U.S. planes sprayed more than 20 million gallons of herbicides.

In an effort to bend the tenacious and stubborn resistance of North Vietnamese soldiers, U.S. aircraft and helicopters, they sprayed more than 20 million liters of herbicides, including Agent Orange, which contained dioxin, on the country’s rainforests.

The conflict between the United States and the Viet Cong regime,backed by China and Russia, has devastated the Asian nation for nearly twenty years, resulting in millions of deaths, mostly among the civilian population.

Despite the fact that decades have passed since the end of the conflict, Vietnam continues to suffer the negative effects of that war. The herbicides used by the US military continue to pollute and poison Vietnamese ecosystems and the people who live there.

But why did the Americans use these poisons indiscriminately?

The U.S. military suffered heavy human casualties in the armed conflict within the Vietnamese jungle, where Viet Cong soldiers, in addition to learning more about the territory and its nature, created frequent ambushes on American soldiers who could not be massively supported by heavy artillery or air raids.

The U.S. military strategies, accustomed to handling field battles over open spaces using air cover and heavy artillery, were to try to lure the North Vietnamese army into the open field to exploit the overwhelming military superiority of their army.

But the Viet Cong proved to be as cunning and tenacious soldiers enough to induce the U.S. army to enter the jungle or wooded hills, especially near the Cambodian border, to get them out into the open. In this harsh and solitary environment, Americans paid a very high price in human lives and achieved poor military results.

The tactics of the North Vietnamese military was called “take the enemy for the belt” which consisted of frequent ambushes within the jungle or in densely wooded environments, where hand-to-hand combat prevented Americans from using the greatest firepower of their army.

Unable to bend the resistance of the enemy, the U.S. Army decided to systematically destroy, in a preventive way, the forests in which their soldiers were to advance, to avoid ambushes and to enjoy, at all times, the armed support from the sky and the earth.

For this operation they thought to spray, with defoliating agents, the vegetation in order to destroy it and, in some cases, the napalm to burn everything to the ground.

The use of the defoliating agent Orange has not only destroyed forests, but also a part of the country’s food crops, due to the presence in the compound of a dioxin-based contaminant that affected many Vietnamese and U.S. military.

An article from the University of Illinois and Iowa State University documents the environmental effects of agent Orange sprayed in Vietnam, also taking into account, not only the effects over time of the poison on the population, but also the persistent action that dioxin still has on the food chain.

But what is Agent Orange?

Olson and co-author Lois Wright Morton explained that Agent Orange was a combination of two herbicides, 2.4-D and 2,4,5-T,which, used individually in agriculture, had a useful life no longer than a few days or weeks in an environment exposed to sunlight.

However, during production, the mixing of the two components to create the new herbicide called Agent Orange, formed a toxic byproduct consisting of dioxin TCDD, the most toxic in the dioxy family of chemicals dioxins.

Once the dyoxin TCDD enters the environment it can remain alive for decades or even centuries. This is what happened in the Vietnamese territory bombarded by this substance.

What was the contamination mechanism?

Researchers examined an 870-page USA ID report, as well as a dozen other research reports on contaminated sites, to explain long-term dioxin behavior in all Vietnam campaigns affected by the event.

“The path of contamination it begins with the spraying of Agent Orange, the absorption by the leaves of trees and shrubs, the fall of the leaves on the surface of the soil (along with some direct contact of the poisonous compound with the soil), then the attachment of the dioxin TCDD to the organic substance of the soil with the clay particles of the soil.

From there, the TCDD dioxin moved with the surface runoff of the water, clinging to sediment particles and settling into wetlands, swamps, rivers, lakes and ponds.

The sediment contaminated with TCDD dioxin was – and still is – ingested by fish and shrimp,accumulating in their fatty tissue and food chain in many other fish that form the basis of the Vietnamese diet.

Although fishing is now banned at most contaminated sites, prohibitions by the authorities are difficult to enforce and, as a result, dioxin TCDD is still entering the human food supply more than 50 years after the end of the conflict.

President Nixon ordered the U.S. military to stop spraying Agent Orange in 1970 also due to the discovery that U.S. soldiers themselves became ill due to dioxin dispersed in the environment.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies.