Opinion Forum

Update: Agent Orange’s Toxic Trail

January 28th, 2013

By Jan Barry In the seaside city of Da Nang, Vietnam, a clean-up is underway to remove dioxin-contaminated soil at a former U.S. military air base. Some 8,500 miles to the east, another clean-up is underway to remove dioxin hot spots along the Passaic River in Newark, NJ and upstream, where tides and floods have […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, birth defects, clean-up, illness, U.S., veterans, Vietnam
Categories: History, Military, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Winning Hearts and Minds

January 27th, 2013

By Jan Barry Fifty years ago, I turned 20 in Saigon, a very drunk and slap happy soldier in the service of the US Military Assistance Command Vietnam. We were making war, when we weren’t doing Happy Hours in every bar from Soc Trang to Da Nang, under slick counter-insurgency slogans like “Winning Hearts and […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, anniversary, poetry, PTSD, suicide, veterans, war, WHAM
Categories: Arts, Military | Comments (0) | Home

Uncle Sam’s Dioxin Cover-Up

July 19th, 2011

By Jan Barry Vietnam and New Jersey, despite the vast distance between them, share a deadly link. Both places, lushly beautiful this time of year, were poisoned by United States government actions regarding one of the most toxic chemicals, dioxin. In Vietnam, dioxin was widely spread as a contaminant in forest-killing Agent Orange herbicides that […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, dioxin, EPA, Ford, HBO, Mann, New Jersey, pollution, toxic
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Environmental Writing 2011

May 27th, 2011

By Jan Barry From Agent Orange’s insidious grasp out of the past of the war in Vietnam to current health concerns of many residents of Ramapo River communities, to the potential future effects of global climate change, 11 student-reporters at Ramapo College of New Jersey dug into a wide array of ecological issues in the […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, climate change, Earth, environment, projects, students
Categories: Education, News, Science | Comments (0) | Home

Agent Orange’s Toxic Legacy Hits Home

January 13th, 2011

By Jan Barry Retired Master Sergeant LeRoy Foster is haunted by the job that launched his 20-year career in the US Air Force—spraying herbicides along perimeter fences and fuel pipelines at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. This duty seemed inconsequential, field maintenance work done amid B-52 bombers thundering in and out to refuel for […]

Articles written by Jan Barry
Tags: Agent Orange, birth defects, contamination, disease, Guam, VA, veterans
Categories: Military, News, Politics, Science | Comments (46) | Home