Agent Orange answers elusive

A lot of attention has been given to the “birthplace” of Agent Orange at Fort Detrick, Md. The recent news conference by Randal Craig espoused that only 16 pounds of Agent Orange was tested at Detrick, never mentioning the other spraying of Agents White (arsenic) and Agent Blue (picloram and tardon, both cancer agents). There were other colors in that rainbow, Agents Pink, Purple, Green and Silvex, all researched and developed at Fort Detrick.

By Lou Krieger in the Sun News

What has really flown under the radar with the litigation at Fort Detrick is the fact that similar tests were also conducted at Fort Ritchie, Fort Meade, Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Also disbursement into the waters around Poole’s Island and in the Dundee Creek by the Army Corps of Engineers dock at Gunpowder State Park in Southeastern Baltimore County. During the week of July 14, 1969, personnel from the Naval Applied Science Laboratory and personnel from the Limited War Laboratory sprayed the shorelines with Agent Orange, Super Orange (developed and used in Vietnam 1967-71) and Agent Orange Foam and Orange Plus Foam. I am awaiting Freedom of Information documents concerning the amount used with this disbursement.

For those of you who fished or crabbed in the Dundee Creek and surrounding areas like I did, you can remember when all the vegetation in the water disappeared and stayed that way for over 15 years? I can remember Joe Thomas, of Thomas Taxidermy in Fells Point, telling me that he spoke with the Army Corps of Engineers while fishing just before the spraying at their dock inside the Dundee. Joe told me that “they [the Corps] were going to take care of this heavy vegetation in the water around their dock and leading to the channel to go back to the Chesapeake Bay.” They cleaned it up, all right; it took out almost all the vegetation in the Dundee and surrounding areas.

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I had given Craig at Fort Detrick a three-week window of opportunity to be interviewed about the review of Agent Orange testing records discovered in the Fort Detrick archives. My initial request was for information pertaining to the spray testing at Fort Gordon, Ga., while I was there in 1967. The Freedom of Information documents I received from Fort Gordon are incomplete and they don’t even know the exact site where Agents Orange, White and Blue were tested, under the direction of scientists from Fort Detrick. Fort Detrick’s public affairs officer Lanessa Hill informed me that Craig had nothing to discuss about Fort Gordon. I was told just before Christmas that the records Craig’s group were searching and reviewing were only Fort Detrick-specific. A total contradiction to what I was told months earlier, especially in light of tests being conducted in 21 states in the U.S.

How deadly is that dioxin? All of these agents were developed as “tactical herbicides.” These sprays were growth accelerators that caused the foliage to grow so fast, the leaves dropped off, then it went on to kill the rest of the tree or shrubbery. Vietnam veterans have an average age of 59 1/2 years old, but we are dying at a rate of over 300 per day with the average age at death being just 64 1/2 years old. The current average male life expectancy in the U.S. is 75.55 years of age, and we aren’t making it to Social Security retirement. The one thing we all have in common is exposure to all of these defoliants, all 20 million gallons that were sprayed in and around the Republic of South Vietnam.

The sad part of all of this, there were many Vietnam-era veterans and civilians who never set foot in Vietnam who were exposed unknowingly, and died without any compensation from the government. I truly believe that had it not been for the invention of the “information speedway,” the Internet, we would not have lived long enough to see all of this “exposed” as it should be. Time Magazine was right in naming Agent Orange one of the Top 5 “worst” discoveries of the 20th century. It’s time our government stood up to the plate and admits how bad this spray really was.

The writer lives in Myrtle Beach.

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