The famous radio scene:
“Got himself killed in 'Nam, didn't even know it””
The American war ended in 1973, but some death dates go beyond the end of the war: 1975, 1979 and, sometimes, they go up to the nineties.
The war was over, but the deaths were still going on and in some cases they are still going on right now.
In fact, one of the many veterans that in those two years helped me to write this book, he too is currently sick and at risk of ending up with his name on Vietnam's memorial wall.
But how can a war continue killing after it's over from so many years?
The famous 'radio scene' of the first Rambo movie – maybe one of the best movie scenes in movie history – refers to one cancer in particular, because Delmore Barry 'brought it home from Vietnam'.
It's an obvious reference to the terrible issue of Agent Orange, one of the darkest pages of the Vietnam War, an issue that gave birth to a real conscience crisis in all of the United States, and it's something people still talk about and work on even nowadays.
Agent Orange was a chemical herbicide that the Americans used a to destroy the vegetation, mostly by spraying it from civilian airplanes.
Leveling to the ground whole acres of terrain made it impossible for the Vietcong to hide in the jungle, and this became an important part of the American strategy during the war.
But then, both soldiers and civilians on both sides started to get cancer or other related illnesses.
Even today, in Vietnam, there are many cases of babies with malformations, leukemia or cancer related to herbicides used during the sixties, and many non-governmental organizations are actually working to both help the sick and clean up the soil.
Many think the U.S. knew Agent Orange was so toxic and yet continued to use it for both economical and military reasons, but this is just another urban legend.
During the sixties, the scientific community had yet to discover that cigarettes can cause cancer, so it should be no surprise that they under evaluated Agent Orange's possible danger.
As soon as the first doubts started rising up, the military immediately changed to other chemicals, while the war was still going on.
On the contrary to what many think, Agent Orange wasn't so devastating itself, but because of the way it was produced. The toxicity was due to the dioxin that ended up in it during the production process, not because of Agent Orange itself.
In other words, it was so devastating because it was not as pure as it should have been.
And this is also the reason why it took so long for scientists to understand what was wrong with it, because they continued to study the pure chemical, not what was really inside the drums.
Either way, its consequences were dreadful.
The 'wound' opened by Agent Orange is one of those still open today and even the U.S. is still having many troubles recovering from it.
