Stuff You Should Know - How Agent Orange Worked

Episode Date: August 4, 2009

Agent Orange was a potent herbicide used by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War. Learn more about the origins, use and devastating side effects of Agent Orange in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I thought you were gonna say, I'm Radius and this is Alma. Let's try that again, Chuck. Okay.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Charles W. Bryan is here, and so am I. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Stuff You Should Know. I thought you were gonna say, I'm Radius and this is Alma. Wow. Okay, okay. So, Alma, how are you doing? Radius, I'm doing fine.

That's fantastic. Good. Chuck, sorry. What? I was just gonna say, you know, I'm just doing the wrist bone thing. Are you? Metacarpal?

Yeah. Okay, should we start over? I don't care. Okay. No, we're gonna leave it in because our producer, Jerry, loves this kind of stuff. And we're gonna go forward. Okay.

How about that? Yes. Chuck, you served in the Vietnam War, correct? That is correct. That is not correct. I was not even born yet. Are you sure? Jerk.

Yeah? When did Vietnam end officially? I think 75. Oh, well, sure, I was born then. I wasn't born then. Well, good for you. Well, Chuck, surely growing up in the 80s, you heard of Agent Orange.

Yes. Remember the skateboard company? Absolutely. Yeah, so that just really attracted me. I never had an Agent Orange skateboard. I was more of a Powell Perelta fan, Mike McGill specifically. Sure.

But I always thought Agent Orange was cool. It just had the coolest name. Yeah. And then I came to find out that it was actually an herbicide. And I thought, that's not that cool. Yeah, I used to get confused with the napalm. Yeah.

I knew there were different things, but napalm was orange, and so it kind of confused me. Have you ever made napalm at home? No, I haven't. Okay. Well, once I came to find out that Agent Orange was an herbicide,

I kind of lost interest in it. And then now here we are, what, 10, 12, 15 years later. Yes. And my interest is once again peaked, because Agent Orange was about the baddest mofo that the US Army deployed against the Vietnamese. Right.

Actually, Agent Purple may have been, but we'll get into that. Okay. Well, let's talk about it. Okay, Agent Orange. Let's give a little background on just how much Agent Orange was used. As we said, it was an herbicide.

Yes. And a very, very potent herbicide. Indeed. Fast acting. And stats. You want to do the stats, buddy? That's my deal. Okay.

It is a defoliant, and we used about 11 million gallons of, specifically of Agent Orange alone. 42 million liters. Yes. From January of 65 through April of 1970, and about 20 million gallons, which is, that is about, oh, I don't know,

somewhere in the neighborhood of 76 million liters. Very good. Thanks. Total herbicides all together from 62 to 71. Right. That's a lot. As a matter of fact, I think over the course of 6,000 missions, spraying missions,

because it was all aerial as far as I know. Right. About 10% of Vietnam was sprayed with Agent Orange alone. Yep. That is a lot of herbicide. Yeah. And that's a substantial portion of a country to be infected with a harmful, dangerous killer.

Yeah. Now, anybody who's sprayed like roundup or some other herbicide around the garden, you kind of almost have this natural inclination to keep it away from you as much as possible. Smartly. And when some gets on your fingers, you like run inside and wash your hands 50 times.

Right? Yeah. I can't use any of that stuff, because the animals and, you know. It's rough stuff. It can be, right? But it does kill the grass. Yeah.

As did Agent Orange, but not only did Agent Orange kill grass, it killed everything. Yeah. And what's ironic about it is that it's actually, it was, it's actually a growth regulator, meaning that it stimulates growth in plants. That shocked me.

Yeah. It was shocking. I thought it was a flat-out killer, but apparently what it does is it, if it's used too much, then they grow to the point where it dries out and dies. Yeah. It grows so fast that the water,

it depletes its water supply very quickly and that's that. Crazy. Never knew that. There's this guy, a botanist named Dr. Arthur W. Galston, and he actually created Agent Orange. And he did create it as a growth regulator to boost plant growth. And after the military got ahold of it,

he started to realize that his invention was being used in a really horrible way and actually campaigned against it. Yeah. I felt bad for that guy. That's his legacy, you know. Well, did you read that quote from him? I did.

And I agree with it. You want to read it? Yeah. Josh, the quote is, nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be turned either to constructive

or destructive ends. That's not the fault of science. Right. And I agree with that. And I'm sure Philip Oppenheimer would agree with that as well. Right. You know, I mean, he created nuclear fission.

Sure. I'm pretty sure he created nuclear fission. And it was used in a catastrophic manner to kill hundreds of thousands, millions, probably, of people. Right. He didn't create it for that and it was just, he created something and basically opened Pandora's box and there you go.

So I agree with Galston's assessment as well, but still, the fact remains, the US military got ahold of this and they sprayed it everywhere they could. Indeed. So Chuck, what's the problem with it? I mean, aside from the fact that, you know, if you're living in Vietnam in, you know,

between 1965 and 70 and they come over your village and spray that stuff, number one, it's probably going to stink, which it did. Yeah, had a bad smell. Number two, you're covered in herbicide. Right. Number three, all of your trees are suddenly leafless. What are some other problems that it poses?

Well, not only trees, buddy. Well, we should point out that the reason they did this was because of the thick jungle cover in Vietnam made it very difficult for snipers and air squadrons to see what was going on, not to mention the guys in the jungle. So they would use this herbicide to just wipe it out completely

and make it like a barren black landscape. So, you know, the enemy could be seen. Right. So not only did it kill the vegetation, but it also killed crops and it also destroys the root system and really completely, I mean, it gets into the soil. So nothing would grow there afterward either.

I mean, that would eventually, if you eradicate it, but sure. Well, and also without root systems, then your soil structure is messed up. Sure. And so apparently, you know, Vietnam's monsoons carried much of the topsoil away. Exactly, it washed it all away.

Right, which also then that the agent orange entered the water, right? Yeah. Polluted that. And then you have a big problem with cropland. So we've got the polluted water supply. Right. So even if you do have crops,

then you're just spraying more agent orange on when you irrigate it. Right. So it's kind of a vicious cycle, right? It is indeed. At the time though, yeah, you're getting rid of snipers, which were a huge problem in Vietnam. And also supposedly the US government secretly sprayed

the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia, which they were definitely not supposed to. Right, in Laos as well. Yeah, and that was a key supply route into Vietnam. So yeah, there was a reason. This wasn't just like, hey, we're over here and why don't we just get rid of all the vegetation? Right.

You know? And again, Chuck, I repose my question. Okay. Am I dodging it? What's the, actually no, you did answer it. But I think the problem is, is okay, so most of the stuff has grown back, right? We're talking like almost 40 years ago.

More, yeah, we're talking almost 40 years ago. Right. The trees have grown back, the vegetation's grown back. What's the problem? Why are we still talking about agent orange? Well, because it's been carried down through genetics, essentially, right, through families.

Well, what's that active ingredient that's so nefarious? Are you talking about the dioxin? I am indeed, my friend. Yeah, the dioxin is the trouble. Now, you may have heard of dioxins with that whole Tupperware thing, not Tupperware. I'm sorry, Tupperware. I don't know if you use it or not,

but some of these food storage containers, I think dioxin is a softener that's used in plastics to keep them from snapping, being very brittle and snapping. The problem is, is they can considerably leach out, and you're not supposed to have dioxins in them. Endocrine disruptors. We, everyone has a little bit of dioxin in our system.

Well, yeah, aren't they naturally occurring to some degree? Yeah, and beyond that, the fact that it's used in things like those kind of plastics, small amounts of dioxin are present in pretty much all of this. Plus, also, when you burn trash, I believe dioxin are created or released. It's usually a byproduct, I think,

of some other things. Copper smelting, which I know you do on the weekend, so you should probably go get checked. Yeah, I'm a big copper smelter. But yeah, but we can deal with some level of dioxin. The problem is, is Agent Orange that had such high concentrations of dioxins in them that there was some serious health effects.

Right, and the Department of Veterans Affairs actually claimed that it only had minute traces of dioxin initially, and for Agent Orange, it was TCDD, it was the specific dioxin. But that's just not true, because people in Vietnam, in some areas, have blood levels up to 10 times above normal for containing dioxin. Right, today. Yeah, yeah.

And originally, right after the Vietnam War, even during, I believe, some people had about 200 times the normal level. Right. So yeah, there was a lot of dioxin flying around, and these were all in areas where Agent Orange was being sprayed. Yeah, and we're talking cancer.

We're talking birth defects. Birth defects, miscarriages. You wanna know how it gets in there and screws things up so bad? School me. Okay, so basically, dioxins are capable of binding to, it's fat soluble, right? Exactly.

