Earlier in the week I went to see Ivo Van Hove’s production of Arthur Miller’s ‘A View From The Bridge’. There is a scene in it where it rains blood. Not just a little shower, but an absolute torrent of blood. In one of those sideways associations to which my mind is prone, I was reminded of the Vietnam war, Agent Orange and Lazy Dog Slivers.
The Vietnam war began three years before I was born and I was 26 when it ended. It is to the eternal credit of the Wilson Government that they kept Britain out of it, otherwise I might have ended up in the Mekong Delta. But it was there in the background throughout my formative years. In common memory we now tend to think of the Vietnam War as a conflict between the USA and the North Vietnamese, but Vietnam was one of those wars which sucked combatants into itself. Starting as a colonial affair between the French and the Indo-chinese, it soon involved the Chinese, Russians, Cubans, North Koreans and North Vietnamese on one side and the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and South Vietnam forces on the other.
From the start the Americans approached it with breathtaking arrogance. As Phil Ochs memorably put it, they considered themselves to be the biggest and toughest kids on the block. As a child I had been brought up with the idea of war as something heroic. My father had been a commando; my uncle had won the distinguished flying cross; my neighbour, Sonny Conkey, told me tales about his exploits in the Korean War. It all fitted in to the story that we in the West were the good guys and it was our moral duty to set the rest of the world straight. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I began to realise that the truth was something different. It was the actions of America in Vietnam which did that and the real turning point for me was reading an article, in some now forgotten journal, about Lazy Dog slivers.
The Lazy Dog was a weapon of mass destruction developed by the USA. It consisted of thousands of slivers of razor-sharp steel packed into a bomb case, designed to spray enemy troops with the deadly slivers following an air burst which had three times the force of standard air burst bombs. They developed an enormous amount of kinetic energy as they fell, their speeds often exceeding 500 mph before impact. As a result, following the explosion, everything in the path of the slivers was cut into tiny pieces.
The official justification for their use was the difficulty of fighting an enemy used to operating in dense jungle. The Lazy Dogs were effective, cheap and easy to to scatter over large areas. They tore through the branches and ‘took out’ the Vietcong. Putting to one side the question of the morality of war, you can see the attraction if you are using the weapons against another army. However the Americans saw the whole North Vietnamese people as the enemy army. They started to use the Lazy Dogs indiscriminately. Rather than using them in the jungle, they began to drop them on to towns and villages in the most densely populated areas of Vietnam. And they dropped them constantly. It is estimated that over a thirteen month period over one hundred million slivers of razor steel fell on the civilian population. It is impossible to determine how many people were diced into little pieces, but eyewitness reports talk of an absolute torrent of blood.
The atrocities in Vietnam are now well documented and have had a lasting impact. The American government went to great lengths to suppress details of what was going on in Vietnam from becoming public knowledge, but it was so sickening that journalists couldn’t be reigned in and gradually information began to emerge. In time it, too, became a torrent. Initially only available in the left wing and underground press the revulsion became mainstream, the american public turned against the war and inquiries started to be held. It peaked in the U.S. Senate hearings in 1971 which heard testimony from soldiers that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, cut off limbs, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of Vietnam. (And let’s not forget it wasn’t one-sided: from as early as 1963, Viet Cong units were using disembowelment and other methods of mutilation for psychological warfare.) Apocalypse Now was not a work of fiction.
There can’t be too many people who are unfamiliar with the line in that film about the smell of napalm in the morning. Napalm is a mixture of plastic polystyrene, hydrocarbon benzene, and gasoline. This mixture creates a jelly-like substance that, when ignited, sticks to practically anything and burns for up to ten minutes. One of the main anti-personnel features of napalm is that it sticks to human skin, with no practical method for removal of the burning substance. The effects of napalm on the human body are unbearably painful and almost always cause death among its victims. Like the Lazy Dogs, it was used indiscriminately against the civilian population. Throughout the duration of the war, eight million tons of napalm were dropped over Vietnam.
But the most insidious weapon used in Vietnam were the various ‘Rainbow Agents’. Their effects are still with us. The ‘Rainbow Agents’ were chemical weapons, so called from the coloured bands around the 55-gallon drums in which they were stored. There were Agents White, Purple, Pink, Green and Blue and above all, Agent Orange. Agent Orange contained dioxin which is highly toxic even in minute doses.
