Mangroves
are sturdy trees. Recognizable by their extensive root systems, these
trees can thrive in muddy soil, sand, peat, even coral. They tolerate
water much saltier than most other plants and survive flooding during
severe storms. It is perhaps their sturdiness that led mangroves to be
one of the most significant targets in the Vietnam War.
During
the war, communist guerilla fighters would often take refuge in
Vietnam’s thick jungles. Mangroves, among other types of flora, provided
shelter from eyes in the sky seeking to deliver air strikes in
strategic locations. So the U.S. military exposed guerillas by
bombarding the trees themselves with huge amounts of defoliants,
chemical herbicides that cause the leaves to fall off of plants. The
most infamous defoliant was Agent Orange, named for the orange stripes marking the drums it was shipped in.
The
defoliant is an equal mix of two herbicides, 2,4-diclorophenoxyacetic
acide (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T). When
sprayed on foliage during the war, it quickly stripped off the leaves,
revealing anyone and anything below the canopy, destroying crops, and
clearing vegetation near U.S. bases. By the end of the campaign, U.S.
military forces had sprayed millions of gallons of Agent Orange on over 5
million acres of upland and mangrove forests and about 500,000 acres of
crops—an area the size of Massachusetts, and about 24 percent of South
Vietnam. Some areas of Laos and Cambodia along the Vietnam border were
also sprayed. This massive effort, known as Operation Ranch Hand, lasted from 1962 to 1971.
READ MORE:http://nautil.us/blog/a-chemical-attack-that-killed-a-countryside--scarred-a-people
No comments:
Post a Comment