Special to The Washington Post
Monday, January 3, 2000

“We used Agent Orange to save lives.”

Hundreds of thousands of American and Vietnamese cancer victims and their deformed progeny might have a more refined position.

Zumwalt Sr and his cohorts OK’d the use of agent orange knowing exactly what it would do to Vietnamese peasants and American soldiers.

Only the WaPo could write such a puff peace on the key figure in military crop dusting of a foreign country and our own people with cancer.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-01/03/036r-010300-idx.html

Zumwalt was a charismatic, innovative and sometimes controversial leader whose service began in the great crusade of World War II and ended in the ambiguities and contradictions of Vietnam.

In the latter struggle, he ordered the use of the defoliant Agent Orange to reduce U.S. casualties. In 1988, his son and namesake, who had served in Vietnam and been exposed to the herbicide, died of cancer. Although he believed Agent Orange had caused his son’s illness, Zumwalt never doubted the necessity of using it. Read the rest of this entry »