August 4, 2009 • 25 mins
Agent Orange was a potent herbicide used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. Learn more about the origins, use and devastating side effects of Agent Orange in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know?
From how Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I thought you were gonna
say I'm Radius and this is almah. Let's try that again. Shoh. Okay, Hey,
(00:24):
and welcome to the podcast. Charles W. Bryant is here,
and so am I. I'm Josh Clark and this is
stuff you should know. I thought you were gonna say,
I'm Radius and this is almah. Wow. Okay, okay, so olmah,
how are you doing, Radius? I'm doing fine. That's fantastic.
That good? Um, Chuck, Sorry, what I'm just gonna say?
(00:45):
You know, I'm just doing the wrist bond thing. Are
you metacarpal? Yeah? Um? Okay, so we start over. I
don't care. Okay, Yeah, we're gonna leave it in because
our producer Jerry loves this kind of stuff. Uh, and
we're gonna go forward about that, Chuck. Um, you served
in the Vietnam War, correct? That is correct? That is
(01:05):
not correct. That was not even born yet, are you sure, jerk? Yeah?
When did Vietnam? And oh well, sure I was born,
then I wasn't born. Then good for you. Um well, chuck, surely.
Growing up in the eighties, you heard of Agent Orange,
remember the skateboard company? Absolutely yeah, so, um that just
(01:25):
really attracted me. I never had an Agent Orange skateboard.
I was more of a Powell per Alta fan, Mike
McGill specifically. Um, but I always thought Asian Orange just cool.
It just had the coolest name. Yeah. And then I
came to find find out that it was actually an herbicide,
and it's not that cool. Yeah. I used to get
it confused with the napalm. Yeah. I knew there were
different things, but I would napalm was orange, and so
(01:47):
it would kind of confuse me. Have you ever made
napalm at home? No? I haven't, Okay. Um well, once
I came to find out that Agent Orange was an herbicide, um,
I kind of lost interest in it. And then now
here we are, what ten, twelve, fifteen years later, and
my interest is once again peaked because Agent Orange was
(02:07):
about the baddest mofo that the US Army deployed against
the Vietnamese. Right now, actually Agent Purple may have been,
but we'll get into that. Okay, well let's talk about it.
Agent Orange. Let's let's give a little background and just
how much agent orange is used. As we said, it
was an herbicide now, very very potent herbicide acting and um,
(02:29):
you want to do the stats, buddy, that's my deal.
It is a defoliant. And we used about eleven million
gallons of specifically of agent orange alone forty two million leaders, yes,
from January of sixty five April nineteen seventy and about
twenty million gallons, which is uh, that is about oh,
(02:51):
I don't know, somewhere in the neighborhood is seventy six
million leaders, very good total herbicides altogether from seventy one right,
it was that's a lot. As a matter of fact,
I think, um over the course of six thousand missions
spraying missions, because it was all aerial as far as
I know, um, about uh of Vietnam was sprayed with
(03:14):
agient orange alone. That is a lot of herbicide. Yeah,
and that's a substantial portion of a country to be
infected with a harmful, dangerous killer. Yeah. Now, anybody who's
sprayed like ground up or some other herbicide around the garden,
you kind of almost have this uh this natural inclination
to keep it away from you as much as possible,
and when some gets on your fingers, you like run
(03:36):
inside and wash your hands fifty times. Right. I can't
use any of that stuff because the animals and you know,
it's it's rough stuff. It can be, right, but it
does kill the grass, as did agent orange. But not
only did agent orange killed grass, it killed everything. And
what's ironic about it is that it's actually it was
it's actually a growth regulator, meaning that it stimulates growth
(04:00):
and plants. That shocked me, Yeah, it was shocking. I
thought it was a flat out killer. But apparently what
it does is it if it's used too much, then
they grow to the point where it dries out and dies. Yeah,
it grows so fast that the water depletes its water
supply very quickly. And that's that crazy. Never knew that.
But there's this guy, a botanist named Dr Arthur W. Galston,
(04:20):
and he actually created agent orange, and he did create
it as a growth regulator to boost plant growth. Um
And after the military got ahold of it, yeah, he
started to realize that his his invention was being used
in a really horrible way. And actually campaigned against it. Yeah,
I feel I felt bad for that guy, but that's
(04:41):
his legacy. And well, did you read that quote from him?
And I agree with it? Yeah, you want to you
want to read it? Uh? Yeah, Josh. The quote is
nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result
in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe is morally neutral,
and it can be turned either to constructive or destructive ends.
That's not the fault of science, right, And I agree
with that. Yeah, And I'm sure Philip Oppenheimer would agree
(05:03):
with that as well. You know, I mean he created
nuclear vision I'm pretty sure he created nuclear vision um
and it was used in a catastrophic manner to kill
hundreds of thousands, millions probably people. He didn't create it
for that, and it was just he created something and
(05:25):
basically open Pandora's box and there you go. So I
agree with Galston's um assessment as well. But still the
fact remains the U. S. Military got ahold of this
and they sprayed it everywhere they could. So chuck um,
what's the problem with it? I mean, aside from the
fact that you know, if you're living in Vietnam, in
(05:45):
in you know, between nine and seventy and they come
over your village and spray that stuff. Number one, it's
probably going to stink, which it did. Number two, you're
covered in herbicide. Number three, all of your trees are
suddenly leafless. What are some other problems that it posed, well,
not only trees, buddy, Well, we should point out that
the reason they did this was because of the thick
(06:05):
jungle cover in Vietnam made it very difficult for snipers
and uh air squadrons to see what's going on, not
to mention the guys in the jungle, so they would
use this herbicide to just wipe it out completely and
make it like a barren black landscape, so you know,
the enemy could be seen. So um, not only did
it kill the vegetation, but it also killed crops, and
(06:28):
it also destroys the roots system and really completely. I
mean it gets into the soil, so nothing would grow
there afterward either, I mean that would eventually if you eradicated,
but sure well, and also without um roots systems, then
your soil structure is messed up. And so apparently you know,
Vietnam's monsoons carried much of the top soil away the right,
(06:52):
which also, um, then that the the the agent orange
entered the water, right, yeah, polluted that, and then you
have a big problem with cropland so we've got the
polluted water supply. So even if you do have crops,
and you're just spraying more agent orange on when you
irrigate it. So it's it's kind of a vicious cycle.
