Between 1961 and 1971, the United States and its South Vietnamese allies sprayed more than 72 million liters of chemical defoliants over millions of acres of land in Central and Southern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Of that 72 million liters, about 62 percent was made up of Agent Orange, a herbicide which by the late 1960s was known to contain potentially dangerous levels of dioxin, one of the most toxic substances on the planet. The goal of Operation Ranch Hand was to defoliate the landscape and deny food to the revolutionary forces of Vietnam, but the consequences of the program have proven to be far greater.

While the Agent Orange issue has received a great deal of attention in the media, there is surprisingly little historical scholarship on the topic, as I found out when completing work on my first book, Invisible Enemies. For this project, I’ve written an international history of Agent Orange that attempts to understand both how and why the United States waged this chemical war in Southeast Asia and how different communities around the world dealt with potentially toxic legacies of that war.

The research for this book is based on a variety of previously overlooked sources from the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Vietnam, as well as a synthesis of existing materials from several disciplines. In 2008, I visited Vietnam for the second time, witnessing first hand the ongoing effects of Agent Orange on the landscapes and people of the region and to interview people working on the issue from the district level all the way up to the national level in Hanoi. I blogged about the trip here.  While the attention surrounding Agent Orange has rightly been focused on Vietnam and on the other nations whose veterans fought in the Second Indochina War, my book will demonstrate that this story is really a global story. When we consider the global scope of the production, testing, distribution, and deployment apparatus developed around the chemical war, places such as Florida, New Jersey, Guam,, the Korean DMZ, Johnston Atoll, Mississippi, New Plymouth (New Zealand) and New Brunswick (Canada), to name but a few, have all shaped and been shaped by the complex and controversial history of Agent Orange.

UPDATE, Spring 2012: The book is officially in publication now, and will be available everywhere in October, 2012!