In Fred A. Wilcox’s book “Scorched Earth: Legacy of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam”, the first chapter talks about the US’s use of herbicides. It is astonishing reading this from the educated perspective I have now, considering how ignorant my point of view was in the beginning of the quarter. Even in the book, it talks about how herbicides were “accidentally” used on innocent villages. Throughout my education, I was taught that the US had a reason to use such inhumane acts of warfare because the Vietnamese were tough guerilla fighters. The severity of these acts of warfare were glossed over, the damages were mere casualties is a bigger effort to “protect democracy”. Chapter 6 really goes into depth about how these warfares affected life even after the war. Even though it is obvious how heartbreaking the situation is, it is also irritating because Vietnamese people are still affected by American actions today, but Americans fail to recognize and act apologetically for its actions. Chapter 12 gets very specific about the birth defects caused by Agent Orange, which was honestly too sad for me to read word-for-word. My question for this week is that if the herbicides and Agent Orange we used was so powerful and is still affecting Vietnamese today, how is it affecting neighboring villages/countries that are indirectly affected since those particles traveled by air? Are the herbicides still affecting the new rice crops grown today? My visual for this week is more satirical. It is of a Vietnamese farmer, who looks happy picking tea leaves in a grassy field. I thought I would share this picture because I find it ironic that the UN would post a picture like this on one of their program’s pages knowing this is such an idealized representation of Vietnamese farmers in so many ways. I know crops have probably grown significantly since the use of Agent Orange, but I also know that this picture is extremely unrealistic.
Greening Vietnam's tea industry. Retrieved from https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/greening-vietnams-tea-industry
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