At the time, though, Yeah, you're getting rid of snipers,
(07:13):
which were a huge problem in Vietnam. And also supposedly
this the US government secretly sprayed the Ho Chiumn trail
in Cambodia, which they were definitely not supposed to, and
that was a key supply route into Vietnam. So yeah,
there there was a reason. This wasn't just like, hey,
we're over here, and why don't we just get rid
of all the vegetation you know. Um. But again, Chuck,
(07:36):
I repose my question, what's the Actually no, you did
answer it. But I think the problem is, Okay, so
most of the stuff has grown back, right, we're talking
like almost forty years ago. More, Yeah, we're talking almost
forty years ago. The trees have grown back, the vegetations
grown back. What's the problem. Why are we still talking
about agian orange. Well, because it um it's been care
(08:00):
down through uh genetics essentially right through through families. Well,
what's the active ingredient that's that's so nefarious? Are you
talking about the dioxin? I am indeed my friend. Yeah,
the docks and is the trouble. Now, you may have
heard of dioxins, uh with with that whole tupperware thing,
that tupperware I'm sorry tupperware. I don't know if you
(08:22):
use it or not, but some of these um food
storage containers. I think dioxin is a softener that that's
used in plastics to make them keep them from snapping,
being very brittle and snapping. The problem is as they
can considerably leach out and you're not supposed to have
dioxins in them there, but curin disruptors. We everyone has
(08:43):
a little bit of docks and in our system. Well, yeah,
aren't they naturally occurring in to some degree? Yeah? And
and but beyond that, the fact that it's used in
things like those kind of plastic small amounts of docks
and are present and pretty much all of us. Plus
also when you burn trash, I believe dioxin are created
or released it's usually a by product I think of
some other which I know you do on the weekend,
(09:04):
so you should probably go get checked from a big
copper smelter. But yeah, but we can, we can deal
with some level of die ox. And the problem is
is Agent Orange that had such high concentrations of dioxins
in them that there were some serious health effects, right,
And the Department of Veterans Affairs actually claimed that it
only had minute traces of docks and initially and uh
(09:25):
for agent Orange it was t C d D. It
was was the specific docks. And but that's just not
true because people in Vietnam, in some areas have blood
levels up to ten times above normal for DOC containing
docks and today yeah, yeah, and uh, originally, like right
after the Vietnam War, even during I believe some people
(09:46):
had about two d times the normal level. Right, So yeah,
there's a lot of dios and flying around and these
were all in areas where agent Orange was being sprayed.
And we're talking cancer, we're talking births, birth defects, miscarriages.
You want to know how it gets in there and
screech things up? So bad school, Okay, So um, basically,
dioxins are capable of binding to um it's fat soluble, right, exactly,
(10:13):
they're capable of binding to hormone receptor sites, right. So
um it can also very easily get into the nucleus
of your cells. When that happens, my friend, your DNA
can be tampered with. Okay, So let's say you remember
that we were talking about the chicken or the egg,
and and mutations take place in the zygote stage. So
(10:35):
let's say a couple of parents of a child have
dioxins in their cells, in the nucleus of their cells,
and these cells are contributed to create the zygote. Well,
if the if the dioxin has managed to mess with
the d n A, it's going to send all sorts
of funky instructions. And that's how you get things like, um,
(10:56):
grossly misshapen heads. Yeah, you sent me some emails of
pictures of children, Vietnamese children. It's just awful. Yeah, it's amazing.
If you type in agent orange and go to search
image results in Google, it's startling some of the things
that happened. One one I saw it was a picture
of a five year old girl who didn't have eyes.
It was just skin and kind of a depression because
(11:17):
she still had the the ocular cavity in her skull,
but it was a skin grown over it, and I
was reading the caption next to it. They were saying
they think what happened was um the hormones that were
released that are supposed to instruct the cell to develop
eyes or to instruct the body to develop eyes failed
to do so because there was dioxen bound to these
(11:40):
receptor sites that should have gotten that hormone and taking
the information and created eyes. So it gets in there
pretty bad and it can be passed down and Vietnam
has a real problem right now. I think they estimate
as many as one million of the four million people
who live in Vietnam have been poisoned by agent orange. Yeah, yeah,
And you were said earlier that it's the worst, and
(12:01):
I brought up agent purple. They actually had a bunch
of agents with the colors, and evidently they were named
by the not by the color of the chemical, but
the color of the container that it came in. There
was an orange stripe on the container, so agent purple
and agent pink. They use millions of gallons of this
stuff too, and it's possibly even more deadly because agent
(12:22):
purple has three times as much docks and as agent orange. Yeah,
you don't hear much about agent pink or agent purple, No,
I think because agent orange was used in spades. So sure,
you know it's odd you said that cancer is a
is a result of agent orange or dioxen poisoning, right,
yeah about risk of an increased risk? Well, cancer is
(12:45):
uncontrolled cellular growth, right, that's it. Um. What's what's surprising
is that you remember we were talking about agent orange
being a growth regulator and that it causes plants to
grow rapidly. Interesting in humans, the exact opposite happens. In
small doses, dioxins actually keep cancer cells in check from growing,
but then in larger doses it promotes this uncontrolled growth.
