Mattis tours contaiminated Vietnam war-era Agent Orange site
BIEN HOA, Vietnam: US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis toured a former Agent Orange storage site in southern Vietnam yesterday, revisiting one of the war’s darkest chapters that lives on among a million Vietnamese with severe birth defects, cancers and disabilities linked to the toxic defoliant.
Standing near a weedy field contaminated with dioxin, Mattis surveyed a map of the Bien Hoa airport outside Ho Chi Minh City, one of the main staging grounds for Agent Orange that was hastily cleared by soldiers near the war’s end more than four decades ago.
US forces sprayed 80 million litres of Agent Orange over South Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 in a desperate bid to flush out Viet Cong communist guerrillas by depriving them of tree cover and food.
At Bien Hoa the spillover from the clearing operation is believed to have seeped beyond the base and into the ground water, rivers and the local food chain and is linked to severe mental and physical disabilities across generations of Vietnamese – from enlarged heads to deformed limbs.
Under a 10-year remediation effort led by development agency USAID, work is set to start next year on cleaning up Bien Hoa, one of the largest dioxin ‘ hotspots’ remaining in Vietnam.
“We hope to have shovels in the ground next year sometime,” said a USAID official who was not authorised to be quoted by name.
Vast amounts of Agent Orange had been stored at Bien Hoa in large fuel containers during the war, and under a 1972 operation called Pacer Ivy the US military began pulling the chemical from Vietnam for storage and disposal outside the country. “In that operation of repackaging, there was a lot of spillage obviously and so that is what we are faced with,” the official said.
The pledge to clean up the site came under the administration of Barack Obama, and will cost some US$ 390 million, officials said.
Hanoi says up to three million Vietnamese people were exposed to Agent Orange, and that one million suffer grave health repercussions today.