Agent Orange Negative Effects On The Environment

Because of this war, many soldiers died. It was difficult for American men to fight in Vietnam due to the geography. American troops were not used to a jungle habitat and therefore did not know how to go about fighting in it. The Americans were fighting a war on foreign soil and it was very unfamiliar to them. The North Vietnamese used Guerilla Warfare and picked off many American men without them even knowing where the attacks came from. The North Vietnamese also used many booby traps set up in the jungle that were well hidden. If one was activated, it would either kill or severely disable the victim.

Agent Orange was used during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was, “a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States”

Not to mention the harm it brought to the local people. According the chapter nine See no evil:Choosing Not to Look at the War in Vietnam，the United States dropped three times as many tons of explosives in Vietnam as it dropped in all theaters of World War II including Hiroshima and Nagasaki3.

During the peak of U.S involvement in the Vietnam War, between 1967 and 1969 the U.S employed a strategy that proved to be a disaster on many different levels. With over 500,000 of their troops serving in Vietnam at the time, the widespread use of herbicides, particularly Agent Orange began being sprayed over the Vietnamese jungle by planes. The aim of this was to eliminate the ‘invisibility' of the Viet Cong and offer a safe path for the American troops to follow. This was a good idea in theory, but what the American strategists didn't think of was the toxicity of the herbicides, and the fact that not only would the Viet Cong be exposed to it, but their troops and innocent South Vietnamese would be also. A widely speculated and argued repercussion of this is that many Vietnam veterans, and Vietnamese villagers began to give birth to babies with birth defects. However, a confirmed result

Kara Hinson The war in Vietnam started in 1955 and lasted until 1975. Many Americans believed it was a pointless war that had no meaning. The United States became involved in the Vietnam Warbecause they wanted to stop the spread of communism. This war took 50,000 lives and wounded 300,000 American men. Due to the My Lai massacre which killed hundreds of innocent and unarmed Vietnamese civilians, protests about the draft start all over the country, because of draft dodgers and draft deferment, and the government misleading people back home, this was known as the credibility gap, Americans are turning against the war in Vietnam. This leads to anti-war protesters, known as doves springing up across the United States demonstrating their opposition to the war.The Vietnam War is one of the most known wars in history, many innocent people were killed that had no involvement. United States soldiers came up with strategies to kill off the Vietcong, but occasionally the United States was not sure who were Vietcong and who were not. Napalm was a jellied gasoline that explodes when dropped in large canisters the napalm was usually dropped on villages. When the napalm was dropped on the villages, the Vietnamese houses and vegetation were destroyed. Napalm burned men, women, and children who were in the villages the clothes would burn completely off their bodies. Agent orange another substance used this was sprayed by an aircraft over the jungle. Agent

“We were told, ‘it’s totally safe and it won’t hurt you at all,” he added. “We were told you can drink it, you can brush your teeth with it, or you can bathe in it. It won’t hurt you. Those were lies.” (“U.S. Soldiers Sprayed Agent Orange across Korea” 1) Agent Orange was an herbicide used by the United States military forces in Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 to destroy their enemies’ food supply, land, and protection. Twelve million gallons of this toxin were sprayed. (Department of Preventive Medicine 1) It affected the Vietnamese and the American troops who were fighting in the same jungle. Little did the United States military know the effects of this dangerous herbicide. It caused many long-term complications, including health problems

The war in Vietnam was, and continues to be, one of the most controversial hot button topics in American history. The military’s use of dangerous pesticides, like Agent Orange, is a major part of this controversy. Agent Orange is a defoliant that was widely used to deforest dense jungle areas to reduce both hiding places and food sources for the Vietnamese. During the war, American B-52 bombers released over nineteen million gallons of Agent Orange over the Vietnamese countryside. After ten years of continuous dumping, 1971 finally marked the end of America’s use of Agent Orange and other herbicides. In 1974, the United States government, headed by Richard Nixon, swore the country would never again use chemical weapons in a first strike. (Levy and Scott-Clark)

This article tells of an interview between a reporter by the last name of Vigeland and retired Lieutenant Colonel Roberts. During the interview, Vigeland and Roberts discuss the horrors of Agent Orange and Roberts’ personal experience with it. Back in 1981, Roberts was a First Lieutenant in the military. He was the facilities maintenance officer of the Futenma Air Base in Okinawa, Japan. Roberts explains that one day he was assigned to check out the high chemical readings in the water runoff from the base. The theory of the chemicals coming from a collection of underground fuel tanks, Roberts was ordered to build a gate. As the they were digging, they came across several barrels. The more they digged, the more barrels they ran across. After they were done digging, they found a total of one hundred barrels neatly placed. Some were new, some were old, some were even leaking, but they were all unmarked. The barrels only had reddish-orange markings on them. Roberts believes that this was the tell-tale marker of Agent Orange. Then, Roberts