The various Agents were defoliants. The British had used them in Malaya to destroy jungle cover, and it was America’s intention to do the same thing in Vietnam. Between 1962 and 1971, the United States military sprayed nearly 20,000,000 gallons of the Agents in Vietnam, eastern Laos, and parts of Cambodia as part of their aerial defoliation program. Fitted with specially developed spray tanks with a capacity of 1000 gallons of herbicide, the planes typically sprayed a 8.5 mile swath of land in about 4½ minutes. The last official spray run by the US Air Force took place on January 7, 1971. By 1971, 12% of the total area of Vietnam had been sprayed with defoliating chemicals, at an average concentration of 13 times the recommended dosage.
The problem with Agent Orange was that the dioxin did not just attack plants, it poisoned humans as well. As details about its use began to leak out, the USA was accused of using chemical weapons against international law. Their response was that a weapon, by definition, is any device used to injure, defeat, or destroy living beings, structures, or systems, and Agent Orange did not qualify under that definition. Agent Orange was not a chemical or a biological weapon as it was considered a herbicide and was used in an effort to destroy plant crops to deprive the enemy of cover and not meant to target human beings. There was no need for alarm, Washington and chemical company executives insisted at the time. Agent Orange did not harm humans, they said. As the 1960s wore on, those assurances increasingly rang hollow. Researchers found evidence of birth defects in lab animals. American scientists and others began to speak out against the spraying. The official line changed to one saying that the sun will break down dioxin, so on leaf and soil surfaces it will only last 1–3 years, depending on conditions. Eventually they had to concede that dioxin buried under the surface or in the sediment of rivers can have a half-life of more than 100 years and in human bodies the half-life can be as high as 20 years. The chemical companies that produced the Vietnam-era herbicides now say they were unaware how toxic the dioxin contaminant was.
The Vietnamese breathed the vapours or were directly exposed to the liquid itself, or simply went about eating from a contaminated food chain during the years of the spraying. The government of Vietnam says that 4 million of its citizens were exposed to Agent Orange, and as many as 3 million have suffered illnesses because of it. These figures include the children of people who were exposed. Studies have shown that these people have increased rates of cancer and nerve, digestive, skin and respiratory disorders. Their children have physical defects and malformations.
(Just to return to Christopher Hitchens for a moment, there is a horrifying piece by him, filed from Vietnam, in which he describes the lasting effects of Agent Orange. Thirty five years on from the end of the war and the dioxin was still producing mutated children: “It wasn’t sufficient that this unsuccessful remnant had no real brain and was a thing of stumps and sutures. Extra torments had been thrown in. The little creature was not lying torpid and still. It was jerking and writhing in blinded, crippled, permanent epilepsy, tethered by one stump to the bedpost and given no release from endless, pointless, twitching misery. What nature indulges in such sport? What creator designs it?” )
Similarly the soldiers who fought were told not to worry, and were persuaded the chemical was harmless. After returning home, Vietnam veterans in both America and Australia began to suspect their ill health or the instances of their wives having miscarriages or children born with birth defects might be related to Agent Orange. Inevitably the response they received was denial: “We are sympathetic with people who believe they have been injured and understand their concern to find the cause, but reliable scientific evidence indicates that Agent Orange is not the cause of serious long-term health effects.”
The Australian Government at first denied that Australian troops had been exposed to chemical defoliants. The Vietnam Veterans Association of Australia lobbied hard on behalf of their members but the material on which they relied to press their case was lacking in the kind of rigour necessary to prove a case. So, in 1982 the VVAA published a list of symptoms by which a veteran might recognise the effects of exposure to Agent Orange. As a result repatriation clinics reported a high incidence of veterans presenting with one or more of the identified symptoms not long after the list was published.
In 2004, a group of Vietnamese citizens filed a class-action lawsuit against more than 30 chemical companies. The suit, which sought billions of dollars worth of damages, claimed that Agent Orange and its poisonous effects left a legacy of health problems and that its use constituted a violation of international law. In March 2005, a federal judge in Brooklyn dismissed the suit. Another U.S. court rejected a final appeal in 2008.
The next time you hear any politician from the West take the moral high ground and justify ‘intervention’, or you read about ‘alleged’ war crimes perpetrated by Western countries, just let the concept of Lazy Dog slivers pass through your mind and contemplate the absolute torrent of blood.
Howff Tae Hip Hop 