Actually, YaTingPom , The colour name given to the Dioxin based defoliants Orange, White and Blue came not from the drum colour but the wide coloured band on each drum used to denote the type of defoliant inside the drum.
Not nice stuff at all regardless of colour. The dioxin does nasty things to the human body and often takes decades to show up as many VN veteran have now found out, myself included. Apart from being sprayed whilst on the ground, we had to fill up our water bottles from the creeks and streams in any area we were operating in, thus ingesting the Dioxin and other to be avoided chemicals as the spray/spray drift always found its way in to any water source.
And for the record:
Agent Orange - Used to denude Hardwood trees and mangrove forests/swamps.
Agent White - Used to clear vegetation and underbrush around base cam berms and perimeters to open up extended clear fire lanes.
Agent Blue - Used to kill growing rice and other crops.
Never mind the use of the extremely toxic chemicals Dieldrin, Chlordane and Lindane used in the aerial spraying and swing fogging of base areas to eradicate mosquitos and other undesirable insects and snakes. There would hardly be a VN field veteran who has not inhaled these deadly cocktails multiple times.
Not to mention the large, rock-like crystals of lachrymatory (tear gas) agents that were used to make VC/NVA tunnels uninhabitable/reusable and spread from the air at dusk along both sides of some routes regardless of wether troops/convoys still had to pass through that area. As the commander at one time of a convoy of 120 mixed vehicles having been delayed and harassed by enemy action we were late pulling out of a Delta Base Camp and I spent close to 15 Km vomiting and gasping for breath in the damp, still, night air full of the gaseous product of these large crystals. My other memory of this horrific trip was of the effectiveness of truck-mounted quad fifty calibre HB MGs hammering away at those harassing us.
OML
How much of Cambodia was sprayed by Agent Orange?
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https://www.cambodiadaily.com/archives/ ... egacy-884/Memot district, Kompong Cham province – The “yellow dew” aroused little interest when it arrived, but few could have imagined what it was about to do.
The aircraft, charged with covert operations, flew over Cambodia’s borders under the protective cover of darkness. They flew so high that villagers below knew nothing.
Not until morning—then the evidence of the high-altitude visitor was evident all around, in the strange, yellow, dew-like sheen that covered trees and vegetation in the eastern portion of Kompong Cham province.
Villagers in Memot and neighboring Krek district recalled recently how, on several occasions in the late 1960s, dawn mists lifted from their villages revealing yellow stains on the leaves of fruit trees, vegetable patches and the province’s extensive rubber plantations.
But villagers carried on with life, washing the US military defoliant “Agent Orange” from the fruits and vegetables they ate and sometimes sold at the local market.
So Sareth, 60, a sinewy, silver-haired resident of Tameng village in Memot district, and locals in other villages explained last week how the chemical took several days to wilt leaves and destroy or damage the host trees.
But the fruit was “OK,” So Sareth said confidently, and a little defiantly, last week. “It was not affected. We ate it.”
http://www.agentorangerecord.com/images ... mbodia.pdf
Romantic Cambodia is dead and gone. It's with McKinley in the grave.
Hard to find data for still births, deformities/mutations, spina bifida and hydrocephalus rates, in Cambodia
[edit] though,
In 1964 its use was already being questioned
[edit] though,
Vietnam is high incidence, and highest levels of dioxin in breast milk. This is 45-50 years after the campaign.KAMPONG CHAM, Cambodia -- The proportion of babies born with disabilities in eastern Cambodia is more than 50 times higher than in other parts of the country, according to local doctors. Though the reason for the higher rate has not officially been confirmed, it is generally thought to result from the use of Agent Orange, a dioxin-containing defoliant, by U.S. forces during the Vietnam War. The scale of the damage wrought by use of the chemical in Cambodia is still unclear because there has been little research into the victims
In 1964 its use was already being questioned
...opposition to the use of the herbicide began as early as 1964 in the US, where the Federation of American Scientists argued that the US military was using the war as a pretext to experiment in biological and chemical warfare.
"Not my circus, not my monkeys" - KiR
There is a so-called photo journalist based in Siem Reap who claimed through his images that Agent Orange had been used in the west of Cambodia...
But then, the same guy used migrant workers heading back to Poipet for a photo set on human trafficking...
But then, the same guy used migrant workers heading back to Poipet for a photo set on human trafficking...
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