The Secret Toxic Legacies of Chemical Warfare: Agent Blue Use during the 2 nd Indochina and Vietnam Wars in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam (1961 to 1971)

Abstract

During the 2 nd Indochina War which started in 1959, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Air America, and the Air Force waged a secret and unconventional air war in Laos from Udorn Air Force base located in Thailand and across the Mekong River from Vientiane, Laos. Starting in 1961, four years before the official start of the American-Vietnam War, Agent Blue, the arsenic-based herbicide used to kill rice and other food crops, was used extensively in Laos, Vietnam and to a lesser extent in Cambodia. During the secret 2 nd Indochina War and the Vietnam Civil War the public knew little about the use of Agent Blue. After the official start of the American-Vietnam War in 1965, the United States media news reports, about chemical warfare were dominated by the story of Agent Orange and its devastating impacts. The public knew very little about the previous use of Agent Blue in both wars. The first known media pick up of the Agent Blue (arsenic based) and Agent Pink, Agent Green, and Agent Purple (all three contain 2, 4, 5-T and unknown amounts of dioxin TCDD ) was in May of 1964. Jim G. Lucas, a Scripps-Howard staff reporter submitted an article that was published as an editorial in Washington Post on May 26, 1964. The next news reference to this chemical weapon was a Letter to the Editor published in the New York Times titled “Agent Blue” in Vietnam by Arthur H. Westing in (1971). The use of herbicides, including Agent Blue in Laos during the 2 nd Indochina War, was kept a secret until 1982, when a draft of Buckingham’s study of Operation Ranch Hand was made public. Much about the U.S. war effort in Laos is still classified. In a 2014 issue of the VVA Veteran magazine, Loana Hoylman published an article on “Today’s Blue Arsenic in the Environment”. The first refereed journal article on this topic, “The Fate of Agent Blue, the Arsenic-Based Herbicide, Used in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War” was published in 2020 in the Open Journal of Soil Science by Kenneth R. Olson and Larry Cihacek. In 2021 the Asia Times (print) and VietnamVeteranNews (radio podcast) picked up the Agent Blue story. During the early 2020s, Olson published six additional refereed journal articles on Agent Blue, cacodylic acid, and arsenic. The primary objective is to determine why no major news organization in the United States, including the New York Times and Washington Post, have never investigated Agent Blue use during the 2 nd Indochina and Vietnam wars? Why did the use of Agent Blue story, used to destroy Laotian and South Vietnamese civilian food (rice) sources and production sites, received only very limited coverage by US print media news organizations during the last 64 years?