They're capable of binding to hormone receptor sites, right? Right. So, it can also very easily get into the nucleus of your cells. When that happens, my friend, your DNA can be tampered with, okay? So, let's say you remember that we were talking about the chicken or the egg,

and mutations take place in the zygote stage. Right. So, let's say a couple of parents of a child have dioxins in their cells, in the nucleus of their cells, and these cells are contributed to create the zygote. Well, if the dioxin has managed to mess with the DNA, it's going to send all sorts of funky instructions.

Yeah. And that's how you get things like grossly misshapen heads. Yeah, you sent me some emails of pictures of children, Vietnamese children, it's just awful to see that. Yeah, it's amazing. If you type in Agent Orange and go to search image results in Google, it's startling some of the things that happen.

One I saw was a picture of a five-year-old girl who didn't have eyes, it was just skin. I know. And kind of a depression, because she still had the ocular cavity in her skull, but it was just skin grown over it, and I was reading the caption next to it. They were saying they think what happened was

the hormones that were released that are supposed to instruct the cell to develop eyes, or to instruct the body to develop eyes. Fail to do so. Fail to do so because there was dioxin bound to these receptor sites that should have gotten that hormone and taken the information and created eyes. Awful.

So it gets in there pretty bad, and it can be passed down, and Vietnam has a real problem right now. I think they estimate as many as one million of the 84 million people who live in Vietnam have been poisoned by Agent Orange. Yeah, that's a lot. Yeah.

And you said earlier that it's the worst, and I brought up Agent Purple. They actually had a bunch of agents with the colors, and evidently they were named by the, not by the color of the chemical, but the color of the container that it came in. There was an orange stripe on the container. Sure.

So Agent Purple and Agent Pink, they used millions of gallons of this stuff too, and it's possibly even more deadly because Agent Purple has three times as much dioxin as Agent Orange. Yeah. You don't hear much about Agent Pink or Agent Purple. No, I think because Agent Orange was used in spades, so.

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where sweet, spicy, and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits. Wherever you wander, plan today at visitmississippi.org slash dining. Mississippi, wanderers welcome. You know it's odd. You said that cancer is a result of Agent Orange or dioxin poisoning, right?

Yeah, about 40% risk of increased risk. Well, cancer is uncontrolled cellular growth, right? That's it. What's surprising is that, you remember we were talking about Agent Orange being a growth regulator, and that it causes plants to grow rapidly. Interesting.

In humans, the exact opposite happens. In small doses, dioxins actually keep cancer cells in check. Right. From growing, but then in larger doses, it promotes this uncontrolled growth. So it has the exact opposite effect on humans as it does plants. Right, it's crazy.

How weird is that? It's very weird. And I know the WHO, the World Health Organization, it's officially classified as a known carcinogen, so. Yeah. There's no mistaking it. No, but there's still a debate. Well, there's not much of a debate anymore,

but there has been since the 80s. Well, since the 70s, really. Uh-huh. About whether or not Agent Orange caused all these problems. I know why. Why? Lawsuits.

Yup. Because no one wants to pay and be responsible for this. No, and certainly not the U.S. government, which has actually been hiding behind sovereign immunity. Yeah, that means the U.S. government cannot be sued. Yeah, it's as simple as that, nicely done. Yeah, basically there's this, it's a doctrine that's established as international law,

and it says, like Chuck said, you can't sue a government, right? So everybody went after the chemical companies instead. And I think it, but who's this, to mention some of these chemical companies that created Agent Orange? Dow, Monsanto, Hercules, Diamond Shamrock were four of the big ones.

Right, and they all say that they were contracted out by the government to do a job, so it's not our fault. Yeah, and the Supreme Court, I believe, upheld that. Or at least tossed out a lawsuit that challenged that. That these companies were working as government contractors and were ordered to produce Agent Orange for the government. So by default, they're protected by sovereign immunity, I'd say by proxy.

Basically, it seems like anytime there's been a big suit, it's kind of resulted in a big fat dead end. Yes, but we should say that those four companies I mentioned in addition to, I think, three others, yes, seven total, ended up paying out $240 million. Right, class action suit? Yeah, to 291,000 people. Right, and that was a settlement too, right?

Yeah, that was a settlement, sure. But there's still plenty of other people who have lawsuits pending or would like to sue, but it doesn't look like it's going to be happening. There was an attorney for a Vietnamese national who was trying to sue one of the chemical companies who said that the ruling that the government ordered, or that because the government ordered

these chemical companies to produce Agent Orange, that they were government contractors, and therefore the lawyer said that's pretty much the end of Agent Orange lawsuits. Right, did you ever see the fog of war? No. The documentary? Errol Morris, as you know, is one of my heroes,

as a filmmaker. Sure. You should check that out. It's an hour and a half, a long interview with Robert McNamara, and just a hardcore, intense interview about the Vietnam War. Really good. I would love to see that.

It's really awesome. Fog of War, I'll check it out. So Chuck, while these lawsuits are, some are being paid off, some aren't. There's still a problem of dioxin poisoning in Vietnam. How do you remediate this? Well, Josh, I have some numbers for you. I think I know what you were getting at here.

Just as an example, the town of Bentray has 140,000 people there, and the Red Cross estimates that 58,000 of them have suffered the effects of Agent Orange. That's like more than 40% of the population. Right, and as you said, a million total. Yeah. In the entire country.

Right, but how do you clean this up? I mean, this is, I think Christopher Hitchens mentioned that it's been called an ecocide. Who said that? Yeah, so I mean, what do you do about this? Well, you clean it up, Josh. OK, well, that's kind of an expensive proposition. There is ways that this can be cleaned up,

and we said a lot of the countryside has been naturally reforested, right? Right, are you talking about the wall of trees? The wall of trees seems pretty cool. Yeah, they planted essentially a barrier to protect people from this in the form of trees. Yeah. Which sounds, I don't know, how that works, actually.

It probably leaches it out of the soil eventually. Or the trees will hold the soil in place. Right, so it won't be washed away. And then perhaps the soil can act as a natural filter. We should also say that dioxins appear to have about a half-life of seven years. But once they hit the top soil, they can actually, they've been shown to stick around a lot longer.

I think part of the problem is there's a lot of people who have a lot of money that don't want to part with it. Right. Who are saying, you know what, this is just eventually going to work itself out. Right, well, they outlawed it, and Richard Nixon actually outlawed it when they found conclusive test results and lab rats.

Yeah. But the damage was done. Definitely, and it has been going on, and it may be going on without some sort of large-scale intervention. It doesn't look like that's going to be happening anytime soon. Should we talk about Victor? Sure.

Victor Yushchenko? Yes. He's actually a living case study in dioxin poisoning, isn't he? Yes, he's a Ukrainian politician, and many of you may know this. He was poisoned with dioxin, but survived. During the 2004 presidential election, which he won.

So not too long ago. And he thinks he was purposely poisoned. Sure. And they traced it back to a dinner he had, but no one, you know, no charges have been filed. No one's claimed responsibility. But you saw the before and after pictures. Yeah.

This dude was a mess. He had quite an effect on him, yeah. Big time. He was a good-looking man. He was. After the dioxin poisoning, he ain't pretty no more. No. His face was, and you should look this up on the internet

as well, and the Google images. Me? No, no, no. Our loyal fan base. Oh, yeah. It's startling. Pockmarked face, deeply pockmarked like, you know, moon crater type stuff.

Swollen, swollen up, big circles under his eyes. I mean, I think they said he had 6,000 times the normal level of dioxin. Is that right? Yeah. Which is the highest, second highest ever recorded in a human that lived. Yeah.

And he looks a little better now. He does. And he's still up and walking around, which is miraculous. It is. But yeah, you can't keep your shanko down. And should we talk about the veterans? Yeah, zoom wall. Well, then, yeah, we'll get to that in a second.

But in 1978, the VA set up a program to officially deal with this and conducted health exams on 315,000 veterans. And basically, the presumption is, if you were exposed to Agent Orange, then you got some trouble. And you have VA care. The VA, even before the lawsuits, any lawsuits were settled.

The VA was operating on the premise that, yeah, there was a huge link between Agent Orange exposure and all of these problems. So the VA actually has done a lot to help out veterans from Vietnam and actually Korea. Right. I didn't even know we were in Korea in the late 60s. Yeah.

And they actually, that was hand sprayed by people, but by Koreans. I got you. Actually, not hand sprayed, but the Koreans did the spraying. Right. And they actually, the VA is also covering the children of soldiers. Yeah.

