EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: The US in Vietnam

The US in Vietnam

By Larry Romanoff

Article in PDF here -- US in Vietnam

 

 

The Creation of a Media Myth

Agent Orange

NAPALM

The CIA's Phoenix Program

The RAND Corporation

Abandoned POWs in Vietnam

 

The Creation of a Media Myth

 

In addition to the false-flag operation and its attendant lies that propelled the US into a full war with Vietnam was an enormous prior effort to manipulate public opinion and alter perceptions about the truth of Vietnam itself, which truth has never seen the light of day in America. Many Americans firmly believe to this day that their country entered Vietnam to protect and save the democratic South from invasion by the brutal communist North, and to contain Soviet "expansionism" and the "spread" of communism over all of Asia. But nothing in the official narrative was ever true, the US story a complete lie and entirely contrary to the reality.

 

 

For background, France had maintained Vietnam and parts of Southeast Asia as a forced colony since the late 1800s, and restored their colonial rule after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945, leading to increased resentment and military resistance, their total defeat in the battle of Dien Ben Phu in 1954 finally forcing the French to concede they had lost Vietnam. In an effort to restore peace to the region, UN negotiations produced a set of documents known as the Geneva Accords, which briefly created a temporary non-political boundary between North and South and directed that national elections be held for a government of the unified and soon to be free nation. And to specifically put aside any notion that the boundary was a partition, the Geneva Agreements stated that the military demarcation line was "provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary".

 

But the Americans, who had been using the French as a proxy, directing the war and paying most of its expenses, were loath to abandon the prospect of a lucrative colony. Instead of permitting peace to return, the Americans greatly increased military aid and activity in the South, and forcibly created a new fake government, importing a genocidal expatriate Vietnamese from New Jersey named Ngo Dinh Diem to be president, effectively colonising South Vietnam as a proxy for its intended war against the North. The US even staged a massive, and reprehensibly fake, election hailed in the Western media as 'free and fair', with American officials fabricating 'an 83 per cent turnout despite Vietcong terror'. It was all a fiction. The Americans also refused to allow the UN to administer the decreed national elections to take place because virtually the entire population was already supporting Ho Chi Minh in North Vietnam, which would have removed the US from any position of control. US President Eisenhower stated openly there was no question that "80 per cent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh as their leader", a condition the Americans would not permit. From that point, the US continued its military escalation, for ten years using the South Vietnamese as fodder in a bitter civil war, until finally staging its false-flag operation with the USS Maddox and declaring all-out war on Vietnam in 1964.

 

But the American history books tell a very different version. They claim that under the 1954 Geneva Accords "Vietnam was partitioned into communist north and democratic south" and, as John Pilger noted, "In one sentence, truth is dispatched". The American books created a fictitious moral world of good South and bad North with the Soviet Union brutally expanding its evil influence and the Americans once again defending the righteous. But of course, it was no such thing. The entire population of Vietnam wanted only to be united and freed of foreign imperialism and its former colonial masters, but in refusing to accept this outcome the US had declared war on both the North and the South, and without support from either side. The US media began a decade-long propaganda campaign to demonise the North Vietnamese and totally fabricate a Russian communist threat to justify the heavy American military presence. The CIA was tasked with this onslaught of disinformation and ordered to maintain the illusion through the media.

 

Almost everything in the American history books about Vietnam is an outright lie. As one author said so well, "What this essentially tells us is that, for all the democratic ideals that America claims to espouse, as soon as someone who does not agree with their viewpoint is voted in, they will do anything in their power to subvert and undermine them. This is rephrased and then becomes the 'official' history of events, finding its way into everything from textbooks to documentaries". And in all of the vicious commentary about the spread of Russian communism, there is not a word about the "spread" of the much more vicious and rapacious America, looking for domination at any cost. And even today, American tourists to Vietnam are offended to see war memorials depicting the truly horrendous human cost to the Vietnamese of this American 'adventure' and the blame laid on the US for the continuing misery from napalm and Agent Orange. The American guidebooks advise their travelers to simply view these memorials as ignorant "anti-Americanism" and not treat them seriously.

