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C H A P T ER 3 The Single Solution If only we could pave this whole country over, we could start from scratch, with no ambushes to worry about ever again. —US soldier in Vietnam, quoted by Malcolm W. Browne1 The US government couldn’t conceal the existence of Trail Dust, so it tried to make the program appear innocuous. This didn’t work either. A 1969 Crops Division report recalled, “Even though tight security restrictions were imposed on the early efforts, the activities attracted considerable attention among friendly and enemy forces. An undue amount of controversy and criticism developed within official US circles. Attitudes of uncertainty, doubt, and perhaps even hostility toward the concepts per se placed the program in jeopardy.”2 On January 9, 1962 (just a few weeks after the Gilpatric memo quoted in Chapter 1), the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed President Kennedy: “Certainly some of the projects we are implementing are outright R & D (i.e. experimental ) efforts such as the defoliation project, and bear all the earmarks of gimmicks that cannot and will not win the war in South Vietnam.”3 State Department officials complained that the herbicide program’s main accomplishment would be to infuriate both Vietnamese civilians and America’s allies. Before Trail Dust could become a proper operation, its supporters would first have to win the bureaucratic war in Washington. In March 1962, James Brown submitted his preliminary report, concluding that D and T were “sufficiently active to kill a majority of species encountered in Vietnam.” He recommended that they “be exploited for immediate use pending development of more active and rapidly acting chemicals.” In fact, the herbicides had barely defoliated anything. The spray missions were flown in the winter, Vietnam’s dry season, when most vegetation is dormant. Since D and T interfere with growth mechanisms, they can’t accomplish much when the plant is asleep. Most of Vietnam’s aquatic vegetation, particularly mangroves, keeps growing through the dry season, which is probably why they’re so vulnerable to these compounds.4 33 The secretary of defense was ready to acknowledge the obvious, that the early Ranch Hand missions had been a failure. A Pentagon general called the program “a blooper from start to finish.” Ground reconnaissance found virtually no improvement in visibility. And the detractors argued that even if these chemicals had worked perfectly, the jungle would still be there, looking something like a northern hardwood forest in winter. The leaves might be gone, but the trees and their branches would remain. Visibility from the air would probably improve, making it easier to spot enemy bases and troop movements, but the Viet Cong would still have plenty of places to hide.5 Another problem was that, as one Army helicopter pilot remembered , the VC “owned the night.” They were most likely to travel and attack in darkness , when increased visibility from defoliation wouldn’t be much help.6 Even worse, the spray missions had accidentally destroyed commercial crops and fruit trees. The local civilians were furious, and the Viet Cong enjoyed a propaganda windfall.7 Trail Dust’s supporters quickly explained these failures away. In April 1962, Harold Brown, DoD’s director of defense research and engineering, complained to secretary of defense Robert McNamara that Trail Dust had been rushed into action at the wrong time of year. He didn’t blame anyone in particular: I feel it would serve no useful purpose to look further for evidence of who said what to whom. It is apparent that the momentum of the exercise, strongly backed as it was by [here he named nearly every relevant person in the US and RVN governments], was sufficient to carry forward the first operational mission in January. This experience has illustrated rather clearly, I believe, the necessity for maintaining the integrity and independence of research and development activities against the pressures of immediate operational requirements. While the record clearly shows that defoliants were conceived as one of several concurrent measures which, taken together, might assist in altering the course of the guerrilla struggle, such warnings and qualifications were too easily forgotten on all sides of the house (including mine) in the search for a ‘single solution’ as a means to win the war.8 James Brown agreed, emphasizing that he’d been forced to hurry his research. “A very important point is that, no matter what chemicals were to be tested, they were to be tested as soon as possible, with...

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