[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Agent Orange: A Chapter from History That Just Won't End

[Bill Totten]

The Boneyard

by Ben Quick

Orion magazine (March / April 2008)


THE FIRST THINGS I SEE are the tails of the planes. They jut like
hundreds of dorsal fins rising from prehistoric fish that have been
lined up by a butcher on a massive table of thin brown grass. It is a
surreal sight, and I allow my eyes to settle into the rhythm of motion -
not quite focused, not quite gone - watching the rows of sharp metal
ridges whir past at fifty miles per hour.

As I crest a small rise, the bodies of the craft come into full view:
rows and rows of warplanes, all shapes and sizes, stretching on forever,
it seems. I force myself back to the task at hand, navigating the
approach to the Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center (AMARC) on
the southeast side of Tucson, Arizona. I turn right at the traffic light
on Kolb Road into a small parking lot and find a space.

Ten minutes later, I'm riding shotgun in a black van with government
plates. My driver, head of public relations at AMARC, is Terry.
Middle-aged, handsome, and soft in her talk and manners, Terry asks me
what I want to see. I hesitate - not because I don't know, but because
I'm not sure how to tell her that I've come to bear witness to American
folly, to rest my eyes on the flying machines that flattened the forests
of Southeast Asia, poisoned its people, and changed my life.

"The C-123s", I say.

She looks at me quizzically, pushes her index finger to her lower lip.
I'm nervous to begin with, having never been on an air base, having very
little in the way of credentials, and having tried, however awkwardly,
to obscure the true reason for my visit. I'd told her I was doing a
piece on Vietnam-era warplanes for graduate school when we talked on the
phone.

I mutter these words - My father is a veteran - and I'm suddenly taken
by the irrational fear that I may have given the impression of an
apologist looking to take some photos for a nostalgic slide show. My
fear is compounded by the fact that today is September 11, the
anniversary of the day some folks, especially those in the military,
have come to view as off-limits for dissent. That I find myself
moderately attracted to Terry only complicates matters. I'd expected a
formal woman in military garb, spit-shined boots, and the works, but
AMARC employees are civilian contractors. And the loose-fitting
sundress, designer shades, and casual tone of the woman beside me have
caught me off guard. I'm entirely unsure of myself and my purpose.

"The C-123s? I'm not sure if we have any of them. They might have one in
the museum."

"Well I saw one in this book". I reach down between my legs, flip open
my bag, and produce the picture book I'd found at the public library.
Glossy and oversized, The Desert Boneyard (1995) by Philip Chinnery is
filled with aerial photos of AMARC, snatches of aviation history, and
nostalgic recollections of past commanders and famous aircraft. An
honest appraisal of the Air Force arsenal and its capacity for
destruction it is not, but like many seemingly frivolous research tools,
it has served a vital purpose. It has shown me that AMARC - known
affectionately as The Boneyard - had, at one point in time, housed the
airplanes I came here to find.

"Oh, you got you a book. Let's see ..." Resting the book on the cup
holders in the space between the seats, I turn to page seventy-five. I
can feel beads of sweat on my forehead.

"Oh. Those. Oh sure, we have two of them on the west side, but the rest
are fenced off. You can't get to 'em. Nobody goes in there."

"Why?"

"Well, the toxin".


JANUARY 20 1961: Eight inches of snow fall on Washington DC, initiating
one of the worst traffic jams ever in the nation's capital as John F
Kennedy takes his inaugural vows. Up to this point, American involvement
in the turmoil of Southeast Asia has been secondary, mainly involving
the grudging flow of money and arms to the fragile Diem regime in South
Vietnam. But conservatives in the capital are calling for more than a
half-hearted attempt to fill the vacuum left by France's withdrawal from
the region. And the new American president is young and Irish-Catholic,
a suspect combination in midcentury American politics. He is worried
that Republicans will paint him pink if he doesn't hold the South from
Communist guerrillas. So he sets out to do so, and to do it with gusto,
expanding US military operations in a manner later described by Noam
Chomsky as a move "from terror to aggression".

