Week8_Raylph Evangelista_ASA150E

The difference between this week and the other weeks of reading that we have done, is that I have actually heard of what we read about before we read it. However, I only heard about if from taking this class which is pretty sad. In "Scorched Earth: Legacy of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam", Fred Wilcox reveals to his readers why the US decided to use chemicals in the war in Viet Nam and the after effects of dropping the chemicals in a country full of people. There was a specific part in the reading that made me really question the reason as to why they decided to start using Agent Orange in the war; the part where they complemented using chemicals because the British were somewhat successful in using it in Malaysia (Wilcox, 9), made me upset. It made me feel like the Americans were looking at the Vietnamese as the same as Malaysians. I felt as if they had grouped Southeast Asians into one group and didn't acknowledge that they both had their own cultures and history. Just because chemicals worked in a different Southeast Asian country, doesn't mean that it would probably work in another one. It's mind boggling to think that the top US officials who were choosing what to do in the war were deciding based on stuff like that.
Besides this, Wilcox also covered going to a hospital in Viet Nam that housed people and children who were born with birth defects because of Agent Orange from the war. Chapter 11 made me pretty sad and I did feel bad for the people who were affected. These people don't get to live normal lives, and these people got abandoned by their own families because of something that they had literally no control over. The fact that people are still being affected by Agent Orange over 40 years later is crazy and sad at the same time. It's a problem that Viet Nam is probably never going to recover from and I think that's something that the US has to own up to. They messed up a nation and the effects are still there. It's really just disheartening.

Question: Why is the US so okay with not owning up to their mess? Don't they know that what they did has had lasting effects on many people and families?

References

Image: https://www.militarytimes.com/veterans/2016/02/27/agent-orange-catching-up-to-vietnam-veterans-decades-later/

Wilcox, Fred A. Scorched Earth: Legacy of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. 2011.