(13:08):
So it has the the exact opposite effect on humans
as it does plants. It's weird, is that it's very weird.
And I know the w h O, the World Health Organization,
it's it's officially classified as a as a known carcinogen.
So yeah, there's no mistaking it. No, but there's still
a debate. Well, there's not much of a debate anymore,
but there has been um since the eighties. Well since
(13:31):
the seventies really about whether or not Asian orange caused
all these problems. Why why lawsuits? Yep, because no one
wants to pay and be responsible for this. No, and
certainly not the U. S Government, which has actually been
hiding behind um sovereign immunity. Yeah. That means the US
government cannot be sued. Yeah, it's as simple as that,
(13:54):
nicely done. Yeah. Basically, there's this it's a doctrine. Uh,
that's it's stablished, this international law. And you it says,
like Chuck said, you can't sue a government, right, So
everybody went after the chemical companies instead. And I think
it behooves us to mention some of these chemical companies
that created agent orange. Uh, Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Diamond, Shamrock
(14:18):
were four the big ones, right, and they all say
that they were contracted out by the government to do
a job. So it's not our fault. Yeah, And the
Supreme Court, I believe upheld that, or at least tossed
out a lawsuit that challenged that. Uh that you know,
these companies were working as government contractors and were ordered
to produce agent orange for the government, so by default
they're protected by sovereign immunity, say, by proxy. Basically, it
(14:42):
seems like anytime there's been a big suit, it's kind
of resulted in a big, fat dead end. Yes, but
we should say that those four companies I mentioned, in
addition to I think three others, yes, seven total, um
ended up paying out two and forty million dollars class
actions too, Yeah, to two hun people. Right, and that
was a settlement to right. Yeah, that was a settlement. Sure,
(15:05):
but there's still plenty of other people who have lawsuits
pending or would like to sue, but it doesn't look
like it's going to be happening. There was an attorney
for Vietnamese a national who is trying to sue one
of the chemical companies, who said that the the ruling
that the government UH ordered or that because the government
(15:26):
ordered these chemical companies to produce agent orange, that they
were government contracts, and therefore, the lawyer said, that's pretty
much the end of agent orange lawsuits. Right. Did you
ever see The Fog of War? The documentary Errol Morris is,
you know, it's one of my heroes as a filmmaker.
You should check that out. It's it's it's an hour
and a half a long interview with Robert McNamara and
(15:49):
just hardcore, intense interview about the Vietnam War. I would
love to see that. It's it's really awesome fogg of war.
I'll check it out. So, Chuck, what all these lawsuits
are Some are being paid off, some aren't. There's still
a problem of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam. How do you
remediate this? Well, Josh, I have some numbers for you.
(16:10):
I think I know what you're getting at here. Uh,
just as an example, the town of Ben Trey has
one hundred and forty thousand people there and the Red
Cross estimates that fifty eight thousand of them have suffered
the effects of agent orange. That that's like more than
of the population and as you said, a million total
in the entire country. Right, But how do you how
(16:31):
do you clean this up? I mean this is a
I think Christopher Hitchens mentioned that it's been called an
eco side. Is that who said that? Yeah? So I
mean what do you do about this? Well? You clean
it up? Josh, Okay, Uh, there's well that's kind of
an expensive proposition. There is you know, ways that that
this can be cleaned up and and we said, a
lot of the um, A lot of the countryside has
(16:54):
been naturally reforested, right right, Are you talking about the
wall of trees? The wall of trees seems pretty cool. Yeah.
They planted essentially a barrier to protect people from this
in the form of trees. Yeah, which sounds I don't
know how that works. Actually, it probably leaches it out
of the soil eventually. UM that that or the um
(17:16):
the trees will hold the soil in place so it
won't be washed away, and then perhaps the soil can
act as a natural filter. We should also say that
UM dioxins appear to have about a half life of
seven years, but once they hit the top soil they
can actually they've been shown to to stick around a
lot longer. I think part of the problem is there's
(17:39):
a lot of people who have a lot of money, uh,
that don't want to part with it, who are saying,
you know what, this is just eventually going to work
itself out. Right, Well, they outlawed it, and Richard Nixon
actually outlawed it when they found conclusive test results and
lab rats. Yeah, but the damage was done, definitely, and
it has been going on, and it may be going
(17:59):
on without some sort of large scale intervention. It doesn't
look like that's going to be happening anytime soon. Should
we talk about Victor Victor Yushenko. Yes, he's actually a
living case study in diox and poisoning unity. Yes, he's
a Ukrainian politician and many of you may know this.
He was poisoned with Dixon, but survived during the two
(18:21):
thousand four presidential election, which you want, so not too
long ago. And he thinks he was purposely poisoned and
they traced it back to a dinner he had and uh,
but no one, you know, there have no charges have
been filed. No one's claimed responsibility. But you saw the
before and after pictures. Yeah, this effect on him, Yeah,
(18:42):
he was. He was a good looking man, he was.
