Operation Wasteland

While the noisy conflict in Cambodia has seized the headlines, the quiet defoliation of South Viet Nam has become the focus of well-informed outrage. Individual scientists and the influential American Association for the Advancement of Science fear that a biological wasteland is in the making.

Since 1962, the U.S. armed forces have sprayed (or dumped in haste) about 13.5 million gallons of potent chemicals from low-flying planes (see color pages). The peak of the program came in 1967-68, when 400 defoliation sorties were flown monthly. Now considerably reduced to a "classified" number of missions, the program continues under the ironic code name "Operation Ranch Hand." To date, the herbicides have affected an estimated five million acres, including 500,000 acres of rice and other crops.

"The herbicides have saved many, many lives," says a Pentagon official. Defoliation removes the thick canopy of Viet Nam's jungle and thus exposes enemy troop movements. Sprayed along roadsides and waterways, defoliants reduce the possibility of ambushes. Treatment of farm land in certain areas denies the enemy food.

Unhappily, Operation Ranch Hand also undermines the allies' efforts to win the minds of the Vietnamese. "The Viet Cong have made tremendous capital out of defoliation," says Jean-Paul Poliniere, agronomist with Viet Nam's Technical Service Institute. "They've told the peasants, The Americans want to take all your food away so you will be dependent on them for all time.' Sometimes the peasants believe them."

Cheery "Blue." The three main defoliants, each cheerily known by the color of the band on its container, do their job with convincing efficiency. "Blue" contains arsenic and burns the juices out of narrow-leaf grasses and rice. "White," a mixture of a persistent chemical called Picloram and 2,4-di-chlorophenoxyacetic acid, causes leaves to shower from trees within weeks. Strongest and most heavily used is "Orange," a mixture of 2,4-D and 2,4,5-tri-chlorophenoxyacetic acid, whose dangers were widely publicized last winter in a New Yorker article by Thomas Whiteside. Last month use of 2,4,5-T was suspended in Viet Nam and strictly limited in the U.S. Reason: the herbicide, together with its contaminant, has caused birth defects in laboratory mice. Some investigators see an alarming if unproved correlation between the defoliant's use and a sudden rise in 1966 (over 1965) in the number of Vietnamese babies born with birth defects in Saigon's Tu Du hospital.

Ecologists are particularly concerned about the future effects of chemicals on the extremely complex tropical ecosystem. They know that removal of even one element, like leaves, will touch off a chain of related changes--all of them probably for the worse.

Writing in Science magazine, Zoologists Gordon H. Orians and E.W. Pfeiffer note that a single spraying does not kill seedlings and saplings. But about 5% of Viet Nam's land has been defoliated more than once. When this happens, even the young trees die, and are replaced with ferns, vines, sedges and thick bamboo groves. By taking over the land, these less desirable species make regeneration of the forest a difficult process requiring many decades. Moreover, mangroves are so susceptible to even one dose of herbicides that the authors believe defoliant molecules in the soil may attack future generations of mangrove seeds as they germinate.

Bringing about this drastic change in the forest environment, the ecologists contend, is tantamount to killing indigenous animals. Many species, fleeing their defoliated habitats, will not find room to live elsewhere in the crowded tropical forest. The authors found no local insect-eating or fruit-eating birds in herbicide-hit regions; fish-eating birds had declined. Even fish seem to be made more susceptible to disease by defoliants.

Flaming Pink Rose. The war is having other marked effects. Huge B-52 bomb craters (an estimated 2,600,000 in 1968 alone) fill with stagnant water and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes. Trees are so riddled with shrapnel that sawmills lose one to three hours a day repairing damage to saw blades. Meantime, the tiger population has increased: the animals have learned to move toward gunfire in order to find food--human corpses. Still, the situation could be worse. Both "Operation Pink Rose" and "Operation Sherwood Forest" fortunately failed. They entailed napalming already defoliated forests in attempts to start fire storms.

What depresses scientists most of all is the fact that the program was started before adequate testing of the effect on the environment. In addition, Harvard's Matthew S. Meselson, a leading U.S. biologist, argues in the current Scientific American that herbicides are an extension of chemical-biological warfare. "If the long-observed rule of 'No chemical and biological weapons' is abandoned," he writes, "there will be no unique and equally simple standard on which national practice and international agreement can be based."

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