Because a lot of times, like we said, it's passed on down and potentially even to another generation. Well, that's the problem in Vietnam. It's sticking around. So I mean, eventually it will be rinsed out. I guess you could put it genetically speaking, but that's a pretty sick way of dealing with the situation.

But that looks like the way it's being handled. Yeah. So you want to talk about ZoomWalt now? Sure, if you want to. I think so. He was a Navy admiral, Elmo ZoomWalt, Jr. And he commanded Naval forces in Vietnam. And he now has a destroyer class named after him.

Oh, really? The ZoomWalt class destroyer. Did not know that. On a positive note, he was credited with helping to end race and gender discrimination in the Navy. So that's a good thing. Sure.

But during the war, he was concerned about snipers in the Mekong Delta. He ordered Agent Orange to be sprayed there. He had a son, Elmo III, or ZoomWalt III, and he was commanding a boat that was in the Mekong Delta at the time. So essentially, what he did was ended up spraying his own son. I mean, not by his own hand, but he gave the order

to have it sprayed right where his son was. And he died of cancer. ZoomWalt III did. And his son, Elmo IV, has a severe learning disability. And ZoomWalt to this day says it haunts him to this day. And then later on, ZoomWalt advocated for compensation for victims. He tried to fight the good fight afterward.

So that's Agent Orange, really. In a nutshell. Yeah, if you want to learn more about it, you can type in those two words in the handy search bar of howstuffworks.com. It will bring up a really good article written by our former colleague now freelancer, Jacob Silverman, which I guess leads us to, I would say, I don't know,

listener mail time, maybe? I've got a couple for you here, Josh. Do they have anything to do with high fruit test corn, sir? No, they don't. This is from a service man serving in Rome, Italy. OK. And I like to read the ones from the service man. I know you do.

Because, I don't know. You're proud to be an American? I am indeed. I just wanted to write and thank you for the podcast. I'm serving in the Navy, currently stationed in Rome, Italy. Cuss job. I wasn't always in Rome. I did two and a half years on a ship in Japan before this.

Sadly, I don't have a glamorous job. My compatriots and I are postal clerks. You never think about these jobs that you have to do in the military. These kind of everyday mundane chores. I do. You do? Sure.

Won't get for you. You're better than me. We make sure the letters and care packages get from home in the states and make it to the guys in the field in Iraq. You wouldn't believe how much theft and rifling takes place when a parcel is sent to when it arrives at its destination. It's terrible.

It is terrible and distressing. There are not many of us here in Rome, no more than a dozen or so. And there's always more than enough work to do. I know this is kind of a long set up with no segue. But one of the PCs I work with is a master of useless knowledge and facts about everything and anything.

In short, I work with a real Cliff Clavin. Yes. From Cheers. Yes. He's a big. He's big. He's a mailman. He's funny.

And in true Cheers tradition, he can pound a beer or seven. Sounds like our kind of guy. Yeah. But thanks to you and your podcast, I can only keep up with them, but have been able to trump him. Yes. Which we're pretty proud of. Yeah.

And he is. He's very psyched about this. He says, you have no idea how good that feels. I listen to the podcast when I'm driving mail from the airport to the various NATO installations and back. Look forward to each and every one. Take your easy PS, I'm sorry, PC3 SW Langdon. And please give a shout out to the rest of the PCs at MCA Room.

So shout out. You've been shouted out. The PCs. Yeah. And I have another real quickie. This is a tongue twister. And I know this is long overdue. But this one is so hard and so simple at the same time

that I cannot even say it once. Irish wristwatch. Irish wristwatch. Irish wristwatch. That was OK. Jerry says no. OK, Jerry, the judge is real. All right, well, let me try again one more time.

Irish wristwatch. Wrist better, but still not perfect. But I couldn't even say it once. So it's not one of those three times. You just did say it once. Well, with about a five second lag. Oh, gotcha. So we want to thank Ryan for sending that in.

A truly twisted tongue twister. Irish wristwatch. Not bad. Thanks. But you've been drinking, so. It loosens the tongue, my friend. If you want to send us a tongue twister that has to do with the Irish or anybody else,

if you're stationed in Rome or anywhere else, or if you just want to say hi, you don't have to impress us. You can just say hi. And you can send an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more Howstuff Works?

Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? You're ready to travel in 2023. And since 1981, Gate One travel has been providing more of the world for less. Let Gate One handle the planning for you with affordable escorted tours in European River Cruises.

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