For ten years, in Vietnam, it rained a chemical mist. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and planes and helicopters flew over the top of the country, spraying out a toxic chemical called Agent Orange.
The simple plan was to wipe out the enemy’s food supply. Agent Orange was an incredibly potent herbicide and defoliant chemical made even stronger in the hands of the U.S. and South Vietnamese Air Forces, who mixed it to thirteen-times its usual strength as part of Operation Ranch Hand, the US's herbicidal warfare program. It could obliterate whole farms and wipe out entire forests with nothing more than a gentle mist. Their plan was to leave the Viet Cong exposed and hungry — but they couldn’t have imagined the full impact that this plan would ultimately have.
From 1961 to 1971, 5 million acres of forests and millions more of farmland were destroyed by Agent Orange. These were farms that the U.S. and South Vietnamese thought were being used to feed the Viet Cong’s guerrilla army – but in reality, most were feeding civilians. People across the country starved with 4 million having been exposed directly to this chemical, which despite what its creators claimed, was not harmless to humans.
Agent Orange caused severe health problems to those who breathed it in and even worse issues to their children. Babies across Vietnam began to be born with severely detrimental mental and physical disabilities ranging from severe mental degeneration, contorted or extra limbs, and the absence of key body parts such as the eyes.
Today, many of these Agent Orange victims live in Peace Villages, where workers care for them and try to give them a normal life – but the mutations caused by Agent Orange still affect the people and the children of Vietnam, even today, over forty years following the end of the Vietnam War. Others fail to survive long past birth, as their disabilities render them unable to survive. The victims of Agent Orange serve as a reminder to all the nations of the world the horrors of not only chemical warfare, but war itself.
