Fahrenheit, baking everything inside. The white coating makes
the planes look like ghost ships, mummies in an aviation graveyard. But I came to see the other planes, the ones that devastated
a vast and peopled landscape, the ones that maimed me before
I was born.
OPERATION RANCH HAND dissolved in 1970 under
intense pressure fueled by increasing awareness of the dangers of
Agent Orange. By then, one-seventh of Vietnam’s total land area
had been sprayed with herbicides, one-fifth of its forest flattened.
Studies would eventually show that the spray missions flown by
the men of Ranch Hand had little or no effect on the path of the
war, that the millions of gallons of herbicide dropped on nipa palm
and mangrove, on tropical rainforest, on trails and swamps and
roads, on military barracks and rice paddies, saved few American
lives. Studies would also show that the substance held in the
striped barrels was more dangerous than its handlers had realized,
and that American military leaders had known this for a long time.
Peter Schuck, author of Agent Orange on Trial, notes that, “as
early as 1952, Army officials had been informed by Monsanto
Chemical Company, later a major manufacturer of Agent
Orange, that 2, 4,5-T was contaminated by a toxic substance.”
The substance he refers to is dioxin, a chemical that the
Environmental Protection Agency has described as “one of the
most perplexing and potentially dangerous chemicals ever to
pollute the environment.” Lab tests in the 1940s had shown that
even the tiniest amounts of dioxin, concentrations as small as 4
parts per trillion—an amount equivalent to one drop in 4 million gallons of water—induced cancer in rats. In slightly larger
doses, the substance brought on virulent symptoms leading to
quick death. When barrels of Agent Orange were shown to con-
JASON HOUSTON
tain dioxin concentrations as high as 140 parts per million,
questions about the effects of human exposure began to swell.
By the 1970s, for Vietnamese living and working in spray
zones, the answers to these questions had already started to
become clear and painful: babies born with massive birth defects,
some with skeletons that bended and twisted as they grew, some
with organs on the wrong side of skulls and ribs, some with
conditions so bad they survived only days. Even though American
servicemen came into contact with the toxin over the course of
months rather than years, soldiers—particularly those serving at
the apex of Ranch Hand, men dropping on knees to fill canteens
with odd-looking water pooled in bomb craters, men walking with
handheld weed sprayers around the flanks of base camps, men
sleeping on naked ground—still ran the risk of lethal exposure.
The risk was so real, in fact, that as Yale biologist Arthur Galston
put it, all soldiers “who worked with Agent Orange or saw duty in
the heavily defoliated zones of Vietnam have a legitimate basis for
asking the government to look into the state of their health.”
Concern about long-term effects on the people and ecology
of Vietnam and the health of American G.I.s prompted groups of
critical American scientists to publicly denounce the use
of Agent Orange and other herbicides as early as the mid-1960s.
In 1966 and 1967, a coalition led by the well-respected American
Association for the Advancement of Science sent petitions to the
Johnson White House calling for an end to all chemical and
biological warfare. At the same time, international anxiety was
growing. In 1969, after three years of failed attempts, the
United Nations succeeded in passing—despite sustained and
often menacing opposition from the U.S.—a resolution
declaring Operation Ranch Hand a violation of the 1925 Geneva
Convention Protocol limiting the use of chemical weapons.
Still, the spraying continued.
Finally, evidence showed up that was too damning to be
stonewalled or intimidated away. In late 1969, Matthew
Meselson, a broad-shouldered Harvard scientist fond of bow ties
and no friend of war boosters, obtained a copy of a National
Cancer Institute report confirming the teratogenicity—the ability
of a compound to cause embryonic or fetal malformation—of
2, 4,5-T in rats and mice. Meselson convinced Lee DuBridge, his
former colleague at the California Institute of Technology and
science advisor to the then newly elected Richard Nixon, to convene meetings to discuss the implications of the findings. In
spite of the continued reluctance of many in the Pentagon to
acknowledge the seriousness of the data, administration officials
could read the changing tea leaves of public tolerance, and on