The word counterinsurgency begins to appear more and more frequently in
the speeches of American politicians. A long and awkward utterance, it
is a word that depends on the existence of the root word insurgency,
defined by Webster's as "a condition of revolt against a government that
is less than an organized revolution and that is not recognized as
belligerency". In the case of Vietnam, the people charged with
perpetuating the state of revolt - the insurgents - are a loose but
growing number of Communist soldiers recently given the tacit approval
of the Hanoi government in North Vietnam. They have begun conducting
night raids on military posts and villages in the South under the name
National Liberation Front and have become known condescendingly to Diem
supporters as the Viet Cong.

In Vietnam, countering these insurgents means denying the Viet Cong and
their allies in the countryside and hills the apparatus of survival:
food and forest. Before long, the primary method of denial becomes the
aerial application of a variety of defoliants. In 1961, accepting a
joint recommendation from the State and Defense departments, President
Kennedy signs a resolution accelerating the program. Spraying will
intensify in three distinct plant communities: the dense broadleaf
vegetation that blankets the Vietnam outback and turns roads and supply
routes into ambush zones, the mangroves that line swamps and provide
habitat for the catfish and shrimp that are staples of the Vietnamese
diet, and the fields of foodstuffs - rice, manioc, and sweet potatoes.

Before 1961 is up, Kennedy sends scientist James Brown to the newly
established United States/Vietnamese Combat Development and Test Center
(CDTC) in Saigon to explore the effectiveness of a variety of herbicides
for use as counterinsurgency tools. The results of Brown's work are a
cluster of compounds that come to be known as the "rainbow agents" for
the colors of the identification bands that encircle barrels of the
herbicides. Agents White, Purple, and Blue will all see use in the
jungles of Southeast Asia, but the most intensively employed by far will
be Agent Orange, a fifty-fifty mix of the n-butyl esters
2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic
acid (2,4,5-T).

The origins of Agent Orange lie in an obscure laboratory at the
University of Chicago where, during World War II, the chairman of the
school's biology department, E J Kraus, discovered that direct doses of
2,4-D can kill certain broadleaf vegetation by causing the plants to
experience sudden, uncontrolled growth not unlike that of cancer cells
in the human body. Kraus, thinking his findings might be of use to the
Army, informed the War Department, which initiated testing of its own
but found no use for the stew of hormones prior to the end of the war.
But experiments with 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T continued through the 1950s.

Late in 1961, Brown and the technicians at the CDTC decide the time is
right, the testing complete, the dispersal methods sound. On January 13
1962, three Air Force C-123s - twin-propellered short-range assault
transport planes - lift off from Tan Son Nhut airfield in South Vietnam,
each loaded down with more than a thousand gallons of Agent Orange. The
planes fly low over the canals and deltas of the Ca Mau Peninsula - the
claw-shaped tip of the nation - occasionally taking fire from the swaths
of jungle below. When they finally reach the prescribed site, the
chemical cargo is sprayed continuously from three groups of
high-pressure nozzles jutting from internal dispensers, the entire load
dropped in minutes. A mist can be seen settling over mangroves as the
planes turn back toward Saigon. Operation Ranch Hand is underway.

Fifteen thousand gallons of herbicide will be sprayed over the forests
and fields of Vietnam that first year. By 1966, the annual application
will have increased to 2.28 million gallons. In retrospect, the
ecological and human consequences of the spraying program will seem
catastrophic. But in 1962, in the thick of an increasingly desperate
conflict with a silent enemy hiding in the bush, the extermination of
mangroves and rice crops, the destruction of hundreds of thousands of
acres of forest canopy, and the desertification of land adjacent to
supply routes are embraced as steps toward creating the conditions for
winning the war, conditions that nevertheless seem to be slipping
farther and farther away from American military strategists in
Washington and Saigon.

The kerosene stench of chemical rain that falls on American troops as
they slink through the hinterlands in search of Viet Cong is seen as a
bearable nuisance. The lethality of the fog that settles on the farms of
South Vietnamese peasants and the convoys of American soldiers, like so
many war costs, will remain hidden.


