Today March 21 2015 is International Day of Forests. It also is Gudi Padwa (गुडी पाडवा), first day of an Indian calendar and Nowruz, first day of an Iranian calendar.
Almost fifty years ago, on March 8 1965, first American ground troops arrived in Vietnam. By the time they left at the end of 1973, an estimated 3 million Vietnamese were killed, including 2 million civilians. Hundreds of thousands were seriously injured and disabled.
However, they were even more devastating for Vietnamese plant life.
George Black explains in The Nation what American invasion meant for Vietnamese natural environment:
"...Although the Romans used to destroy their enemies’ fields, and armies have always bombed and burned adversaries out of their hiding places, there is no real precedent for the systematic use of science and technology to destroy large portions of a country’s natural environment, as the United States did with its herbicide-spraying program in Vietnam. The overall operation was called Trail Dust, but it’s generally referred to as Ranch Hand. Another name that was sometimes used was Hades, and that may be the most apposite of the three...
...Agent Orange accounted for more than 60 percent of the spraying, but actually it was just one in a rainbow spectrum of herbicides, each employing a different cocktail of chemicals and color-coded by a painted band around its fifty-five-gallon storage barrel. Agent White was the second most widely used defoliant, while substantial amounts of Agent Blue were also sprayed, mainly to kill crops by desiccation. Agents Pink, Green and Purple were used in smaller quantities during the early years of the war..."
Michael Herr, 'Breathing In' from 'Dispatches', 1968:
"...At the end of my first week in-country I met an information
officer in the headquarters of the 25th Division at Cu Chi who showed me on his
map and then from his chopper what they’d done to the Ho Bo Woods, the vanished
Ho Bo Woods, taken off by giant Rome plows and chemicals and long, slow fire,
wasting hundreds of acres of cultivated plantation and wild forest alike,
“denying the enemy valuable resources and cover.”..."
However, they were even more devastating for Vietnamese plant life.
George Black explains in The Nation what American invasion meant for Vietnamese natural environment:
"...Although the Romans used to destroy their enemies’ fields, and armies have always bombed and burned adversaries out of their hiding places, there is no real precedent for the systematic use of science and technology to destroy large portions of a country’s natural environment, as the United States did with its herbicide-spraying program in Vietnam. The overall operation was called Trail Dust, but it’s generally referred to as Ranch Hand. Another name that was sometimes used was Hades, and that may be the most apposite of the three...
...Agent Orange accounted for more than 60 percent of the spraying, but actually it was just one in a rainbow spectrum of herbicides, each employing a different cocktail of chemicals and color-coded by a painted band around its fifty-five-gallon storage barrel. Agent White was the second most widely used defoliant, while substantial amounts of Agent Blue were also sprayed, mainly to kill crops by desiccation. Agents Pink, Green and Purple were used in smaller quantities during the early years of the war..."
'The Scream', 1893,
Artist: Edvard Munch (1863-1944)
courtesy: Wikipedia
Are all Agents captured in Munch's picture?
Are all Agents captured in Munch's picture?
Artist: Harry Bliss, The New Yorker, April 2014