It doesn't just stop at physically injuries, many were also affected by mental disorders.. Over 10 thousand people was affected with some kind of mental disorder during vietnam, with one of the most common ones being PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder). PTSD affects the way people experience life after experiencing dramatic events, like war. It affects people differently, and our triggered by different things. Loud noises, flashing lights, are just a couple examples of things that can trigger people that have

War causes a myriad of effects in varying degrees of severity on the land and consequently among humankind. In the scenario of Vietnam with Agent Orange, no one anticipated the birth defects, cancer, and brain damage that would affect the lives of our nation’s veterans, the people of Vietnam, and thousands of unborn children for years to follow. Despite the evidence linking the Agent Orange to these injustices, there has been little done to right these wrongs. There should be more policy protecting the environment and its inhabitants, especially when detrimental effects are exacerbated by war. As mentioned previously, most of society may not even be aware of the effects war has on our environment. This piece is aiming to serve as a bridge for the gap between what science knows and what the people know about war’s effect on the land we

Agent Orange is a herbicide that was used to defoliate the jungles, meaning the United States military was trying to kill off the trees in Vietnam in order to take away places for North Vietnamese military men could hide (1). The Viet Cong did not fight conventionally against the American military, they could not do so and expect to win. This caused them to resort to guerilla warfare in order to strike and weaken parts of a division or unit. The Americans used Agent Orange as a defense strategy in order to take away hiding places for the Viet Cong to run to after hitting the American units (2). What is especially harmful to those who were around Agent Orange and where it was sprayed was the dioxin, which is a byproduct of one of the chemicals components. People still worked and breathed even with the residue of the toxin still in the air and in the soil, civilians and military personnel alike. The toxin carried in it a carcinogen that got its way into the water and in the soil. Slowly as the years have passed and Vietnam has been hit with a lot of monsoons clean water has washed away the toxic water, but not before it entered into the food chain and then started to accumulate into body fat and tissue in humans that was able to passed from a mother to their child threw breast milk. The American military, by word of the American government, dumped millions of gallons of Agent Orange onto the southern half of

This piece of work was intriguing because it is two Vietnam veteran’s explanation of how Agent Orange was viewed at during their time at war and what the effects brought after the war. The retired Air Force veterans shared their experiences with the chemical weapon. Huge Kendall and Ed Rodgers were the two men that watched the U.S. spray down the fields with the chemical substance. Directly from the source, Kendall said, "’We'd watch them drop that stuff up in the mountains,’ Kendall said. ’We didn't know at the time that it was hazardous. We were glad to see it, because it got rid of the undergrowth where the Viet Cong used to hide.’" Ed Rodgers said to the interviewer, "’We were situated by a river, and all of our water, for both bathing

Agent orange was very harmful to our troops, Vietnam’s environment and to the Vietnamese people. Between 1961 and 1972 there was a horrible spraying of a bunch of harmful chemicals joined to be called agent orange which killed off so many people and wildlife which, caused a lot of confusion to the US because they thought it was just going to cause the plants to die off instead of what it actually did. Agent orange was used during the Vietnam war as a non-harmful chemical but it turned out it was killing a lot of people and things. Agent orange started in the 60’s and the main harmful chemical was Dioxin and many more that are hard to explain.Agent orange was a very easy spray to make, and we thought ourselves that it wasn’t that bad to use so, we started to spray the jungle and it did so much more than we thought it would and even today it’s still harming things/people There are so many ways

The chemical weaponry that were used on the Vietnam vegetation had an adverse effect on the people in a way that even after three generations, the effects are still evident on the children. Many of them are born with malformations and severe defects in the nervous structure and immune system. The chemical also affected the American soldiers and veterans as many of them have health issues related to these weapons. Although the American government thought that they were only punishing the North Vietnamese, American veterans ended up victims of chronic and unhealthy conditions.

The destruction this chemical caused to the vegetation should have been the first clue that what destroys nature will in due time destroy us. We are the cause for this mess; but we should have been notified much earlier about the potential risk associated with Agent Orange. According to the Executive Summary on Operations Trail Dust and Ranch Hand, "On April 17,1995 Researchers have found that during the spraying of Agent Orange in southern Vietnam, dioxin levels in human tissue were as high as 900 times greater in Vietnamese living in southern Vietnam than those living in Northern Vietnam where Agent Orange was not used."(Arison5) It was not until 1993, when the Institute of Medicine News reported, "Evidence exists linking three cancers and two other health problems with chemicals used in herbicides used in the Vietnam War, a committee of the Institute of Medicine has concluded. Those diseases are soft tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and Hodgkin's disease as well as chloracne and prophyria cutanea tarda (PCT)."(Turner-Lowe1) An explanation of each disease follows: Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma refers to any group of cancers of lymphoid tissues that multiply. These are found mainly in the lymph nodes and the spleen. The symptoms are related to painless swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck or groin region. There is an attempted