Nothing about latter-day Vietnam, however, is more memorable than a visit to a hospital in Saigon where I saw crippled, deformed people wandering the halls or confined to beds, sentenced for life by the effects of Agent Orange. Some could walk with crutches, canes and walkers, others were curled in weird positions, their faces vacant and twisted, their mouths curled in strange patterns. The most saddening were children and infants, born years after the devastation of the war, doomed to halting existences on the fringes of life, the victims of the chemicals passed on by their parents and in some cases their grandparents. Rows of bottles on display showed the deformed fetuses of those who had lived briefly in their mother’s wombs, their tiny heads distended, their limbs askew.
Can anyone believe, however, that the mad scientists who developed Agent Orange, and another defoliant that I heard about in Vietnam, Agent Blue, did not know the lethal effects of their handiwork? Or, if they told their bosses about it, then what were executives at Dow Chemical and Monsanto Chemical, the two leading manufacturers of the killer liquid, telling their clients in the Pentagon? Were they saying, well, maybe you wouldn’t want to drink the stuff, but actually it’s not all that bad?
You have to wonder, as you cringe at the sight of the victims of Agent Orange, about those who concocted this chemical defoliant and then ordered its use. It’s fairly obvious that commanders on the ground were assured it was OK, that it wouldn’t harm people, just plants and flowers and trees, but then you have to ask about the great scientific minds that researched and tested the stuff. Were these minds smart enough to make a crippling chemical but too dumb to imagine it would have an equally terrible impact on fauna as well as flora?
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