 

Agent Orange

 

Agent Orange is a highly toxic herbicide, defoliant and carcinogen consisting of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, intermixed with another especially lethal dioxin named TCDD. The chemical was the creation of joint efforts between the British and the Americans to design a bio-weapon that would totally exterminate an enemy's food crops[1][2][3]. Some of the chemical's components proved useful as commercial herbicides and later entered the mass markets, though eventually proving too destructive to the environment for continued use. The US military was testing Agent Orange as a bio-weapon in the early 1940s, especially for rice crops, and began full-scale production for use against Japan before the end of the war. And yes, they did use it against Japan. The US tested well over 1,000 similar compounds and conducted field trials of "the more promising ones", especially in Tanganyika and Kenya to assess the value of millions of liters of carcinogenic herbicides in the eradication of (1) trees and bushes concealing terrorists and (2) socialist governments. Arthur Galston, TCDD's developer, cited it as "perhaps the most toxic molecule ever synthesized by man" but, according to Photoshop and Mr. Sanitise, its insertion into Agent Orange was a mistake, an unintended manufacturing side effect, and present in only "vanishingly small quantities".

 

The sanitised version that finds its way into American history books is that the US military used it as a 'defoliant', a gentle process of removing the leaves from a few trees where Vietnamese snipers might be hiding, but that was never true. This extraordinarily lethal chemical was used in an effort to destroy Vietnam's entire rice crops, and the nation's food supply, and to contaminate the soil and groundwater to the extent that re-growth would become impossible. There is no shortage of publicly-available photographs showing US Army helicopters and C-123 transports spraying Agent Orange over Vietnamese agricultural land, rivers, lakes and water reservoirs. The official version was that President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam asked the United States to conduct aerial herbicide spraying in his country, but that claim is ridiculous nonsense. Diem was an American gangster transplanted from New Jersey by the US government and installed as the fictitious president of a fictitious 'South Vietnam'.

 

 

Agent Orange was an attempt at the genocide of the Vietnamese people, and totally unrelated to defoliation of anything. The record clearly states that in Quang Ngai province alone, 85% of all the croplands were scheduled to be destroyed in 1970 alone, leaving hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese starving to death. Many authors have noted testimony that US military personnel were officially informed the destroyed crops were being produced to feed "insurgents" and "guerillas", but eventually discovered they were simply eradicating the entire food supply of the civilian population.

 

   

The Americans sprayed more than 100 million liters of this chemical in South Vietnam alone, resulting in at least 10 million hectares of agricultural land being ultimately totally destroyed and perhaps never recoverable. In fact, in Congressional testimony in 1965, it was admitted by the US military that "crop destruction is .... the more important purpose ... but the emphasis is usually given to the jungle defoliation in public mention of the program." And it was once again the pathologically genocidal "analysts" at the RAND corporation who engineered this travesty, stating in one memorandum (5446-ISA/ARPA) "the fact that the VC obtain most of their food from the neutral rural population dictates the destruction of civilian crops ... if they (the VC) are to be hampered by the crop destruction program, it will be necessary to destroy large portions of the rural economy – probably 50% or more". Using the RAND memo and Congressional testimony as references, it becomes abundantly clear the only purpose of the chemical was to destroy Vietnam's entire food supply and force a military surrender from starvation. Of the millions of Vietnamese living in the contaminated areas, many hundreds of thousands were reported suffering from severe malnutrition and there is little doubt many or most of those died, but the Western media have completely censored this topic, maintaining the fiction of Agent Orange and other lethal herbicides as 'defoliants' to 'deter snipers'.

 

Even today, after nearly 50 years, the Americans refuse to accept any responsibility or liability for the human and ecological destruction of much of Vietnam. The US government repeated states it "does not recognize any legal liability for damages alleged to be related to Agent Orange", and it refuses to accept the accuracy of tests or validity of claims of damage to either human health or the ecosystem, refusing to discuss the issue and denying the credibility of all claims. In one recent Congressional Report, "Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange and U.S.-Vietnam Relations Michael F. Martin Specialist in Asian Affairs August 29, 2012", the typical American position is that:

 

"Virtually every aspect of the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam is infused with uncertainty and/or controversy. There is some question about the amount of Agent Orange and other herbicides sprayed in Vietnam, as well as the amount of dioxin contained in the Agent Orange used. It is also unclear exactly where the herbicides were sprayed and the amount sprayed at each location. Nor is it known who was exposed to Agent Orange and its dioxin, and for what duration they were exposed. Finally, there is limited information about the long-term effects of Agent Orange on the environment and people of Vietnam. The uncertainty and controversies are in part attributable to the general “fog of war."

