I’m an in home senior caregiver and I’ve had a client who was exposed to AO. He was a lifelong marine that retired in his 60’s but with severe health issues. He had tremors so violent he could not walk, developed a stutter and would pause and look into space while speaking before carrying on, he developed epilepsy, and his wife had two still births with severe birth defects and several miscarriages before they stopped trying. He was in his 80’s when I met him and told me how much he regretted his service and how horrible he felt for the people of Vietnam and what we did to them.

My step Dad got tumors in his hands from this. He spent decades fighting the VA to help him. They claimed forever that it wasn't cancerous. Then, they refused to pay for %100 care these people needed. He fought literally for the rest of his life. They finally granted him full Vet disability, months before he passed away.
The government doesn't care for it's soldiers

I went to uni in Australia in the early 2000s. There was a girl in one of my classes who said her dad was a pilot that sprayed agent orange. I asked her if her family was affected by it and said, "I dunno, but I've got..." and listed half a dozen minor deformities and sensitivities.

99.999999% of the time, a court of law will find you guilty of murder if you kill someone. Yet they commit genocide and all of a sudden "it was an accident"

Everyone and everybody is talking about their dads or someone they know that was affected by it, but only some are talking about how generations of children born after the war in Vietnam are affected by this left in orphanage because their families can not afford the care for them. Tens of thousands of children are still born with malformities (deformed head, no eyes/nose, no limbs, missing vital internal organs).

What ive learned from into the shadows:
1. Dont trust your government
2. Dont trust a company
3. Never be first in line for a new miracle product

This is just to say, i wont be trying GLP1s any time soon.

This killed my grandpa, or rather it gave him multiple cancers and ultimately resulted in him ending his own life a couple years ago.

My uncle did 3 tours in Nam, and died from Agent Orange.
The US government knew what it was doing and did it anyway.  Never trust your government, any of them.
And while the death of my uncle hurt like hell, but what has happened to the Vietnamese people is beyond heartbreaking.

Lets also remember that our government spent decades denying, and still deny, fault and take responsibility to offer care to affected veterans and veteran families. Many died painfully and without support or recourse.

i grew up in norway. at my school there were two boys from vietnam - the younger had a severe cleft lip and palate. he was a few years younger than me. their father worked as a custodian at the school. he had a bad limp and didn't speak much, but he was very kind to me. i didn't connect the dots as to what had happened to that family until researching the vietnam war many years later.

the vietnam war didn't end just because people stopped fighting. new victims are being born to this day. chemical warfare is evil.

Let this be a lesson to learn:
Never trust government and never trust greedy corporations, especially ones that produce chemicals.

I love the way gov contractors get to play the 'we where only following orders......' yet when enlisted men use the same defense..........jail time

My dad got exposed to it. But apparently he was "never" there. He finally got confirmation in 2013 that he was but not "exposed" because his unit's info suddenly disappeared.

My dad was in the air force and wasn't even deployed to Vietnam, but he handled and loaded barrels of chemicals.  Told me how one time the base had an inspection and him and some other guys were told to hide a bunch of barrels in a field.  He only made it to 50 before prostate cancer got him.  Pretty much every doctor he saw would ask how long he was in Vietnam, they only saw this aggressive cancer in agent orange exposure.

finding out agent orange itself was technically fine and it was a byproduct of forced mass production that "made" it bad is INSANE. I feel like this is not talked about enough

My mom's cousin got sprayed with it. He has necrotising faciatius, incredibly gifted sculpture, but I talked to him right before I joined the military and every few minutes he would stop (talk to his friends, who passed away but acted like they were still there) and woul continue his conversation like nothing happened. It has wrecked him.

I had a dormmate in the eighties who, although old for a college student, was not exceptionally so. He did have issues from Agent ORange, gaunt, easily tired, but good humored and open. One day, he was no show at a couple of dorm meetings and one guy found him in the downstairs bathroom. The RA asked me to go in since I had had 1st Aid training. He'd been dead long enough for rigor to set in and for corneal milkiness to have taken fast. It turned out that his heart and, really, everything just finally gave out. Poor man had been a dead man walking for at least ten years. Peace to him. He was , to us, a kind and gentle man.

I never knew that it smelled nice.... That's so creepy...

If Dow Chemical don’t want to admit how dangerous they knew it was, just have all their board members drink a pint of it.

Those chemists who developed 2-4-5T worked for Monsanto. The workers manufacturing it were the first victims of the dioxin poisoning, and the company was aware of it. They didn't warn the public not just because it was a hugely successful product, but because they were about to strike gold through the government contract to purchase what we know now as Agent Orange. Veritasium did a fantastic deep dive into this industry, I highly recommend it. It's called, "Exposing why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds".