“Dave [Maier] didn’t know that the riverbanks had been defoliated with Agent Orange to protect against Viet Cong attack, or that the herbicide had washed off the banks and into the river. But he did notice that the shoreline somehow looked wrong. There was too much sand, and the vegetation “just drooped.” Most trees looked like sticks, with nothing growing on them. “The river itself looked absolutely terrible. It looked like the color of coffee.” Some of his shipmates tried to fish in it, but they never caught anything.
“His first time in Vietnam, Dave stood on the deck of his ship and studied the river. He remembered reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring back in high school. He kept bees then and wanted to find out whether pesticides could hurt them. “I’m up there on the deck, and I’m looking at that river, and all this crap floating through it, it’s like a dead river, and not much vegetation along the sides. And I thought, if there ever was a silent spring, this is it."
“The Westchester County had no facilities for storing fresh water. Ships from the “blue water navy” were designed to desalinate ocean water for drinking and general use. Unable to do this in Vietnam, the ship simply pumped river water into its holding tank. This water, which looked so much like coffee from a distance, was the color of tea when it came out of the ship’s pipes and faucets. The men brushed their teeth with it, showered and shaved with it, did their laundry in it.”
Read more about the effects of Agent Orange exposure...
