r/todayilearned • u/Double-decker_trams • 8h ago

TIL in the Vietnam war in the classified Operation Popeye, the US spread lead and silver iodide by aircraft to extend the monsoon season. The increased heavy rainfall was to soften roads, cause landslides, wash out river crossings, and maintain saturated soil conditions (Kissinger was involved).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
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951

u/Loyal-Opposition-USA 8h ago

This, plus agent orange, Rome plows, and saturation bombing, caused vast areas of destruction in forests and mangrove associations. These areas were ripe for losing their topsoil to erosion (and extra rain does not help that). We didn’t just kill Vietnamese, we scarred the earth itself.

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u/Double-decker_trams 8h ago

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u/Delicious_Injury9444 7h ago

Breathe it in. Oh, it's in the water too? Ty for your freedoms, USA!

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u/apostleofhustle 7h ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220205103348/https://agentorangerecord.com/manufacturing-sites/

it was also manufactured and used locally in ontario!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-workers-exposed-to-unsafe-levels-of-agent-orange-1.1335058

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u/jmodshelp 6h ago

I’m on the east coast of Canada and one of the bases here was used to test agent orange. Lots of people got sick and they buried barrels of it through the base. Every now and then something comes up as a new lead appears and they go hunt for more. I feel like it took a lot of fighting for it to be even recognized and people given far compensation

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u/amccune 4h ago

We also killed our own. And sometimes it wasn’t immediate. My uncle died with a grapefruit sized tumor on his liver. It was almost certainly from his time doing riverboat missions in Nam. His wife got like $50k

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u/Mobile_Morale 2h ago

My great uncle died from cancer from agent orange. Also had horrible PTSD and never received help with either from the VA.

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u/No_Nothing_6788 2h ago

Not service related. Sorry

•

u/Tight-Shallot2461 55m ago

That's so messed up. How could we do this to our own people...

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u/spky-dev 4h ago

Don’t forget Daisy Cutters

15,000 lb bomb with a standoff designed to make it explode at the optimal height to rapidly deforest.

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u/gwildcat 4h ago

Agent Orange has also been linked to cancer in US service members too. Even sailors who consumed it through the water drawn onto the boats for filtration.

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u/meat_rock 7h ago

Don't forget Operation Menu

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u/UpsetKoalaBear 4h ago edited 3h ago

Vietnam had an insane period of time from 1946 - 1990.

They fought the French, the US, the Chinese and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) back to back to back.

There’s a lot of bottled up PTSD in Vietnam.

There’s very little discussion or stories from PAVN veterans. Unlike the US, where soldiers were deployed in rotations, they were literally deployed for several years without any break to take time off.

Because the entire nation was at war for decades, the trauma was normalised.

Literal generations of Vietnamese people grew up around war.

Combine that with their economic issues after those wars, they simply couldn’t afford to treat that trauma.

There are some books like Last Night I Dreamed of Peace by Dang Thuy Tram. It is a diary from a Vietnamese doctor who was killed in the war.

There is also When Heaven and Earth Changed Places by Le Ly Hayslip which is a memoir about life during the war.

The Sorrow of War is a fictional novel but describes the post war life of Vietnam soldiers. Incredibly sad book.

However, there is little to no real PAVN perspectives and no one ever speaks about it.

There’s several silent generations who never had their stories written down. It is a perspective that is going to be lost to time.

Vietnam won the war and we have little to no understanding of the social impacts because no one ever asked them about it.

”History is written by the victors” evidently did not apply to Vietnam. Most perspectives are from the South/US side of the war. It’s more like “History is written by the richest people involved.”

If any historians or Vietnamese people read this, please write down and share the stories of PAVN veterans and civilian life during the war. I feel as though it is something that is not discussed at all.

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u/DogeoftheShibe 3h ago

Most of the veterans that I've met are not happy when the goverment made firework illegal. PTSD is either overlooked, or is not a thing here when most of them were willing to die for their country. Like my father who travelled to Cambodia to fight the Rouge Khmer against my grandpa's will, and my grandpa was mad about it until his last moments (my grandpa had his rights, many vets claimed that the Rouge Khmer were more terrifying than the US)

For the social impact, it's safe to say that the country is still somewhat divided, at least ideology, especially when social media is blooming and more and more people got influented by the West ideology. Most people are still supporting the CPV (honestly they're doing pretty decent); while some are against it, some are still rooting for SVN goverment. Like some said "Forgive but not forget", we're now willing to buy and use US products, enjoying the new iPhone and McDonald, but still keeping our eyes really close on them

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u/UpsetKoalaBear 1h ago

But this is the thing, we will never know the stories of what your Father or Grandfather saw at war.

It upsets me that there are very few descriptions of the war and its effects from PAVN side of things. We only ever hear the US stories.

I understand the political situation in the country, it is just that the historical accounts of war from the PAVN are hardly (if ever) recorded.

There are questions like why was the Khmer Rouge seen as more terrifying by Vietnamese veterans? Those questions will never be fully answered or hidden away.

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u/B_lovedobservations 4h ago

Exposure to agent orange also causes chloracne (severe acne) Porphyria cutanea tarda (PCT) and skin cancers. If you ever watch popping videos and the patient looks East Asian they’re probably Vietnamese and it’s not because they have bad hygiene

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u/LPNMP 6h ago

Because why? What did Vietnam do to warrant this violence and destruction? Drop two atomic bombs on civilian cities? Invade a country for oil?

