2012-09-07
What is Agent Orange?
Named for the orange-striped barrels in which it was shipped, Agent Orange is an herbicide that the U.S. military used during the Vietnam War to destroy enemy food crops and kill jungle vegetation that concealed North Vietnamese forces. Beginning in 1961, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces sprayed 20 million gallons of it and other herbicides over vast areas of South Vietnam and parts of Laos and Cambodia. The spraying denuded more than 8,600 square miles of jungle and cropland. The U.S. military stopped using Agent Orange in 1971 after the National Institutes of Health found...
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