skin disorders,
birth defects, gastrointestinal diseases and neurological defects.
Zumwalt also uncovered irrefutable evidence that the US military had
dispensed “Agent Orange in concentrations six to 25 times the suggested
rate” and that “4.2m US soldiers could have made transient or significant
contact with the herbicides because of Operation Ranch Hand”. This
speculative figure is twice the official estimate of US veterans who may
have been contaminated with TCCD.
Most damning and politically sensitive of all is a letter, obtained by
Zumwalt, from Dr James Clary, a military scientist who designed the spray
tanks for Ranch Hand. Writing in 1988 to a member of Congress investigating
Agent Orange, Clary admitted: “When we initiated the herbicide programme in
the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin
contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware that the military
formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version, due
to the lower cost and speed of manufacture. However, because the material
was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned.”
The Office of Genetic Counselling and Disabled Children (OGCDC) operates out
of a room little bigger than a broom cupboard. Dr Viet Nhan and his 21
volunteers share their cramped quarters at Hue Medical College with cerebral
spinal fluid shunt kits donated from Norfolk, Virginia; children’s clothes
given by the Rotary Club of Osaka, Japan; second-hand computers scavenged
from banks in Singapore.
Vietnam’s chaotic and underfunded national health service cannot cope with
the demands made upon it. The Vietnamese Red Cross has registered an
estimated one million people disabled by Agent Orange, but has sufficient
funds to help only one fifth of them, paying out an average of $5 (£3) a
month. Dr Nhan established the free OGCDC, having studied the impact of
Agent Orange as a student, to match Vietnamese families to foreign private
financial donors. “It was only when I went out to the villages looking for
case studies that I realised how many families were affected and how few
could afford help,” he says. “I abandoned my research. Children need to run
before they die.”
The walls of his room are plastered with bewildering photographs of those he
has helped: operations for hernias and cleft palates, open-heart surgery and
kidney transplants. All of the patients come from isolated districts in
central Vietnam, villages whose names will be unfamiliar, unlike the
locations that surround them: Khe Sanh, Hamburger Hill, Camp Carroll and the
Rock Pile. “I am not interested in apportioning blame,” Nhan says. “I don’t
want to talk to you about science or politics. What I care about is that I
have 60 sick children needing financial backers. They cannot wait for the US
to change its policy, take its head out of the sand and clear up the mess.”
He takes us into an intensive care ward to meet nine-year-old Nguyen Van
Tan, who two weeks before had open-heart surgery to correct a birth defect
thought to be connected to dioxin poisoning. There is no hard proof of this,
but his father, who sits beside the bed, talks of being sprayed with
defoliants when he fought with the Viet Cong. The area they live in was
repeatedly doused during the war. Almost all of his former battlefield
comrades have disabled children, he says. Nhan ushers us away. “I don’t want
to tell the family yet, but their boy will never fully recover. He is
already suffering from total paralysis. The most we can do now is send them
home with a little money.”
Back in his tiny office, the doctor gestures to photocopies of US Air Force
maps, sent by a veterans’ organisation because the US government refuses to
supply them. These dizzying charts depict the number of herbicide missions
carried out over Quang Tri, a province adjacent to the DMZ, from where
almost all Nhan’s patients come. Its topography is obliterated by spray
lines, 741,143 gallons of chemicals dropped here, more than 600,000 of them
being Agent Orange. “I’m just scratching the surface,” he says.
The Vietnamese government is reluctant to let us travel to Quang Tri
province. It does not want us “to poke and prod” already dismal villagers,
treating them as if they are medical exhibits. We attempt to recruit some
high-powered support and arrange a meeting in Hanoi with Madame Nguyen Thi
Binh, who until last year was the vice-president of Vietnam. She receives us
at the presidential palace in a teak-panelled hall beneath an enormous
photograph of Ho Chi Minh in a gold frame writhing with dragons. “Thank you,
my young friends, for your interest in Vietnam,” Madame Binh says,
straightening her grey silk ao dai, a traditional flowing trouser suit.
She looks genteel, but old photographs of her in olive fatigues suggest she
is a seasoned campaigner. As minister of foreign affairs for the Provisional
Revolutionary South Vietnamese government, she negotiated at the Paris peace
talks in 1973. “I must warn you, I will not answer questions about George W
Bush,” she says, casting a steely gaze, perhaps conscious of the fact that,
since the lifting of the US economic embargo in 1994, trade with America has
grown to £650m a year. Madame Binh does, however, want to talk about
chemical warfare, recalling how, when she returned after the war to her home
province of Quang Nam, a lush region south-west of Hue which was drenched in
defoliants, she found “no sign of life, just rubble and grass”. She says:
“All of our returning veterans had a burning desire for children to
repopulate our devastated country. When the first child was born with a
birth defect, they tried again and again. So many families now have four or
five disabled children, raising them without any hope.”
What should the US do? Madame Binh laughs. “It’s very late to do anything.
We put this issue directly on the table with the US. So far they have not
dealt with the problem. If our relationship is ever to be normal, the US has
to accept responsibility. Go and see the situation for yourself.”
She sends us back to Hue. Over chilled water and tangerines, we talk to a
suspicious party secretary who asks us why we have bothered to come after
all these years. “There is no point,” he says. “Nothing will come of it.”
But he opens his file all the same and reads aloud: “In Hue city there are
6,633 households affected by Agent Orange and in them 3,708 sick children
under the age of 16.” He eventually agrees to take us north-west, over the
Perfume river, beyond the ancient royal tombs that circle this former
imperial city, towards the DMZ. We arrive at a distant commune where a
handyman is sprucing up a bust of Ho Chi Minh with white gloss paint.
Eventually, the chairman of the People’s Committee of Dang Ha joins us, and
our political charabanc stuffed with seven officials sets out across the
green and gold countryside, along crisscrossing lanes. The chairman tells us
proudly how he was born on January 31 1968, the night of the Tet offensive,
the turning point of the war, when the Viet Cong launched its assault on US
positions. By the time we stop, we are all the best of friends and, holding
hands, he pulls us into the home of the Pham family, where a wall of
neighbours and an assembly of local dignitaries dressed in shiny,
double-breasted jackets stare grimly at a moaning child. He lies on a mat on
the floor, his matchstick limbs folded uselessly before him, his parents
taking it in turns to mop his mouth, as if without them he would drown in
his own saliva.
Hoi, the boy’s mother, tells us how she met her husband when they were
assigned to the same Viet Cong unit in which they fought together for 10
years. But she alone was ordered to the battle of Troung Hon mountain. “I
saw this powder falling from the sky,” she says. “I felt sick, had a
headache. I was sent to a field hospital. I was close to the gates of hell.
By the time I was discharged, I had lost the strength in my legs and they
have never fully recovered. Then Ky was born, our son, with yellow skin.
Every year his problems get worse.” Her husband, Hung, interrupts:
“Sometimes, we have been so desperate for money that we have begged in the
local market. I do not think you can imagine the humiliation of that.”
And this family is not alone. All the adults here, cycling past us or
strolling along the dykes, are suffering from skin lesions and goitres that
cling to necks like sagging balloons. The women spontaneously abort or give
birth to genderless squabs that horrify even the most experienced midwives.
In a yard, Nguyen, a neighbour’s child, stares into space. He has a
hydrocephalic head as large as a melon. Two houses down, Tan has distended
eyes that bubble from his face. By the river, Ngoc is sleeping, so wan he
resembles a pressed flower. “They told me the boy is depressed,” his
exhausted father tells us. “Of course he’s depressed. He lives with disease
and death.”
This is not a specially constructed ghetto used to wage a propaganda war
against imperialism. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has long embraced the
free market. This is an ordinary hamlet where, in these new liberal times,
villagers like to argue about the English Premiership football results over
a glass of home-brewed rice beer. Here live three generations affected by
Agent Orange: veterans who were sprayed during the war and their successors
who inherited the contamination or who still farm on land that was sprayed.
Vietnam’s impoverished scientific community is now trying to determine if
there will be a fourth generation. “How long will this go on?” asks Dr Tran
Manh Hung, the ministry of health’s leading researcher.
Dr Hung is now working with a team of Canadian environmental scientists,
Hatfield Consultants, and they have made an alarming discovery. In the Aluoi
Valley, adjacent to the Ho Chi Minh trail, once home to three US Special
Forces bases, a region where Agent Orange was both stored and sprayed, the
scientists’ analysis has shown that, rather than naturally disperse, the
dioxin has remained in the ground in concentrations 100 times above the
safety levels for agricultural land in Canada. It has spread into Aluoi’s
ponds, rivers and irrigation supplies, from where it has passed into the
food chain, through fish and freshwater shellfish, chicken and ducks that
store TCCD in fatty tissue. Samples of human blood and breast milk reveal
that villagers have ingested the invisible toxin and that pregnant women
pass it through the placenta to the foetus and then through their breast
milk, doubly infecting newborn babies. Is it, then, a coincidence that in
this minuscule region of Vietnam, more than 15,000 children and adults have
already been registered as suffering from the usual array of chronic
conditions?
“We theorise that the Aluoi Valley is a microcosm of the country, where
numerous reservoirs of TCCD still exist in the soil of former US military
installations,” says Dr Wayne Dwernychuk, vice-president of Hatfield
Consultants. There may be as many as 50 of these “hot spots”, including one
at the former US military base of Bien Hoa, where, according to declassified
defence department documents, US forces spilled 7,500 gallons of Agent
Orange on March 1 1970. Dr Arnold Schecter, a leading expert in dioxin
contamination in the US, sampled the soil there and found it to contain TCCD
levels that were 180 million times above the safe level set by the US
environmental protection agency.
It is extremely difficult to decontaminate humans or the soil. A World
Health Organisation briefing paper warns: “Once TCCD has entered the body it
is there to stay due to its uncanny ability to dissolve in fats and to its
rock solid chemical stability.” At Aluoi, the researchers recommended the
immediate evacuation of the worst affected villages, but to be certain of
containing this hot spot, the WHO also recommends searing the land with
temperatures of more than 1,000C, or encasing it in concrete before treating
it chemically.
At home, the US takes heed. When a dump at the Robins Air Force Base in
Georgia was found to have stored Agent Orange, it was placed on a National
Priority List, immediately capped in five feet of clay and sand, and has
since been the subject of seven investigations. Dioxin is now also a major
domestic concern, scientists having discovered that it is a by-product of
many ordinary industrial processes, including smelting, the bleaching of
paper pulp and solid waste incineration. The US environmental protection
agency, pressed into a 12-year inquiry, recently concluded that it is a
“class-1 human carcinogen”.
The evidence is categoric. Last April, a conference at Yale University
attended by the world’s leading environmental scientists, who reviewed the
latest research, concluded that in Vietnam the US had conducted the “largest
chemical warfare campaign in history”. And yet no money is forthcoming, no
aid in kind. For the US, there has only ever been one contemporary incident
of note involving weapons of mass destruction – Colin Powell told the UN
Security Council in February that, “in the history of chemical warfare, no
country has had more battlefield experience with chemical weapons since
world war one than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq”.
The US government has yet to respond to the Hatfield Consultants’ report,
which finally explains why the Vietnamese are still dying so many years
after the war is over, but, last March, it did make its first contribution
to the debate in Vietnam. It signed an agreement with a reluctant Vietnamese
government for an $850,000 (£543,000) programme to “fill identified data
gaps” in the study of Agent Orange. The conference in Hanoi that announced
the decision, according to Vietnamese Red Cross representatives who
attended, ate up a large slice of this funding. One of the signatories is
the same US environmental protection agency that has already concluded that
dioxin causes cancer.
“Studies can be proposed until hell freezes over,” says Dr Dwernychuk of
Hatfield Consultants, “but they are not going to assist the Vietnamese in a
humanitarian sense one iota. We state emphatically that no additional
research on human health is required to facilitate intervention or to
protect the local citizens.”
There is cash to be lavished in Vietnam when the US government sees it as
politically expedient. Over the past 10 years, more than $350m (£223m) has
been spent on chasing ghosts. In 1992, the US launched the Joint Task
Force-Full Accounting to locate 2,267 servicemen thought to be missing in
action in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Jerry O’Hara, spokesman for JTF-FA,
which is still searching for the remains of 1,889 of them, told us, “We
don’t place a monetary value on what we do and we’ll be here until we have
brought all of the boys back home.”
So it is that America continues to spend considerably more on the dead than
it does on the millions of living and long-suffering – be they back home or
in Vietnam.
The science of chemical warfare fills a silent, white-tiled room at Tu Du
hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Here, shelves are overburdened with research
materials. Behind the locked door is an iridescent wall of the mutated and
misshapen, hundreds of bell jars and vacuum-sealed bottles in which human
foetuses float in formaldehyde. Some appear to be sleeping, fingers curling
their hair, thumbs pressing at their lips, while others with multiple heads
and mangled limbs are listless and slumped. Thankfully, none of these dioxin
babies ever woke up.
One floor below, it is never quiet. Here are those who have survived the
misery of their births, ravaged infants whom no one has the ability to
understand, babies so traumatised by their own disabilities, luckless
children so enraged and depressed at their miserable fate, that they are
tied to their beds just to keep them safe from harm
US used far more dioxin on Vietnam than it admitted
Tim Radford, science editor
Thursday April 17, 2003
The Guardian
US troops sprayed far more dioxin over wartime Vietnam than they admitted at
the time, according to new research.
Between 1961 and 1971, herbicides such as Agent Orange and other weapons of
mass defoliation were used to strip mangrove swamps and forests of cover for
Vietcong forces and deprive the enemy of food by destroying crops.
Jeanne Mager Stellman, of Columbia University in New York, and colleagues
report in the journal Nature today that a fresh look at US military data has
revealed that an extra 7m litres of dioxin-containing herbicide was sprayed
over key regions of the war-torn country.
The study supersedes a US National Academy of Sciences investigation nearly
30 years ago and opens the way for a new look at the long-term effects of
this form of chemical warfare.
“Large numbers of Vietnamese civilians appear to have been directly exposed
to herbicidal agents, some of which were sprayed at levels at least an order
of magnitude greater than for similar US domestic purposes,” the scientists
report.
“Other analyses carried out by us show large numbers of American troops also
to have been directly exposed.”
Environmental campaigners blame Agent Orange and similar substances for
chronic illnesses among American veterans, and for hideous childhood
deformities in present-day Vietnam.
The herbicide was banned in the US in 1970.
“The government position had been that it was impossible to do a study
because military records weren’t any good. We began to work on this in
1998,” said Professor Stellman.
She unearthed material that had been classified as top secret during the
original investigation in 1974. She also pinpointed the areas targeted for
defoliant treatment.
“It [the spraying] wasn’t as much of a slosh as we thought it was. In fact
it was targeted,” she said. “Most of Vietman was not sprayed, but the areas
that were, were heavily sprayed.”