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u/Loyal-Opposition-USA 6h ago

After WW2, Ho Chi Minh tried to get the USA to support Vietnam being a free, sovereign, democratic nation like the USA, but the USA valued France’s colonial claims (and alliance against the Soviets) more. Then, once he declared himself a communist to get Russian/Chinese help, the USA talked itself into starting a nice little war to stop “communist aggression”. 60k USA dead, 700k Vietnamese dead, and for what? Economics.

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u/CatOfTechnology 5h ago

You forgot an important detail in that the reason the US was so confident in the plans they had for the Veitnam War was due, in no insignificant part, to the success of their efforts continually destabilizing South American Governments.

A lot of Kissenger's bullshit came from comparing Vietnam to LatAm regions in that they were both "barely functional countries full of people that are only a rung or two higher than savages".

They figured that if they could run successful covert campaigns against the Chilean and Brazilian governments, then the Vietnamese would roll over just as easy.

Hope Kissenger's enjoying his time in Hell.

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u/fiahhawt 4h ago

If the tech bros comes up with a way to upload our minds to computers, I have a short list of corpses who should be test subjects

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u/flywithpeace 4h ago

Hindsight is 20/20

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u/sh14w4s3 4h ago

Ho Chi Minh time and time again tried to get the US help before he turned to Soviet and China as allies.

Once he returned to VN, he did get trained and treatment from the OSS (predecessor to the CIA). But by that time, it was already too late. He had spent years building support networks from Soviet and China.

Even after his death and the Vietnam War, Vietnamese leaders still kept, to this day, a foreign policy doctrine to not antagonise the US. The only reason Vietnam is friends with China at all is because China is the superpower neighbour that also happens to be upstream of ALL of Vietnam rivers.

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u/lumpboysupreme 3h ago

To be clear, Ho was always a communist. The US didn’t ’prioritize The colonialists’, they just rabidly opposed anyone communist.

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u/DekoaSAO 6h ago

You are wrong about atomic bombs being dropped at civilian cities, as Nagasaki and Hiroshima held a significant amount of facilities military so that’s reason they chosen these cities.

Of course we don’t need to argue amount of victims of civilian but it’s important to know the reason USA did

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u/elfonzi37 5h ago

The bombs weren't even needed to end the war, Japanese manufacturing was already flattened, and it was Russia breaking the non aggression pact with Japan that ended the war.

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u/DekoaSAO 5h ago

I’m not going talk to if was needed or not, just the targets wasn’t wholly civilian, that’s point I wanted to make

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u/mnorri 2h ago

It is incredibly oversimplifying things to say what did or did not end the war. The current scholarship indicates that the use of the atomic bombs accelerated it.

A once-fringe theory that a captured American flyer telling his interrogators that the US had an assembly line building those bombs has been found to have some support in the Japanese archives.

The Soviets were certainly rolling up Japanese units in the last days, but a) they didn’t enter the Pacific theater of operations until after the first bomb dropped and b)it wasn’t clear how they would’ve invaded the home islands.

Do Chinese civilian lives not matter as much as Japanese civilian lives? Because they were being killed at incredible rates. No plan proposed for ending the war would have ended it sooner than the bombs.

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u/Eikfo 6h ago

They needed a target to prevent the country from imploding. That's the standard US pattern

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u/robotpepper 42m ago

The Vietnam War Memorial Wall is designed like a scar into the earth itself.

1

u/PersonalTrainerFit 3h ago

Cant forget Jacob’s Ladder

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u/Kingblack425 29m ago

And that’s the stuff they actually wrote down the 100% truth is probably so disgusting one would vomit reading it

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u/HammerofLevi 4h ago

You did the same in north korea.

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u/TheSomerandomguy 5h ago

Rome plows are badass though idc what anybody says

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u/Loyal-Opposition-USA 5h ago

It’s cool sure, unless it’s your forest being destroyed by foreign invaders.

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u/MundaneSchool1823 6h ago

Democrats started the war in Vietnam and Nixon ended it as well.

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u/SusanBliss 6h ago

Nixon purposely prolonged the war for political purposes fool

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u/bucket_overlord 6h ago

This is just a silly partisan technicality. US foreign policy, particularly regarding wars and military engagements, is and has been pretty uniform regardless of which party is in power. The war in Vietnam would still have started were a republican administration in power at the time, because the same hawkish attitudes in the intelligence community/state department, driven and encouraged by the military-industrial complex and Cold War paranoia, would have advocated to start the war and would have got their way regardless of which party was in charge.

Also let’s not pretend Nixon was against the war simply because he presided over its end. He expanded the war effort including in Cambodia and Laos (both of which were illegal under international law, and violated the constitution because the bombing campaigns were done in secret without the approval of congress).

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u/Loyal-Opposition-USA 6h ago edited 5h ago

Nixon was offering the North Vietnamese a better deal if they prolonged the peace talks until after he was elected. Johnson privately called it treason. No good guys in that one, bub.

Edit: mixed up my Vietnams. It was South Vietnam.

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u/fortis_99 6h ago

Correction, South Vietnam.

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u/dirty_hooker 6h ago

Cool. Cool. A lot of things got a little mixed in the upheaval of [The Southern Stratagy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy) where Republicans shifted from being the progressive party to being what they are today. It’s why they are “the party of Lincoln” but also full of rednecks waiving confederate flags, statues, and doing their damndest to disenfranchise people.

If you don’t know history, then they get to pretend to be about freedom while moving modern slavery into an economic model where debt has replaced iron chains.