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Cambodian civilians bag up captured North Vietnamese rice. Photo Credit: William H. Hammond. The U.S. Army. In public domain
Episode 2846 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a portion of a paper just received about why chemical weapons were used in the Vietnam War. The paper was provided to this podcast by the Merry Band of Retirees. The title of the paper is: Review and Analysis: Evaluation of the Impacts and consequences of Using Agricultural Herbicides as Military Chemical Weapons in Second Indochina.
The paper was submitted by Kenneth R. Olson, College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois, Urbana, USA and David R. Speidel1, USDA Resource Conservationist and Agricultural Consultant with Natural Resource, Conservation Service and Foreign Agricultural Service, Benton, Missouri, USA.
In this episode, the influence of the American military affected the decision to use herbicides in Vietnam will be reviewed. It is important to learn as much as we can about events and circumstances that resulted in the use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War.
The U.S. Military advisors at the Saigon and Vientiane United States embassies were surely adequately competent to have earned their positions, but their opinion of the enemy’s capability as a low-level foe was telling. This was noted in the literature review more than once. The American military held the Vietnamese Communists as warriors in low esteem and expected they would be easily defeated. It should have been clear to their State Department planning members that their military counterparts had not learned the lessons of the French military experience.
The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu disrupted President Eisenhower’s hopes for Indochina. America had supported the French at Dien Bien Phu with 60 cargo aircraft. Several had been damaged and two Americans had lost their lives. The French had miscalculated
Listen to episode 2846 and discover more about the historical events that led to our use of chemical weapons in Vietnam.
