It only took 40 years. And yes, Washington still disputes Hanoi’s claim that up to 4 million Vietnamese suffered contact with the defoliant, which was dumped en masse in a U.S. air campaign to scorch away the dense jungle cover under which guerilla fighters hid. But the AP reports that the U.S. is finally set to start cleaning up the mess.Not to give short shrift to the unconscionable, U.S.-led carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1970, of course. But to really size up the horrific, lingering sting of the Vietnam conflict you have to consider the equally long-lasting and nightmarish fallout from America’s wanton fire-hosing of Agent Orange. The numbers are staggering: Between 1962 and 1971 the U.S. military sprayed some 20 million gallons of Agent Orange and a galaxy of other herbicides on nearly a quarter of former South Vietnam. The defoliant ate through about 5 million acres – a tract comparable in size to Massachusetts – of forest. An additional half-million acres of crops were decimated.So now, after a slog characteristic of damn near anything moving through the upper echelons of American war-crimes admissions, the U.S. and Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense “plan to excavate 2.5 million cubic feet of soil” from in and around the airport at Danang, a port city along the south-central coast of Vietnam and home to a former military base that stored the awful stuff. The idea is to dump the soil into storage tanks, which will be pumped up to high enough temperatures to remove any lingering dioxins.It’ll take about four years. But really, can anyone reasonably expect the $43 million project to finally sponge away dioxins – these have been linked with cancer, remember – that have had four decades to seep into Vietnamese soil and ground water? I don’t know. For what it’s worth, Vo Duoc, who recently got word that he and 11 family members have dioxin swimming through their bloodstreams, welcomes the effort. As Duoc, 58, tells the AP: “It’s better late than never that the U.S. government is cleaning up the environment for our children. They have to do as much as possible and as quickly as possible.”The motives, though, are less murky. Maybe the cleanup really and truly is the U.S. extending its hand in a show of good faith that it’s game to continue strengthening ties with the Vietnamese – and righting all its herbo-war wrongs. But let me go out on a limb, here, and equate the cleanup with timeless wartime semantics: Theatre.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
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