As a young GI at Fort Ord in Monterey County, California, Dean Osborn spent much of his time in the oceanside woodlands, training on soil and guzzling water from streams and aquifers now known to be contaminated with cancer-causing pollutants.
“They were marching the snot out of us,” he says, recalling his year and a half stationed on the base, from 1979 to 1980. He also remembers the poison oak pervasive across the 28,000-acre installation that closed in 1994. He went on sick call at least three times because of the overwhelmingly itchy rash.
Mounting evidence shows that as far back as the 1950s, in an effort to kill the ubiquitous poison oak and other weeds at the Army base, the military experimented with and sprayed the powerful herbicide combination known colloquially as Agent Orange.
While the U.S. military used the herbicide to defoliate the dense jungles of Vietnam and adjoining countries, it was contaminating the land and waters of coastal California with the same chemicals, according to documents.
The Defense Department has publicly acknowledged that during the Vietnam War era it stored Agent Orange at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, Mississippi, and the former Kelly Air Force Base in Texas, and tested it at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.
According to the Government Accountability Office, however, the Pentagon’s list of sites where herbicides were tested went more than a decade without being updated and lacked specificity. GAO analysts described the list in 2018 as “inaccurate and incomplete.”
Fort Ord was not included. It is among about four dozen bases that the government has excluded but where Pat Elder, an environmental activist, said he has documented the use or storage of Agent Orange. Those sites also include Chanute Air Force Base, which is about 15 miles north of Champaign and closed in 1993.
An entomology expert who served at Chanute in 1963 and 1964 told the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency in 2013 he used the herbicides. However, sampling of wells in the area between 1998 and 2001 had detected only trace levels likely due to “instrument noise” and were not a health concern, according to a 2002 Illinois Department of Health report that the state EPA cited in 2013.
At Fort Ord, the use of Agent Orange herbicides led to a “drastic reduction in trainee dermatitis casualties,” according to a 1956 article in the journal The Military Engineer.
“A well-organized chemical war has been waged against this woody plant pest,” the article noted.
‘The Most Toxic Chemical’
Agent Orange is a 50-50 mixture of two ingredients, known as 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. Herbicides with the same chemical structure slightly modified were available off the shelf, sold commercially in massive amounts and used at practically every base in the United States, says Gerson Smoger, a lawyer who argued before the U.S. Supreme Court for Vietnam veterans to have the right to sue Agent Orange manufacturers. The combo was also used by farmers, forest workers and other civilians across the country.
The chemical 2,4,5-T contains the dioxin 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin or TCDD, a known carcinogen linked to several cancers, chronic conditions and birth defects. A recent Brown University study tied Agent Orange exposure to brain tissue damage similar to…
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