After the diox and poison he ain't pretty no more. No,
his face was. And you should look this up on
the internet as well, and the Google images. No, no, no,
our our loyal fan base. It's um it's startling pockmarked face. Um,
deeply sw yeah, deeply talk marked like you know, moon
crater type stuff. Um, swollen swollen up, big circles under
(19:06):
his eyes. I mean I think they said he he
had six thousand times the normal level of docks and
is that right, which is the highest second highest ever
recorded any human that lived. Yeah, and he looks a
little better now, he does. And he's still up and
walking around, which is miraculous. But yeah, they you can't
(19:26):
keep your shanko down. And should we talk about the veterans, yeah,
zoom walt, Well then yeah, we'll get to that in
a second. But um in the v A set up
a program to officially deal with this and conducted health
exams on three and fifteen thousand veterans and uh, basically
(19:47):
the presumption is if you were exposed to agent orange,
then you've got some trouble and you have v A
care the v A. UM, even before the lawsuits, any
lawsuits were settled, the v A was operating on the
premise that, um, yeah, there there was a huge link
between agent orange exposure and all of these problems. So
the v A actually has done a lot to help
(20:09):
out veterans from Vietnam and actually Korea. And I didn't
even know we're in Korean the late sixties. Yeah, and
they actually that was hand sprayed by people, but by Koreans.
I got you. Um, actually not hand sprayed, but the
Koreans did the spraying and they actually the v A
is also covering the children of soldiers because a lot
of times passed on down and potentially even to another generation.
(20:34):
Well that's the problem in Vietnam. It's sticking around, So
I mean, eventually it will be rinsed out. I guess
you could put it genetically speaking, but that's a pretty
sick way of dealing with the situation. But that looks
like the way it's being handled. So you want to
talk about zoom Walt, now, sure if you want to,
I think so. He was a Navy Admiral um Almo
zoom Walt, Jr. And he commanded naval forces in Vietnam,
(20:57):
and he now has a destroyer class named after him,
the zoom Walt Class destroyer. Didn't know that. Um. On
a positive note, he was credited with helping to end
race and ginger discrimination in the navy, so that's a
good thing. But during the war he was concerned about
snipers and the Mekong Delta. He ordered agan orange to
be sprayed there. He had a son, Elmo the Third
(21:20):
or zoom Walt the Third, and he was commanding a
boat that was in the Mekong Delta at the time.
So essentially what he did was ended up spraying his
own son, I mean, not by his own hand, but
he gave the order to have it sprayed right where
his son was, and he died of cancer. Zoom walt
the third did, and his son, Elmo the fourth, has
(21:41):
a severe learning disability, and zoom walt to this day says,
you know, it haunts him to this day. And then
later later on zoom walt Um advocated for compensation for victims.
He he tried to fight the good fight afterwards. So
that's Agent Orange really in a nutshell. Yeah, if you
want to learn more about it, you can type in
those two words in the handy search bar of how
(22:02):
stuff Works dot com. It will bring up a really
good article written by our former colleague now freelancer Jacob Silverman,
which I guess leads us to I would say, I
don't know, listener, mail time, maybe I've got a couple
of couple for you here jobs. Do they have anything
(22:24):
to do with high fruit toast corn, sir, No, they don't.
This is from a serviceman serving in Rome, Italy, Okay,
And I like to read the ones from the serviceman
because I don't know you're proud to be an American
I am. Indeed, I just wanted to write and thank
you for the podcast. Serving in the Navy currently station
in Rome, Italy, because job I wasn't always in Rome,
into two and a half years on a ship in
(22:45):
Japan before this. Sadly, I don't have a glamorous job.
My compatriots and I are postal clerks. You never think
about these jobs that you have to do in the military,
these kind of everyday mundane chores. You doll good for you.
You're better than me. Uh. We make sure the letters
and care packages get from home in the States and
make it to the guys in the field in the rack.
(23:06):
You wouldn't believe how much theft and rifling takes place
when a partial is sent to when it arrives at
its destination. It's terrible. It is terrible and distressing. There
are not many of us here in Rome, no more
than a dozen or so, and there's always more than
enough work to do. I know this kind of a
long set up with no segue, but one of the
PCs I work with is a master of useless knowledge
and facts. About everything and anything. In short, I work
(23:27):
with a real Cliff Claven from Cheers. He's a big
he's big, he's a maleman, he's funny and in true
Cheers tradition, he can pound a beer or seven. Sounds
like our kind of guy. Yea. But thanks to you
and your podcast, I can only keep up with him,
but have been able to trump him. So you yeah,
and he is. He's very psyched about this. He says,
(23:47):
you have no no idea how good that feels. I
listened to the podcast when I'm driving mail from the
airport to the various NATO installations and back. I look
forward to each and everyone. Take her easy, p S.
I'm sorry e C three s W langdon and please
give a shout out to the rest of the PCs
at m C a Rome So shout out you've been
shouted out the PCs. Yeah, I have another real quickie.
(24:10):
This is a tongue twister. And I know this is
long overdue, but this one is so hard and so
simple at the same time that I cannot even say it.
Once Irish wrist watch, Irish wi, Irish wristwatch. That was okay,
that was Jerry says, okay, Jerry the judges, all right, well,
(24:31):
let me try to get one more time. Irish wristwatch
rist better but still not not perfect. But I couldn't
even say it once, so it's not one of those
three times. Just did say it once well, with about
a five second lag and got all right. So we
want to thank Ryan for sending that in a truly
twisted tongue twister. Irish wristwatch not bad. Thanks, but you've
been drinking so it listens to the tongue. My friend. Uh,
(24:54):
if you want to send us a tongue twister that
has to do with the Irish or anybody else, if
you're stationed in Rome or anywhere else, or if you
just want to say hi, you don't have to impress this.
