AO: Seeing a need

Community School teacher visits Vietnam to aid disabled children

Naples residents Mike and Melinda Mansfield visited Hanoi, Vietnam, earlier this year to help children with birth defects, likely as a result of Agent Orange, at a school devoted to working with profoundly disabled youngsters.

November 19, 2010 - When Mike Mansfield was a teenager, he worked on a road crew in his home state of Illinois. As part of that job, he was charged with killing the weeds that grew alongside the county highway. To do so, he and his co-workers sprayed a diluted version of Agent Orange.

Mansfield never forgot what that chemical did to those weeds.

“It was amazing,” he said, sounding equally impressed and horrified. “You would put it on this plant, and it would immediately die.”

Mansfield is now a United States government and 20th century history teacher at the Community School of Naples. He regularly takes his students on field trips, and in 2000, he took a group to Vietnam. While he was there, he noticed what seemed to be an unusually high number of birth defects.

“It kind of got me interested,” he recalled.

Used to strip the Vietnamese countryside of its foliage, an estimated 20 million gallons of Agent Orange was sprayed by the United States military during the Vietnam War. From 1962 to 1971, approximately 6,000 spray missions were conducted, Mansfield said; in 60 percent of those missions, Agent Orange was used.

There is an ongoing debate about the link between birth defects and Agent Orange exposure. The research is not considered conclusive, but the Vietnam Veterans of America reports that of the 2.8 million Americans who served in Vietnam, 3 percent to 6 percent of their children have been born with birth defects. {read rest}

Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign