Agent Orange

[bixaorellana]

This was one of the headlined stories on my Yahoo page this morning:

The Associated Press
Updated: 10:06 a.m. Friday, June 17, 2011
Published: 2:41 a.m. Friday, June 17, 2011
HANOI, Vietnam — Vietnam on Friday started the first phase of a joint plan with former enemy the United States to clean up environmental damage leftover from the chemical defoliant Agent Orange, a lasting legacy from the Vietnam War.
click text for full article

Looking for more details, I found this article:
Three retired veterans claim to have buried 250, 55-gallon drums of Agent Orange at Camp Carroll [US Army base in S. Korea] in 1978.
click text for full article

This blog discusses the claim, with some interesting comments below the main text:
rokdrop.com/2011/05/20/us-military-veterans-claim-to-have-buried-dangerous-agent-orange-chemical-on-camp-carroll/

Here is a source of information for US military veterans on the effects of agent orange, with extensive links:
www.vawatchdog.org/agentorange.htm

Much more on agent orange here:
www.agentorangerecord.com/information/what_is_dioxin/studies_and_conference_reports1/

[Deleted]

I took a tour of the DMZ near Da Nang on one of my trips to Vietnam, and they pointed out the barren hills devastated by agent orange, compared to a (very) few unaffected areas of tropical rain forest. A lot of the area was part of the Ho Chi Minh trail from Laos, so the Americans absolutely wanted to devastate the area completely.

30 years later, a lot of the zone had been replanted with eucalyptus just to prevent erosion, but they had already realized that this was not the proper plant for the area and were saying that it would take at least 50 more years to begin to get proper growth of local plants.