You can just say hi and you can send an
email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com
(25:17):
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thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know?
From how Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I thought you were gonna
say I'm Radius and this is almah. Let's try that again. Shoh. Okay, Hey,
(00:24):
and welcome to the podcast. Charles W. Bryant is here,
and so am I. I'm Josh Clark and this is
stuff you should know. I thought you were gonna say,
I'm Radius and this is almah. Wow. Okay, okay, so olmah,
how are you doing, Radius? I'm doing fine. That's fantastic.
That good? Um, Chuck, Sorry, what I'm just gonna say?
(00:45):
You know, I'm just doing the wrist bond thing. Are
you metacarpal? Yeah? Um? Okay, so we start over. I
don't care. Okay, Yeah, we're gonna leave it in because
our producer Jerry loves this kind of stuff. Uh, and
we're gonna go forward about that, Chuck. Um, you served
in the Vietnam War, correct? That is correct? That is
(01:05):
not correct. That was not even born yet, are you sure, jerk? Yeah?
When did Vietnam? And oh well, sure I was born,
then I wasn't born. Then good for you. Um well, chuck, surely.
Growing up in the eighties, you heard of Agent Orange,
remember the skateboard company? Absolutely yeah, so, um that just
(01:25):
really attracted me. I never had an Agent Orange skateboard.
I was more of a Powell per Alta fan, Mike
McGill specifically. Um, but I always thought Asian Orange just cool.
It just had the coolest name. Yeah. And then I
came to find find out that it was actually an herbicide,
and it's not that cool. Yeah. I used to get
it confused with the napalm. Yeah. I knew there were
different things, but I would napalm was orange, and so
(01:47):
it would kind of confuse me. Have you ever made
napalm at home? No? I haven't, Okay. Um well, once
I came to find out that Agent Orange was an herbicide, um,
I kind of lost interest in it. And then now
here we are, what ten, twelve, fifteen years later, and
my interest is once again peaked because Agent Orange was
(02:07):
about the baddest mofo that the US Army deployed against
the Vietnamese. Right now, actually Agent Purple may have been,
but we'll get into that. Okay, well let's talk about it.
Agent Orange. Let's let's give a little background and just
how much agent orange is used. As we said, it
was an herbicide now, very very potent herbicide acting and um,
(02:29):
you want to do the stats, buddy, that's my deal.
It is a defoliant. And we used about eleven million
gallons of specifically of agent orange alone forty two million leaders, yes,
from January of sixty five April nineteen seventy and about
twenty million gallons, which is uh, that is about oh,
(02:51):
I don't know, somewhere in the neighborhood is seventy six
million leaders, very good total herbicides altogether from seventy one right,
it was that's a lot. As a matter of fact,
I think, um over the course of six thousand missions
spraying missions, because it was all aerial as far as
I know, um, about uh of Vietnam was sprayed with
(03:14):
agient orange alone. That is a lot of herbicide. Yeah,
and that's a substantial portion of a country to be
infected with a harmful, dangerous killer. Yeah. Now, anybody who's
sprayed like ground up or some other herbicide around the garden,
you kind of almost have this uh this natural inclination
to keep it away from you as much as possible,
and when some gets on your fingers, you like run
(03:36):
inside and wash your hands fifty times. Right. I can't
use any of that stuff because the animals and you know,
it's it's rough stuff. It can be, right, but it
does kill the grass, as did agent orange. But not
only did agent orange killed grass, it killed everything. And
what's ironic about it is that it's actually it was
it's actually a growth regulator, meaning that it stimulates growth
(04:00):
and plants. That shocked me, Yeah, it was shocking. I
thought it was a flat out killer. But apparently what
it does is it if it's used too much, then
they grow to the point where it dries out and dies. Yeah,
it grows so fast that the water depletes its water
supply very quickly. And that's that crazy. Never knew that.
But there's this guy, a botanist named Dr Arthur W. Galston,
(04:20):
and he actually created agent orange, and he did create
it as a growth regulator to boost plant growth. Um
And after the military got ahold of it, yeah, he
started to realize that his his invention was being used
in a really horrible way. And actually campaigned against it. Yeah,
I feel I felt bad for that guy, but that's
(04:41):
his legacy. And well, did you read that quote from him?
And I agree with it? Yeah, you want to you
want to read it? Uh? Yeah, Josh. The quote is
nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result
in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe is morally neutral,
and it can be turned either to constructive or destructive ends.
That's not the fault of science, right, And I agree
with that. Yeah, And I'm sure Philip Oppenheimer would agree
(05:03):
with that as well. You know, I mean he created
nuclear vision I'm pretty sure he created nuclear vision um
and it was used in a catastrophic manner to kill
hundreds of thousands, millions probably people. He didn't create it
for that, and it was just he created something and
(05:25):
basically open Pandora's box and there you go. So I
agree with Galston's um assessment as well. But still the
fact remains the U. S. Military got ahold of this
and they sprayed it everywhere they could. So chuck um,
what's the problem with it? I mean, aside from the
fact that you know, if you're living in Vietnam, in
(05:45):
in you know, between nine and seventy and they come
over your village and spray that stuff. Number one, it's
probably going to stink, which it did. Number two, you're
covered in herbicide. Number three, all of your trees are
suddenly leafless. What are some other problems that it posed, well,
not only trees, buddy, Well, we should point out that
the reason they did this was because of the thick
(06:05):
jungle cover in Vietnam made it very difficult for snipers
and uh air squadrons to see what's going on, not
to mention the guys in the jungle, so they would
use this herbicide to just wipe it out completely and
make it like a barren black landscape, so you know,
the enemy could be seen. So um, not only did
it kill the vegetation, but it also killed crops, and
(06:28):
it also destroys the roots system and really completely. I
mean it gets into the soil, so nothing would grow
there afterward either, I mean that would eventually if you eradicated,
but sure well, and also without um roots systems, then
your soil structure is messed up. And so apparently you know,
Vietnam's monsoons carried much of the top soil away the right,
(06:52):
which also, um, then that the the the agent orange
entered the water, right, yeah, polluted that, and then you
have a big problem with cropland so we've got the
polluted water supply. So even if you do have crops,
and you're just spraying more agent orange on when you
irrigate it. So it's it's kind of a vicious cycle.