MY FATHER RETURNED to the Midwest after his tour in the jungles of
Vietnam accompanied by a dehumanizing terror. But along with the images
and the guilt was something more tangible, a rash that covered his back,
raised hivelike splotches that didn't go away for five years - until I
was nearly three. The name for this rash is chloracne; its cause,
prolonged exposure to herbicides.

I entered this world on a muggy July evening in 1974, the sun beginning
to sink down into the hardwoods that separate the town of Morrison,
Illinois, from miles upon miles of cornfields - fields that would have
been at least six feet tall by then, ripening with line upon line of fat
yellow ears sheathed in green. The delivery went without complication.
There was my mother's low moaning, the usual frenzy of female nurses,
and the old doctor reaching his latexed hands to cradle my small wet
head as it emerged from the birth canal. There was much crying and
celebration, the ceremonial cutting of the cord by the father, the
grandparents waiting anxiously in the hallway, aunts and uncles,
friends. But there was something else as well, something curious:
although in every other way I fit the normal profile of a baby boy, my
left hand was almost round, and at first glance, fingerless. Looking
closer, one could see that there were indeed fingers in the flat bell of
flesh and bone, but no space between them, and the bones were either
misshapen or missing altogether. Instead of clutching at nipples and
beards, it flew from side to side like the club on the tail of a
prehistoric beast. My grandmother was horrified.

Despite my evident uniqueness, I ran through the first half of my
childhood like any other midwestern boy, playing soccer and baseball,
fishing, running around the neighborhood with other children in packs. I
played war games in the local woods, snuck off to the candy store with
my younger brother, dug up earthworms in the big garden between rows of
tomatoes and hot peppers, watching with delight as aphids and sow bugs
crawled over my hands. Although I endured a number of surgeries in a
prolonged attempt to separate fingers, and although I was forced to wear
a series of uncomfortable bracelike contraptions to bed - sterile
plaster meant to force the bones to bend into a more functional
formation - these were happy times for me. Too young to feel
self-conscious, stubborn and creative enough to circumnavigate any
limitations, I didn't really stop to think that I was different from
other children. I climbed trees, played catcher in Little League, kept
goal for my soccer team, won sprints in swim meets.

Still, I have to believe an awareness was growing. There must have been
innocuous comments from neighborhood boys, partially hidden
conversations, questions. And parents, even kind and well-meaning
parents, can fumble with answers.

I must have been close to ten years old the day my mother and I ambled
through the automatic door of Eagle's Supermarket and across the chipped
green and white checkers of tile. We came for just a few items, the only
memorable one being the ice cream. We were gliding across that tile,
headed straight for the open freezers of the dairy section, me in my
shorts and t-shirt, my mother in her gardening clothes. We were moving
fast, were so close to the freezers that I could almost feel the chill,
could almost see the dense coating of hoarfrost on the inner chambers,
when she ran her eyes from my face to my shorts and asked with
impatience: "Why do you keep your hand in your pocket? Don't you think
people know?" Hiding my flaw was beginning to become second nature, an
act of instinct rather than will.


TERRY'S BEEN AT THE BONEYARD for eighteen years. She shoots down the
gravel road like a person who's done it a thousand times before,
pointing out an array of aircraft, telling me stories as we bounce
through the past. Here sit the Grumman Tomcats. There, in the tall
grass, the Rockwell B-1Bs. And over there, on the near side of the wash,
the Lockheed Hercules, the Huey transporters, the Cobra gunships. This
F-14 bombed one of Saddam's bunkers in the second Gulf War. That 119 was
Westmoreland's ride. Airplanes, helicopters, and missile casings, all in
different shapes, sizes, ages, and states of dismemberment, are lined up
like trinkets in a jewelry booth at a country fair - the earrings in
this quadrant, the bracelets in that, the bolos over here, the brass
buckles over there. Three thousand acres' worth.

Some are stripped for parts. As evidence I see the glint of naked metal
on exposed engines and radiators and, in big black drums beside hoodless
frames, the jumbled masses of fuel pumps and belts. Some will be called
back to service with the Air Force or Navy, maintenanced and flown away
to bases in Utah and Nevada. Others, especially the historic planes, are
destined for museums. And still others will end up in the hands of
foreign armies, sold to the highest - and often most unsavory - bidder
or shipped off, at discount rates, to allies in Tel Aviv or Seoul.

