Word: viet
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When U.S. Air Force flyers dumped millions of gallons of an oily herbicide called Agent Orange over the thick jungle canopy of war-ravaged Viet Nam, they unwittingly started a battle that would rage long after the last American helicopter left Saigon. Over the past 13 years, some 35,000 Viet Nam veterans have vigorously pressed Washington to compensate them for injuries and illnesses that they believe were caused by exposure to Agent Orange. The herbicide contains dioxin, a potent poison that causes cancer in laboratory animals. But Government officials have delayed paying most claims, pointing to a lack...
...long-awaited five-year study found "no evidence" that Agent Orange injured soldiers in the field. The report did conclude that Viet Nam veterans are more likely than the general population to get a rare, fatal cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. But for some mysterious reason, the veterans who suffer from this cancer were predominantly sailors who were stationed off the Viet Nam shore and who had relatively little exposure to the defoliant. Even though the CDC could find no link between Agent Orange and increased cancer, Veterans Affairs Secretary Edward Derwinski immediately authorized compensation for about...
...know, there were two aspects of the agreement. One has been totally forgotten. The two aspects were: one, that the U.S. would continue to support South Viet Nam, just as the Soviets would be expected to be supporting North Viet Nam. The other was that the U.S., in the event that the North Vietnamese complied with the terms, would also support them economically. In other words, there was the economic package...
Naturally, this is self-serving, but everything I say is self-serving. But had I survived, I think that it would have been possible to have implemented $ the agreement. South Viet Nam would still be a viable non-Communist enclave or whatever you want to call it. But because I think that I had enormous credibility with the North -- because of what I'd done on May 8 ((ordering the mining of North Vietnamese ports)), because of what I'd done in December ((ordering the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong)) -- they thought, Well, this unpredictable...
Meanwhile, Indian military leaders were pondering why things had gone so wrong in their rough equivalent of America's debacle in Viet Nam. Invited into Sri Lanka by then President J.R. Jayewardene, the Indian army's original mission was to collect arms from Tamil militants, who had been trained and equipped by India in the first place. In exchange, Jayewardene promised that the 2 million Tamils, who have suffered discrimination at the hands of the majority Sinhalese (11.8 million), would be given more autonomy over a newly created Northeastern province, where they predominate. But when the Tigers refused to give...