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Originally Posted by August
Well actually depending on the wind conditions at the time your neighbor just might be in your weed killer dispersal zone too.
The point is however that like your weed killer, Agent Orange was deployed to destroy plants, not to injure or kill people. Of course it did turn out to be quite deadly but not immediately enough to be remotely useful as a weapon.
For example it took AO 31 years to kill my father with liver cancer after his exposure to it in 1967 but it didn't stop him from carrying out his military duties or completing his tour over there. It that makes it a weapon it is a damned inefficient one.
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It wasn't just deployed to strip cover, it was also deployed to push the peasants out of the countryside and into the cities, thus removing the rural support for the VC. So it was designed to attack crops as well as trees, which meant that it was inevitable that it would get into the food supplies of the rural Vietnamese. It also caused mass migration to the urban areas which sparked a housing crisis and created vast slums around Saigon. So it was deployed with full knowledge and acceptance of collateral damage, which is pretty shaky moral grounds, but c'est la guerre.
In regards to your father, he is one of many victims of AO, and it's affects have manifested themselves in different ways, particularly in Vietnam and other areas where AO was used, it may not have been a swift killer, but it had an affect on both the forces handling it, and those sprayed by it.
I'm not judging, the use of AO and whether it should have been used is a debate that will be had for many decades to come, particularly given the eventual outcome of the war, but in my opinion AO was a chemical based deployment designed to disrupt the lives of not just the enemy but innocent civilians, and that makes it a weapon, a chemical weapon, in my eyes at least, and America was not the only one to use it, we did too in small doses in Malaya, and for all I know it could have been that and not the fingerprint dust that gave my grandfather emphysema. In fact, on the quiet, I'd wager that a lot of the tactics used by the US in Vietnam were likely based on tactics that we'd deployed in Malaya under a similar situation and terrain as that which developed in Vietnam.