Through this broad yard of history we roll, the faded marks of the
military all around us. Terry gradually slows down and comes to a stop.
On one side is a row of unarmed nuclear warheads; on the other, the
noses of two green and tan cargo planes.

"Here we are".

Stepping down from the van, I tear my disposable camera from its foil
package, unpack my tape recorder, and walk toward the aircraft.

"So these were not part of Ranch Hand?"

"No. I think these guys were just transporters."

"Just transporters".

They look like smiling whales, these two transporters. Smiling whales
with propellered wings. Like all the planes in The Boneyard, the
windows, air ducts, and doors of the 123s are covered in thick white
latex. Spraylat, it is called, and it keeps the interiors of the planes
cool. Without the Spraylat, temperatures in the cargo holds and cockpits
can rise to two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, baking everything inside.
The white coating makes the planes look like ghost ships, mummies in an
aviation graveyard. But I came to see the other planes, the ones that
devastated a vast and peopled landscape, the ones that maimed me before
I was born.


OPERATION RANCH HAND dissolved in 1970 under intense pressure fueled by
increasing awareness of the dangers of Agent Orange. By then,
one-seventh of Vietnam's total land area had been sprayed with
herbicides, one-fifth of its forest flattened. Studies would eventually
show that the spray missions flown by the men of Ranch Hand had little
or no effect on the path of the war, that the millions of gallons of
herbicide dropped on nipa palm and mangrove, on tropical rainforest, on
trails and swamps and roads, on military barracks and rice paddies,
saved few American lives. Studies would also show that the substance
held in the striped barrels was more dangerous than its handlers had
realized, and that American military leaders had known this for a long time.

Peter Schuck, author of Agent Orange on Trial (2006), notes that, "as
early as 1952, Army officials had been informed by Monsanto Chemical
Company, later a major manufacturer of Agent Orange, that 2,4,5-T was
contaminated by a toxic substance". The substance he refers to is
dioxin, a chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has
described as "one of the most perplexing and potentially dangerous
chemicals ever to pollute the environment". Lab tests in the 1940s had
shown that even the tiniest amounts of dioxin, concentrations as small
as four parts per trillion - an amount equivalent to one drop in four
million gallons of water - induced cancer in rats. In slightly larger
doses, the substance brought on virulent symptoms leading to quick
death. When barrels of Agent Orange were shown to contain dioxin
concentrations as high as 140 parts per million, questions about the
effects of human exposure began to swell.

By the 1970s, for Vietnamese living and working in spray zones, the
answers to these questions had already started to become clear and
painful: babies born with massive birth defects, some with skeletons
that bended and twisted as they grew, some with organs on the wrong side
of skulls and ribs, some with conditions so bad they survived only days.
Even though American servicemen came into contact with the toxin over
the course of months rather than years, soldiers - particularly those
serving at the apex of Ranch Hand, men dropping on knees to fill
canteens with odd-looking water pooled in bomb craters, men walking with
handheld weed sprayers around the flanks of base camps, men sleeping on
naked ground - still ran the risk of lethal exposure. The risk was so
real, in fact, that as Yale biologist Arthur Galston put it, all
soldiers "who worked with Agent Orange or saw duty in the heavily
defoliated zones of Vietnam have a legitimate basis for asking the
government to look into the state of their health".

Concern about long-term effects on the people and ecology of Vietnam and
the health of American GIs prompted groups of critical American
scientists to publicly denounce the use of Agent Orange and other
herbicides as early as the mid-1960s. In 1966 and 1967, a coalition led
by the well-respected American Association for the Advancement of
Science sent petitions to the Johnson White House calling for an end to
all chemical and biological warfare. At the same time, international
anxiety was growing. In 1969, after three years of failed attempts, the
United Nations succeeded in passing - despite sustained and often
menacing opposition from the US - a resolution declaring Operation Ranch
Hand a violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention Protocol limiting the use
of chemical weapons. Still, the spraying continued.