 

And there we are. The Americans don't actually know if, when, or where, they sprayed Agent Orange, or if the spray contained any toxic chemicals, nor who might have been exposed, nor if the dioxins were really toxic after all. The fact that international agencies have repeatedly discovered toxic concentrations in many locations in Vietnam at nearly 400 times the maximum permitted international levels, is apparently irrelevant. The Vietnamese government of course filed claims in US courts for compensation and damages for the irreparable environmental and human carnage resulting from those 100 million liters of dioxins poured on their country and its people. But, following the well-established principles of rule of law, those US courts dismissed the claims. In their rulings, they cited the principle of sovereign immunity, but they could just as well have applied the doctrine of 'self-inflicted injury', from their fatuous claim that the Vietnamese government asked the US to conduct aerial herbicide spraying in the country. So, it was really their own fault anyway.

 

Just so it doesn't go unsaid, some people promote the myth that dioxin has a short 'half-life' and degrades quickly, and that is not true. The lethal dioxin components can remain stable - and lethal - for 100 years or more, especially in underground aquifers, resulting in health problems and birth defects for generations, either through ingesting the contaminated water or from high concentrations in the plant life. In many areas of the country, these dioxins are still at levels many hundreds of times higher than the maximum 'safe limits' stated by medical experts. The Vietnamese government estimates that nearly 500,000 people have died from Agent Orange poisoning to date, and that more than half a million children have been born with birth defects. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that perhaps 1 million people are currently disabled or suffering serious health problems from Agent Orange contamination, including the fact that even today high levels of dioxins are found in the breast milk of many Vietnamese mothers. The US government of course refutes all these figures and claims on the basis that "the Vietnamese are notoriously unreliable", as are all other nations presenting evidence of American military-flavored democracy.

 

NAPALM

   

Napalm - essentially jellied gasoline with incendiary additives - was developed by a team led by the Jewish chemist Louis F. Fieser in 1942 at Harvard University in a top-secret war research collaboration with the United States government. It was made from a mixture of powdered aluminum soap of naphthalene with palmitate and, when added to gasoline it acted as a gelling agent. It was originally used to increase the range of flamethrowers almost tenfold, but found its most inhuman use in incendiary bombs.[4][5] Napalm burns at around 2,000 degrees Celsius, and sticks to human flesh, making it impossible to wipe off. In Vietnam, civilians quickly discovered they could extinguish the flames by immersing themselves in water, so the geniuses at Harvard concocted the practice of infusing napalm with white phosphorus, which cannot be extinguished once lit, and will burn a man right through his bones even under water.

 

Independence Day, 1942: the first field test of napalm, behind Harvard Business School.Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives/ Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method

 

The US used napalm in attacks on Germany in 1944, in Saipan, Iwo Jima, the Philippines and Okinawa, in Korea, China, and in Japan. In Vietnam, the US dropped nearly 400,000 tons of napalm on Vietnamese military and civilian locations, and Curtis LeMay and his team dropped 700,000 pounds of it on Tokyo, in one of the most inhumane war atrocities ever committed. In Vietnam, napalm was used on military installations, but it was applied at least as often on Vietnamese food supplies and on the civilians.

 

"The horrifying photograph of children fleeing a deadly napalm attack has become a defining image not only of the Vietnam War, but of the 20th century."[6] One of the most famous photos emerging from the Vietnam war is of a naked 9-year-old girl, burning with napalm on her back, running in terror from the attack. The girl, since identified as Phan Thi Kim Phuc, ultimately survived her injuries.