At the time, though, Yeah, you're getting rid of snipers,
(07:13):
which were a huge problem in Vietnam. And also supposedly
this the US government secretly sprayed the Ho Chiumn trail
in Cambodia, which they were definitely not supposed to, and
that was a key supply route into Vietnam. So yeah,
there there was a reason. This wasn't just like, hey,
we're over here, and why don't we just get rid
of all the vegetation you know. Um. But again, Chuck,
(07:36):
I repose my question, what's the Actually no, you did
answer it. But I think the problem is, Okay, so
most of the stuff has grown back, right, we're talking
like almost forty years ago. More, Yeah, we're talking almost
forty years ago. The trees have grown back, the vegetations
grown back. What's the problem. Why are we still talking
about agian orange. Well, because it um it's been care
(08:00):
down through uh genetics essentially right through through families. Well,
what's the active ingredient that's that's so nefarious? Are you
talking about the dioxin? I am indeed my friend. Yeah,
the docks and is the trouble. Now, you may have
heard of dioxins, uh with with that whole tupperware thing,
that tupperware I'm sorry tupperware. I don't know if you
(08:22):
use it or not, but some of these um food
storage containers. I think dioxin is a softener that that's
used in plastics to make them keep them from snapping,
being very brittle and snapping. The problem is as they
can considerably leach out and you're not supposed to have
dioxins in them there, but curin disruptors. We everyone has
(08:43):
a little bit of docks and in our system. Well, yeah,
aren't they naturally occurring in to some degree? Yeah? And
and but beyond that, the fact that it's used in
things like those kind of plastic small amounts of docks
and are present and pretty much all of us. Plus
also when you burn trash, I believe dioxin are created
or released it's usually a by product I think of
some other which I know you do on the weekend,
(09:04):
so you should probably go get checked from a big
copper smelter. But yeah, but we can, we can deal
with some level of die ox. And the problem is
is Agent Orange that had such high concentrations of dioxins
in them that there were some serious health effects, right,
And the Department of Veterans Affairs actually claimed that it
only had minute traces of docks and initially and uh
(09:25):
for agent Orange it was t C d D. It
was was the specific docks. And but that's just not
true because people in Vietnam, in some areas have blood
levels up to ten times above normal for DOC containing
docks and today yeah, yeah, and uh, originally, like right
after the Vietnam War, even during I believe some people
(09:46):
had about two d times the normal level. Right, So yeah,
there's a lot of dios and flying around and these
were all in areas where agent Orange was being sprayed.
And we're talking cancer, we're talking births, birth defects, miscarriages.
You want to know how it gets in there and
screech things up? So bad school, Okay, So um, basically,
dioxins are capable of binding to um it's fat soluble, right, exactly,
(10:13):
they're capable of binding to hormone receptor sites, right. So
um it can also very easily get into the nucleus
of your cells. When that happens, my friend, your DNA
can be tampered with. Okay, So let's say you remember
that we were talking about the chicken or the egg,
and and mutations take place in the zygote stage. So
(10:35):
let's say a couple of parents of a child have
dioxins in their cells, in the nucleus of their cells,
and these cells are contributed to create the zygote. Well,
if the if the dioxin has managed to mess with
the d n A, it's going to send all sorts
of funky instructions. And that's how you get things like, um,
(10:56):
grossly misshapen heads. Yeah, you sent me some emails of
pictures of children, Vietnamese children. It's just awful. Yeah, it's amazing.
If you type in agent orange and go to search
image results in Google, it's startling some of the things
that happened. One one I saw it was a picture
of a five year old girl who didn't have eyes.
It was just skin and kind of a depression because
(11:17):
she still had the the ocular cavity in her skull,
but it was a skin grown over it, and I
was reading the caption next to it. They were saying
they think what happened was um the hormones that were
released that are supposed to instruct the cell to develop
eyes or to instruct the body to develop eyes failed
to do so because there was dioxen bound to these
(11:40):
receptor sites that should have gotten that hormone and taking
the information and created eyes. So it gets in there
pretty bad and it can be passed down and Vietnam
has a real problem right now. I think they estimate
as many as one million of the four million people
who live in Vietnam have been poisoned by agent orange. Yeah, yeah,
And you were said earlier that it's the worst, and
(12:01):
I brought up agent purple. They actually had a bunch
of agents with the colors, and evidently they were named
by the not by the color of the chemical, but
the color of the container that it came in. There
was an orange stripe on the container, so agent purple
and agent pink. They use millions of gallons of this
stuff too, and it's possibly even more deadly because agent
(12:22):
purple has three times as much docks and as agent orange. Yeah,
you don't hear much about agent pink or agent purple, No,
I think because agent orange was used in spades. So sure,
you know it's odd you said that cancer is a
is a result of agent orange or dioxen poisoning, right,
yeah about risk of an increased risk? Well, cancer is
(12:45):
uncontrolled cellular growth, right, that's it. Um. What's what's surprising
is that you remember we were talking about agent orange
being a growth regulator and that it causes plants to
grow rapidly. Interesting in humans, the exact opposite happens. In
small doses, dioxins actually keep cancer cells in check from growing,
but then in larger doses it promotes this uncontrolled growth.