Finally, evidence showed up that was too damning to be stonewalled or
intimidated away. In late 1969, Matthew Meselson, a broad-shouldered
Harvard scientist fond of bow ties and no friend of war boosters,
obtained a copy of a National Cancer Institute report confirming the
teratogenicity - the ability of a compound to cause embryonic or fetal
malformation - of 2,4,5-T in rats and mice. Meselson convinced Lee
DuBridge, his former colleague at the California Institute of Technology
and science advisor to the then newly elected Richard Nixon, to convene
meetings to discuss the implications of the findings. In spite of the
continued reluctance of many in the Pentagon to acknowledge the
seriousness of the data, administration officials could read the
changing tea leaves of public tolerance, and on April 15 1970,
application of Agent Orange and most other defoliants was suspended
indefinitely.

Years later, a sad and fitting epitaph for the Agent Orange saga would
come from James Clary, an Air Force scientist and author of the official
history of Operation Ranch Hand, in a statement to Senator Tom Daschle:
"When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s we were well aware
of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the
herbicide. We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher
dioxin concentration than the civilian version, due to the lower cost
and the speed of manufacture. However, because the material was to be
used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned."


BY THE TIME I reached adolescence, there was no longer any doubt as to
whether I was like other young men. I was different, less than, not
quite whole. Instead of attempting to come to terms with what I have now
come to realize is a minor glitch in DNA, instead of facing up to my own
uniqueness, the shape of my particular handprint, I tried hard to deny
it, to prove to myself that I was in no way distinct from the two
hundred boys and girls I entered Dixon High School with in 1988. On the
surface, I succeeded. I joined sports teams and - I'm sure this was a
conscious act of rebellion - put myself in positions that required the
use of both hands in order to succeed. I wrestled and won matches as a
freshman, earned four varsity letters as a soccer goalkeeper, brought
home trophies and plaques. What's more, I had awkward sex with teenage
girls, drank beer and smoked pot, grew my hair long, hung out with the
right crowd, took a cheerleader to the prom.

Inside, I was a wreck. I recall the summer between my junior and senior
year and a girl named Krista, younger than I, brown hair, green eyes,
slender, carrying always the smell of Elizabeth Taylor Passion. Krista
was the first girl I spent more than one or two nights with, and I fell
for her hard. Along with my friend Josh and his girlfriend Billy, we
spent the better part of the summer together. It was a hot summer, hot
in the manner that all midwestern summers are, so thick with vapor that
even the loosest clothing sticks to skin, and sunglasses slide down
noses. That whole summer, when I was in the company of Krista - which
was most of the time - I wore long sleeves. I would rush into my bedroom
to change clothes each time she came to my house. There was a particular
red cotton shirt a friend had loaned to me that I must have worn three
times a week. I wore it in the water when we swam in the moonlight at
the abandoned rock quarry; I wore it during sex on the gravelly shore; I
wore it when to do so must have been agonizing. I thought the sleeves
would hide my hand.

And the long-sleeved t-shirt was not the only mechanism employed for
hiding the truth of who I was. I took to wearing thick goalkeeper's
gloves that kept the shape of their fingers against gravity when I shook
hands with players from opposing teams after soccer games (in
retrospect, I wonder if the gloves weren't part of the appeal of the
position). I would bury both hands deep in the pockets of my letterman's
jacket as I flirted with girls from other schools at track meets or
wrestling matches. I became skilled at striking a variety of postures to
keep my dreaded deformity out of sight, turning this way or that,
sitting down just so. I learned to live in a state of contortion.