 

  The children from left to right are: Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim's cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting. Behind them are soldiers of the Vietnam Army 25th Division, June 8, 1972. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)

   

Bombs with a mixture of napalm and white phosphorus jelly dropped by Vietnamese Air Force Skyraider bombers explode across Route 1, amid homes and in front of the Cao Dai temple on the outskirts of Trang Bang, Vietnam, June 8, 1972. (Nick Ut/AP Photo)

 

The CIA's Phoenix Program

 

This was one of the most brutal and corrupt series of events in American history, involving the most violent acts of torture and terrorism conducted on an unbelievably widespread scale against the innocent civilians of Vietnam. Like all such American programs in the third world, this was an organised program of genocide, one which the US government and media denied then, and continue to deny today in spite of volumes of documented proof. The objective of the Phoenix Program - and many similar since, conducted by the US military and the CIA - was to eliminate by destruction the entire social infrastructure of the Vietnamese resistance to American colonisation. This was accomplished by mass murder on an unprecedented scale, astonishing use of terror tactics against civilians, and one of the most brutal torture programs ever initiated in the history of the world.[7]

 

A man named Barton Osborne who was assigned to this CIA and military project at the time, wrote that "It was basically a psychological operation, and it was very well done. Americans have done it many times before. The theory is you don't kill the leader, you kill his children, or his family. Basically, what you do is you destroy the chief's family ... when the guy [returns home], he sees this mess - you know, his wife beheaded, and her infant child stripped out of her abdomen, and beheaded and bleeding on her body, hung from a rafter, [excrement] all over the walls, those kind of things - that's how you do it. So the whole operation loses its fighting will. And that's basically "The American Way." Osborn testified further before the US Congress, "I never knew in the course of all those operations any detainee to live through his interrogation. They all died. Not a single suspect survived interrogation ... and the majority were either tortured to death or thrown out of helicopters."

 

One American official who was an "advisor" in the Phoenix program stated, "It was common knowledge that when someone was picked up [to be 'interrogated'] their lives were about at an end." I won't go into details of the inhumanities inflicted on the victims but one example of the ingenuity of Americans is worthy of note. Barton testified that the "interrogators" (There is always the pretense of an interrogation, suggesting questioning for vital military information. The pretense is always false.) would take a six-inch wooden dowel and pound it into a man's ear and into his brain, then letting him wander around crazed, until he died.

 

"There are chilling accounts of direct CIA atrocities in South Vietnam, particularly in the Bien Hoa Mental Hospital in Saigon. It is reported that in 1966 Dr Lloyd H. Cutter and two other psychiatrists were sent with an electroshock machine provided by the Technical Services Division of the Office of Public Safety (OPS), to test whether certain depatterning exercises worked on the brain to alter human behavior. Utilizing the Phoenix ladder, Viet Cong prisoners were brought to the hospital and given excessive shock treatments. For one week straight, they were subjugated to 60 shock treatments every day. Not a single captive survived."[8]

 

All the brutal inhumanities, and the very existence of the Phoenix Program itself, were vehemently denied by the authorities and the media until Barton's testimony and the publication of several books on the program. Upon being forced to appear before the US Congress to testify, then CIA Director William Colby admitted the existence of Phoenix and the deaths of perhaps 20,000 Vietnamese civilians. The Vietnamese have a much higher number of confirmed deaths from this program, many official and apparently documented estimates ranging well over 250,000. American officials dismiss Vietnamese claims on the basis that "Vietnamese statistics are notoriously unreliable." Barton had testified there were "quotas" of nearly 2,000 such torture deaths to be performed each month, for a program that lasted ten years or more, all under the watchful eye of Robert McNamara.

 

THE PHOENIX PROGRAM -- Douglas Valentine

 

There was of course the traditional and mandatory Congressional investigation that exposed the crimes then quickly buried the evidence and airbrushed the entire episode from public memory. The investigation stated "the Phoenix Program had been used by the CIA as "an instrument of mass political murder" to neutralize politicians and activists who opposed America's puppet government in Vietnam." After the Congressional investigations, various authors published books on the program, T.P. Wilkinson and Douglas Valentine for two, but the media refused to publish reviews of these and other books, bitterly attacking the authors and their sanity. A common tactic was to claim the authors were suffering from "serious psychological scars" from their wartime experience and were therefore not credible witnesses. Most wrote that the object of the program was to identify and terrorise every supporter of Vietnam and every opponent of the American presence in Vietnam, and that "What followed was murder and torture ... on a grand scale. Untold thousands died and were tortured."

 

In fact, the Phoenix Program was following prior CIA experience in the destruction of nations, and became a template the US would use in many other nations, post-Vietnam, in Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, most of Central and South America, as well as Africa and Asia. This is what the Israelis do in Palestine against the Arabs, and was what the Americans did when they spawned the massive genocidal massacre in Indonesia. It is worthy of note that a Director of the new US Department of Homeland Security was a major officer in the Phoenix Program, with many citizens concerned the same tactics will essentially be utilised to dispel dissention within the US. Valentine wrote of the "insidious" infiltration of these methods into the militarisation of the US police and their new "methods of population control and suppression of dissent". One author wrote that "It is no accident that the torture methods [Barton] documented [in Vietnam] are strikingly similar to those revealed in the December 2014 Senate torture report [for Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib], since Vietnam was the first testing ground for "a new paradigm in the practice of torture developed by the CIA"." He stated further the CIA "had launched a multi-billion-dollar research program" on the methods for such programs. It should be noted too that the CIA had prepared, from its extensive experience, a 1,000-page torture manual which it not only applied as a template around the world, but used as the prime teaching material in the curriculum at its famous "torture university", the School of the Americas, and which it shared with all the 50 dictators the US installed around the world.

 

The "targets" of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam were civilians, not soldiers, as has been true for US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq and so many other nations. The local population who rebel against American oppression and terror are invariably categorised as "terrorists" to be hunted down and killed. This was precisely Obama's policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with his use of drone aircraft, targeting and killing members of the domestic population who object to the American presence in their country. One former US military official wrote that the US was a country "where all common decency" has disappeared. An American author, William Shirer, wrote in 1973, at the time of the intense and inhuman conflict in Vietnam,

 

Until we go through it ourselves, until our people cower in the shelters of New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere while the buildings collapse overhead and burst into flames, and dead bodies hurtle about and, when it is over for the day or the night, emerge in the rubble to find some of their dear ones mangled, their homes gone, their hospitals, churches, schools demolished — only after that gruesome experience will we realize what we are inflicting on the people of Indochina."

 

The RAND Corporation

 

Joint Chiefs of Staff meet at the LBJ Ranch; Scope and content: Location: LBJ Ranch. Depicted: Major General Chester Clifton, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, President Lyndon B. Johnson, General Curtis LeMay, General Earle Wheeler, Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, General Harold Johnson, Admiral David McDonald, General Wallace Greene. SOURCE

 

Before Robert McNamara left his position as US Defense Secretary, he created a group to write what he termed an "encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War", which eventually comprised about 7,000 pages in 47 volumes and was classified Top Secret. Copies of this material were supplied to the RAND corporation where an analyst named Daniel Ellsberg found them. Ellsberg copied the entire files which contained an astonishing amount of information on illegal CIA programs, massacres, deaths, cover-ups and more, and tried to expose the criminality to various high-level government officials including Henry Kissinger, none of whom were apparently interested. Ellsberg then released the material to the media, which became known as the scandal called "The Pentagon Papers". They revealed for the first time the illegal American bombing of Laos and Cambodia and the fact that four successive US Presidents had lied enormously to the public about US military activities in South-East Asia. Ellsberg wrote at the time, "I felt that as an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public."

 

Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg leave a Los Angeles courthouse after promising to appear later before a federal Grand Jury investigating the leak of the so-called Pentagon Papers. (AP Photo/GB) source: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/secret-origins-cias-torture-program-and-forgotten-man-who-tried-expose-it/

 

But there was more. One of Ellsberg's associates at the RAND Corporation named Anthony Russo had written a paper on the Phoenix and other Programs that Ellsberg claimed was "the first to document American complicity in the routine use of torture". Russo had apparently written three such papers on the subject, a project for which he was eventually fired. The RAND corporation refuses to release copies of those documents, the reason being, according to many military experts, that RAND analysts performed all the research that led to the creation of the CIA's torture practices and to the existence of the Phoenix Program itself. In other words, Russo had independently catalogued not only the existence of the CIA's massive torture and civil repression programs, but unwittingly also catalogued the RAND Corporation's responsibility in creating those programs.