(13:08):
So it has the the exact opposite effect on humans
as it does plants. It's weird, is that it's very weird.
And I know the w h O, the World Health Organization,
it's it's officially classified as a as a known carcinogen.
So yeah, there's no mistaking it. No, but there's still
a debate. Well, there's not much of a debate anymore,
but there has been um since the eighties. Well since
(13:31):
the seventies really about whether or not Asian orange caused
all these problems. Why why lawsuits? Yep, because no one
wants to pay and be responsible for this. No, and
certainly not the U. S Government, which has actually been
hiding behind um sovereign immunity. Yeah. That means the US
government cannot be sued. Yeah, it's as simple as that,
(13:54):
nicely done. Yeah. Basically, there's this it's a doctrine. Uh,
that's it's stablished, this international law. And you it says,
like Chuck said, you can't sue a government, right, So
everybody went after the chemical companies instead. And I think
it behooves us to mention some of these chemical companies
that created agent orange. Uh, Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Diamond, Shamrock
(14:18):
were four the big ones, right, and they all say
that they were contracted out by the government to do
a job. So it's not our fault. Yeah, And the
Supreme Court, I believe upheld that, or at least tossed
out a lawsuit that challenged that. Uh that you know,
these companies were working as government contractors and were ordered
to produce agent orange for the government, so by default
they're protected by sovereign immunity, say, by proxy. Basically, it
(14:42):
seems like anytime there's been a big suit, it's kind
of resulted in a big, fat dead end. Yes, but
we should say that those four companies I mentioned, in
addition to I think three others, yes, seven total, um
ended up paying out two and forty million dollars class
actions too, Yeah, to two hun people. Right, and that
was a settlement to right. Yeah, that was a settlement. Sure,
(15:05):
but there's still plenty of other people who have lawsuits
pending or would like to sue, but it doesn't look
like it's going to be happening. There was an attorney
for Vietnamese a national who is trying to sue one
of the chemical companies, who said that the the ruling
that the government UH ordered or that because the government
(15:26):
ordered these chemical companies to produce agent orange, that they
were government contracts, and therefore, the lawyer said, that's pretty
much the end of agent orange lawsuits. Right. Did you
ever see The Fog of War? The documentary Errol Morris is,
you know, it's one of my heroes as a filmmaker.
You should check that out. It's it's it's an hour
and a half a long interview with Robert McNamara and
(15:49):
just hardcore, intense interview about the Vietnam War. I would
love to see that. It's it's really awesome fogg of war.
I'll check it out. So, Chuck, what all these lawsuits
are Some are being paid off, some aren't. There's still
a problem of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam. How do you
remediate this? Well, Josh, I have some numbers for you.
(16:10):
I think I know what you're getting at here. Uh,
just as an example, the town of Ben Trey has
one hundred and forty thousand people there and the Red
Cross estimates that fifty eight thousand of them have suffered
the effects of agent orange. That that's like more than
of the population and as you said, a million total
in the entire country. Right, But how do you how
(16:31):
do you clean this up? I mean this is a
I think Christopher Hitchens mentioned that it's been called an
eco side. Is that who said that? Yeah? So I
mean what do you do about this? Well? You clean
it up? Josh, Okay, Uh, there's well that's kind of
an expensive proposition. There is you know, ways that that
this can be cleaned up and and we said, a
lot of the um, A lot of the countryside has
(16:54):
been naturally reforested, right right, Are you talking about the
wall of trees? The wall of trees seems pretty cool. Yeah.
They planted essentially a barrier to protect people from this
in the form of trees. Yeah, which sounds I don't
know how that works. Actually, it probably leaches it out
of the soil eventually. UM that that or the um
(17:16):
the trees will hold the soil in place so it
won't be washed away, and then perhaps the soil can
act as a natural filter. We should also say that
UM dioxins appear to have about a half life of
seven years, but once they hit the top soil they
can actually they've been shown to to stick around a
lot longer. I think part of the problem is there's
(17:39):
a lot of people who have a lot of money, uh,
that don't want to part with it, who are saying,
you know what, this is just eventually going to work
itself out. Right, Well, they outlawed it, and Richard Nixon
actually outlawed it when they found conclusive test results and
lab rats. Yeah, but the damage was done, definitely, and
it has been going on, and it may be going
(17:59):
on without some sort of large scale intervention. It doesn't
look like that's going to be happening anytime soon. Should
we talk about Victor Victor Yushenko. Yes, he's actually a
living case study in diox and poisoning unity. Yes, he's
a Ukrainian politician and many of you may know this.
He was poisoned with Dixon, but survived during the two
(18:21):
thousand four presidential election, which you want, so not too
long ago. And he thinks he was purposely poisoned and
they traced it back to a dinner he had and uh,
but no one, you know, there have no charges have
been filed. No one's claimed responsibility. But you saw the
before and after pictures. Yeah, this effect on him, Yeah,
(18:42):
he was. He was a good looking man, he was.