It would be comforting to look back and to sense some kind of turning
point, some theatrical beginning of a healing process, a link between
the discord of those years and the relative stillness of the present.
The truth is this: like most authentic change, most real letting go,
mine has happened gradually, and beneath the surface of things. A decade
and a half of life - of marriage and divorce, of fatherhood and graduate
school, of love affairs and rafting swift rivers, of university teaching
and Buddhist meditation - have swept away much of the hidden shyness and
dread. But still, at the age of thirty-three, I'm finding that old
habits die hard. If I've lost myself momentarily while driving, reading
a book, or engaging in some other task that requires a chunk of my
brain, I sometimes find that, without intending to, I have tucked my
left hand gently behind my right elbow. Lying in bed at night before
sleep takes hold, I'll notice my left hand resting underneath the
ruffles of the blanket while my right hand sits bare and comfortable on
top. Or I'll think about a class I've taught on a particular morning,
coming to a sudden realization that all the gesturing and hand-waving
was done with one arm. I will pause for a moment and make a mental note.
Sometimes, I will curse.


TERRY PUMPS THE BREAKS to keep from skidding, drags the gearshift into
park, and points out the driver's-side window. From behind a chain-link
fence, I stare at a fleet of seventeen C-123s beached on the desert
playa. A two-foot square of aluminum, white with red block letters,
clasped to the fence at shoulder height, reads AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL
ONLY, meaning Air Force specialists wearing hazmat suits. I must make do
with the view from the fence line, which is fine with me, since the
nearest contaminated aircraft are less than fifty feet away.

I climb out of the van and gawk. Forty years before, these olive planes,
arranged before me now like neglected toys on the top shelf in a child's
bedroom, unloaded over ten million gallons of dioxin-laden herbicide on
a countryside halfway across the world, the same countryside my father
tromped through with a gun at his side for one full year at the peak of
the spraying. And now, on the edge of the desert metropolis, beneath
wisps of cloud shifting and breaking in the morning sky, in the
checkered shadow of the chain-link fence, as much as I would like to
deny it, I find myself looking for catharsis - a burst of emotion that
will finally and emphatically wash it all away.

I know how lucky I am - that things could be much worse. I've seen the
pictures of the Vietnamese tending the earth after the fire. The parents
who cut and burned the trunks of leafless trees to keep their children
warm in winter. The beautiful young girls with jet black hair and loose
blouses trimming grass for baskets. The peasants planting saplings in
barren ground.

And I've seen the photos of jars filled with the stillborn at the Tu Du
hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Babies born with two faces and three ears.
Dead babies with limbs like ropes, long, slender, twisted like pale
pretzels in formaldehyde. Siamese twins with melting heads, gathered in
a lovers' tangle, the lips of one pressed to the neck of the other in
the softest kiss. Shelves full of pickle jars holding the rawest fruit.

And the living, the children of the damned. Children with eyes like
marbles, huge and rolling and blank. Children with skin like birch bark,
skin that peels and flakes in small squares, covering their bodies in
checkerboards of dying flesh, pushing up from scalps like duff on a
forest floor. Children with alien heads, their skulls ten times the size
of their jaws. I've seen the feet turned in on themselves, the blackened
arms, the hands like clamps.

I look down at my hand in its present state, nearly three decades after
the last surgery, after I finally said no more - no more casts, no more
stitches, no more IV needles, no more Darth Vader masks spewing
anesthesia into my lungs. I look down at the rumpled flesh, the grafts
sewn between the spaces opened up to give me fingers, grafts of crotch
skin, grafts that grow hair, and the lines of scars from the stitching,
and the two tiny inner digits, and the middle knuckle that bears no
crop, and the pinky that juts straight out, and the short, thick thumb,
and I am glad that at six years of age I finally said no. They wanted to
do more surgeries, wanted to cut a little more here, tweak the bone
structure a little more there. And I said no.

A gust of wind rakes an old Pepsi can along the base of the fence. It
rattles to a stop on the crown of an anthill, teeters for a moment, and
rolls to my feet like an empty shell. Out here on the scabland of memory
where scorpions scurry under B-52s, jackrabbits bound over chopper
blades in tufts of never-green grass, and the sun burns through
everything, there are no epiphanies. There are only dirt and space,
dreams and loneliness, and - I realize with a start - confrontations
with the past that will never quite fill the gaps. Taken with an
incredible urge to urinate, I snap one last photo and hop in the van,
trying hard not to look back.
_____

Ben Quick finishes his MFA in creative writing at the University of
Arizona this spring. He lives in Tucson.

The Orion Society, 187 Main Street, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2862/

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