Lasting legacy of Agent Orange
By Donald Kirk The fallout from the Vietnam War endures an ongoing tragedy that no one imagined when I was based in old Saigon as a journalist at the height of the fighting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We had a lot of stories to cover from the mountains of northern ``South Vietnam” though the central highlands, down the coast and on to the Mekong Delta. There was the U.S. ``pacification” program, Saigon politics, firefights in isolated regions, diplomatic maneuvering, just about everything. And then, for a break in the routine, you could always go to Cambodia and Laos and cover very different conflicts there while dining in fine restaurants, drinking in some great bars and listening to the Armed Forces Vietnam Network. There was one story, though, that a lot of us missed, and it may be one of the most significant. Sure, we heard about helicopters and lumbering cargo planes spraying remote jungle regions with a chemical called Agent Orange, but we gave little thought to what this strange chemical was doing. We sometimes flew in helicopters over swaths