After the diox and poison he ain't pretty no more. No,
his face was. And you should look this up on
the internet as well, and the Google images. No, no, no,
our our loyal fan base. It's um it's startling pockmarked face. Um,
deeply sw yeah, deeply talk marked like you know, moon
crater type stuff. Um, swollen swollen up, big circles under
(19:06):
his eyes. I mean I think they said he he
had six thousand times the normal level of docks and
is that right, which is the highest second highest ever
recorded any human that lived. Yeah, and he looks a
little better now, he does. And he's still up and
walking around, which is miraculous. But yeah, they you can't
(19:26):
keep your shanko down. And should we talk about the veterans, yeah,
zoom walt, Well then yeah, we'll get to that in
a second. But um in the v A set up
a program to officially deal with this and conducted health
exams on three and fifteen thousand veterans and uh, basically
(19:47):
the presumption is if you were exposed to agent orange,
then you've got some trouble and you have v A
care the v A. UM, even before the lawsuits, any
lawsuits were settled, the v A was operating on the
premise that, um, yeah, there there was a huge link
between agent orange exposure and all of these problems. So
the v A actually has done a lot to help
(20:09):
out veterans from Vietnam and actually Korea. And I didn't
even know we're in Korean the late sixties. Yeah, and
they actually that was hand sprayed by people, but by Koreans.
I got you. Um, actually not hand sprayed, but the
Koreans did the spraying and they actually the v A
is also covering the children of soldiers because a lot
of times passed on down and potentially even to another generation.
(20:34):
Well that's the problem in Vietnam. It's sticking around, So
I mean, eventually it will be rinsed out. I guess
you could put it genetically speaking, but that's a pretty
sick way of dealing with the situation. But that looks
like the way it's being handled. So you want to
talk about zoom Walt, now, sure if you want to,
I think so. He was a Navy Admiral um Almo
zoom Walt, Jr. And he commanded naval forces in Vietnam,
(20:57):
and he now has a destroyer class named after him,
the zoom Walt Class destroyer. Didn't know that. Um. On
a positive note, he was credited with helping to end
race and ginger discrimination in the navy, so that's a
good thing. But during the war he was concerned about
snipers and the Mekong Delta. He ordered agan orange to
be sprayed there. He had a son, Elmo the Third
(21:20):
or zoom Walt the Third, and he was commanding a
boat that was in the Mekong Delta at the time.
So essentially what he did was ended up spraying his
own son, I mean, not by his own hand, but
he gave the order to have it sprayed right where
his son was, and he died of cancer. Zoom walt
the third did, and his son, Elmo the fourth, has
(21:41):
a severe learning disability, and zoom walt to this day says,
you know, it haunts him to this day. And then
later later on zoom walt Um advocated for compensation for victims.
He he tried to fight the good fight afterwards. So
that's Agent Orange really in a nutshell. Yeah, if you
want to learn more about it, you can type in
those two words in the handy search bar of how
(22:02):
stuff Works dot com. It will bring up a really
good article written by our former colleague now freelancer Jacob Silverman,
which I guess leads us to I would say, I
don't know, listener, mail time, maybe I've got a couple
of couple for you here jobs. Do they have anything
(22:24):
to do with high fruit toast corn, sir, No, they don't.
This is from a serviceman serving in Rome, Italy, Okay,
And I like to read the ones from the serviceman
because I don't know you're proud to be an American
I am. Indeed, I just wanted to write and thank
you for the podcast. Serving in the Navy currently station
in Rome, Italy, because job I wasn't always in Rome,
into two and a half years on a ship in
(22:45):
Japan before this. Sadly, I don't have a glamorous job.
My compatriots and I are postal clerks. You never think
about these jobs that you have to do in the military,
these kind of everyday mundane chores. You doll good for you.
You're better than me. Uh. We make sure the letters
and care packages get from home in the States and
make it to the guys in the field in the rack.
(23:06):
You wouldn't believe how much theft and rifling takes place
when a partial is sent to when it arrives at
its destination. It's terrible. It is terrible and distressing. There
are not many of us here in Rome, no more
than a dozen or so, and there's always more than
enough work to do. I know this kind of a
long set up with no segue, but one of the
PCs I work with is a master of useless knowledge
and facts. About everything and anything. In short, I work
(23:27):
with a real Cliff Claven from Cheers. He's a big
he's big, he's a maleman, he's funny and in true
Cheers tradition, he can pound a beer or seven. Sounds
like our kind of guy. Yea. But thanks to you
and your podcast, I can only keep up with him,
but have been able to trump him. So you yeah,
and he is. He's very psyched about this. He says,
(23:47):
you have no no idea how good that feels. I
listened to the podcast when I'm driving mail from the
airport to the various NATO installations and back. I look
forward to each and everyone. Take her easy, p S.
I'm sorry e C three s W langdon and please
give a shout out to the rest of the PCs
at m C a Rome So shout out you've been
shouted out the PCs. Yeah, I have another real quickie.
(24:10):
This is a tongue twister. And I know this is
long overdue, but this one is so hard and so
simple at the same time that I cannot even say it.
Once Irish wrist watch, Irish wi, Irish wristwatch. That was okay,
that was Jerry says, okay, Jerry the judges, all right, well,
(24:31):
let me try to get one more time. Irish wristwatch
rist better but still not not perfect. But I couldn't
even say it once, so it's not one of those
three times. Just did say it once well, with about
a five second lag and got all right. So we
want to thank Ryan for sending that in a truly
twisted tongue twister. Irish wristwatch not bad. Thanks, but you've
been drinking so it listens to the tongue. My friend. Uh,
(24:54):
if you want to send us a tongue twister that
has to do with the Irish or anybody else, if
you're stationed in Rome or anywhere else, or if you
just want to say hi, you don't have to impress this.
You can just say hi and you can send an
email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com
(25:17):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because
at how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works,
check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot
com home page. Brought to you by the reinvented two
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