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C H A P T ER 4 “We Didn’t Have Any Information That It Was Safe” As to be expected, the communists exploited the use of herbicides for their propaganda purposes. But the people were told the truth about the herbicides by the RVN Air Force. The communist propaganda backfired and the VC lost face when the people found that the herbicide was harmless to them and to their animals. —Lt. Col. Stanley Fair1 Trail Dust would remain a minuscule program for a while longer. President Kennedy, whose main concern was enemy propaganda, continued to be wary about spraying these chemicals in wartime. The US military was confident, however, that Trail Dust had already dodged its propaganda bullet. The VC had tried to shock the world, and the world hadn’t seemed to take much notice. In fact, Trail Dust was about to get some very bad publicity. And the source wasn’t the Viet Cong, but an American newspaper. In February 1963, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an article condemning herbicide spraying, particularly chemical crop destruction, as a “dirty war” tactic , and Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield placed it in the Congressional Record. Congressman Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin asked Kennedy to renounce the use of chemical weapons, particularly herbicides, in Vietnam. Apparently, this was the first time anyone had asked the government to consider Trail Dust in a moral context. In March, Kennedy referred the congressman’s letter to the Defense Department. He asked for a response, along with another update on the spraying program. William Bundy, assistant secretary of state for the Far East and brother of McGeorge Bundy, who had signed the order creating Trail Dust (see Chapter 1), wrote back to Kastenmeier. Bundy maintained that herbicides shouldn’t be classified as chemical weapons since they weren’t specifically designed to harm people. He also insisted that Trail Dust was a Vietnamese program and that the United States was merely playing a supporting role.2 40 A few months later, the International Control Commission presented the South Vietnamese government with a letter from the Viet Cong, charging that noxious chemicals were being used to carry out “collective reprisals” against civilians. The government of Cambodia, which regularly imported food from Vietnam, had also accused the United States of poisoning Vietnam’s food supply. The State Department, which had strong doubts about Trail Dust, persuaded Kennedy to ask for a comprehensive review of the entire herbicide program, instead of a mere update.3 This review asked the following questions: 1. Did the defoliants actually work? MACV, now a convert to the program, responded that these agents improved visibility from both the ground and the air, allowing the South Vietnamese Army to reduce its presence in defoliated areas. 2. Would Trail Dust turn the Vietnamese people against their government? MACV concluded that civilians didn’t really object to the spraying as long as they were properly compensated for their ruined crops. Admittedly, the Vietnamese were terrified of the sprays, but this created still another incentive for the VC to keep away from defoliated areas.4 3. Was chemical crop destruction worth the potential propaganda risk? MACV responded that there was nothing new about destroying an enemy’s food supply. The issue wasn’t really whether, but how, crop destruction would be carried out. The South Vietnamese government was wasting time and resources on inefficient , outdated methods such as cutting, pulling, and burning. Why not do the job in an efficient way?5 To make their case, Trail Dust’s supporters exaggerated the benefits of chemical crop destruction. Ambassador Nolting drafted a report claiming that the compounds had already ruined 700,000 pounds of rice, enough to feed a thousand Viet Cong for a year. But he also acknowledged that the sprays weren’t the sole cause of the food shortage. A week later, Nolting qualified even that equivocal statement, admitting that it was difficult to obtain precise results, but still, the overall effects of crop spraying were definitely good. The Joint Chiefs of Staff couldn’t agree on how to handle this issue and came up with several very different draft responses. The earliest version simply assured the president that the food denial program was working. The second added some careful language: “It is extremely difficult to obtain precise, statistical results on defoliation and crop destruction operations, particularly in terms of specific military impact. But we believe [that recent] operations validate the general conclusion that the VC [in...

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