 

RAND is an acronym for Research and Development", originally created immediately after World War II as a private research arm of the US Air Force, under the control of Curtis LeMay who was responsible for the genocidal fire-bombing of Japan and the genocide in North Korea. RAND staff concentrated on areas like new weapons development, including biological and chemical warfare, and performing what was called "advanced strategic thinking" on how to wage war. One grave concern is that RAND has recently published (internally) a comprehensive report on a proposed US war with China, discussing strategy and tactics and probable losses, apparently concluding the US would suffer much less from the conflict than would China. This is what RAND does. RAND Corporation "analysts" were present and active in Vietnam during the period of the Phoenix Program and were so active that reports state "RAND’s Saigon villa became the requisite "prestige stop" for anyone with an interest in the war", and that the RAND Corporation actually served as a "command center" for Project Phoenix. It was this deep involvement that Russo wanted to expose to the public, the fact that this so-called 'think tank' had quietly not only affected but created this inhuman political policy totally unknown to the public.

 

You can read the RAND Corporation's version of their internally-conceived and created Phoenix Program that was designed for Vietnam,[9] with RAND telling us that "Phoenix made positive contributions to counterinsurgency in South Vietnam". Even more usefully, RAND claims that "One of the major advantages of Phoenix was that it was a relatively low-cost program". What more do you need to know about the RAND Corporation and the people who work for it?

 

It wasn't only torture programs that emerged from RAND; others have claimed RAND was responsible for a huge range of inhuman practices relating to Vietnam, items like recommending the use of red-colored plastic shrapnel that would be invisible to x-rays and render difficult or impossible its removal from wounded soldiers. Another was the recommendation that American soldiers should not shoot to kill, but should shoot Vietnamese in the abdomen or the bowels so as to strain the enemy's medical resources. There are no human beings working at the RAND Corporation

 

Abandoned POWs in Vietnam

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NJn6kY4Rdk

 

Another despicable atrocity the US government has heavily censored to prevent public exposure is the thousands of prisoners of war deliberately left behind and abandoned in Vietnam. The matter first came to light during the court-martial of Robert Garwood in 1985, where he testified at his trial that the US government had knowingly and deliberately abandoned its soldiers for the sake of cheap politics and money. Garwood claimed there were many Americans remaining in Vietnam long after the war ended, with his testimony being supported by many veterans with impeccable credentials. One of these was the former head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency General Tighe, and a Captain McDaniel, who held the Navy's top award for bravery. It was revealed that the Vietnamese government had held back many thousands of American POWs as a means to ensure the US would pay the more than $3 billion in war reparations to which it was committed. But the US government had no intention of paying those reparations, and so simply abandoned the prisoners to their fate. This was known by many government leaders including Senator John McCain who had himself been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and has been kept as a state secret for 40 years. In simple terms, the US balked at paying reparations to Vietnam because that would constitute a public admission of not only guilt and wrong-doing but of having been defeated by Vietnam, and since paying the money was the price of releasing the prisoners of war, the US government just abandoned them and for decades threatened people with execution if they talked.

 

If that weren't enough, by 1975, after North Vietnam’s victory over both South Vietnam and the Americans, and the US exit from the country, then US President Gerald Ford was so unapologetic and embittered he severed all diplomatic relations with Vietnam and imposed a brutal trade embargo on the country in an attempt to achieve through economic war what the US military had failed to achieve.

 

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Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

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NOTES

[1] What is Agent Orange?

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/agent-orange-in-vietnam-program/what-is-agent-orange/

[2] Agent Orange Wasn’t the Only Deadly Chemical Used In Vietnam

https://www.history.com/news/agent-orange-wasnt-the-only-deadly-chemical-used-in-vietnam

[3] Agent Orange

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange

[4] How Napalm Went From Hero to Villain During the Vietnam War

https://historycollection.com/napalm-hero-villain-vietnam-war/

[5] Napalm in Vietnam War 

https://thevietnamwar.info/napalm-vietnam-war/

[6] 'Napalm Girl' at 50: The story of the Vietnam War's defining photo - with video

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/napalm-girl-50-snap/index.html

[7] The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22309162-the-phoenix-program

[8] Mercy of the Wicked: The CIA’s Phoenix Program

https://greydynamics.com/mercy-of-the-wicked-the-cias-phoenix-program/

[9]  The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency  -- RAND_OP258

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP258.pdf

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