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[ 17 ]       The Chemical War and the Illusion of Control TheplanescametoCatSona little after six o’clock in the morning . The reconnaissance plane came first, followed by two fighter jets that strafed the village. Then came the big cargo planes, three of them, flying in formation, parallel and low to the ground, and spraying a fine mist that looked to the people below like white smoke. The planes sprayed the trees and fields surrounding Cat Son, including the villagers’ fruit trees and rice paddies. Upon surveying the damage three days after this mission in October 1965, one eyewitness to the attacks, a member of the main force unit of the NLF in Binh Dinh province and a former farmer himself, described the effects of what Vietnamese soldiers and civilians came to call the spray: “All the fields along the two banks of a small river were utterly destroyed. Even the people’s vegetables and fruit-tree gardens near the fields were ruined. According to the people, after the spraying, the tree leaves were wet as if soaked in oil. The water had a film on the surface, which looked like fat skim. A little while later, the leaves became dry and fell on the ground. Rice stalks turned dry, banana trees sank, potato and manioc became soft and rotten, the pineapple was tainted, the coconuts split, and the jet fruits fell on the ground.”1 No eyewitnesses described any immediate health problems among the villagers after the attack, but locals refused to drink the water for several days. The rice seedlings, still fairly young, were destroyed. Most of the village’s fruit supply was rendered inedible, and the trees would have to be replanted.2 CHAPTER ONE [ 18 ] CHAPTER ONE Scenes like this one were repeated thousands of times during the Vietnam War, as the modified C-123 aircraft of Operation Ranch Hand carried out herbicide missions across central and southern Vietnam in an attempt to defoliate the jungle and deny easy access to food to the revolutionary forces of Vietnam. Caught in between the various sides of this long, bloody conflict, millions of Vietnamese civilians watched helplessly as the spray destroyed their crops, trees, and much of the surrounding landscape. Looking back on these events with the hindsight of history and knowing what we now know about the scale of destruction of the Vietnam War, one might regard these chemical attacks as less than shocking. Images of the widespread bombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, of the massacre at My Lai, and of children burned by napalm running in the street remain familiar components of the cultural memory of the war. But the absence of televised images and immediate casualties from herbicide missions should not obscure the unusual, even radical, nature of these attacks. How and why did the United States come to carry out chemical attacks on the villages and surrounding areas of millions of peasant farmers half a world way? Why were chemical herbicides produced in places like Midland, Michigan, being sprayed over places like Cat Son village? Why did American planes destroy the crops of those they were ostensibly trying to protect and for whose hearts and minds U.S. forces were ostensibly battling? Learning how the chemical war came to be requires understanding three unique, interrelated historical contingencies of the early 1960s. First, Operation Ranch Hand cannot be comprehended apart from the political and military circumstances in Southeast Asia and the world that the Kennedy administration faced when it took office in 1961. Both the Cold War and the decolonization of former European empires were at their height when Kennedy was elected. The war in Vietnam quickly took its place alongside Cuba and Berlin as the primary hot spots of the struggle between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. Kennedy’s decision to deploy herbicides and other chemicals in Vietnam has to be grasped within the context of its interrelated efforts at nation building and counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, efforts which policymakers at the time saw as part of a global struggle against communism. Just as important , however, as many within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were acutely aware, the potential fallout from this decision could not easily be separated from the Cold War. No sooner had Operation Ranch Hand begun than the propaganda battle ignited. From its inception the chemical war was intricately entwined not only with the battle for hearts and minds [18.117.183.172] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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