Maine Army Guard troops haunted by Agent Orange

[unhappycamper]

http://www.pressherald.com/news/maine-army-guard-troops-haunted-by-agent-orange_2013-03-17.html

Maine Army Guard troops haunted by Agent Orange
By Kevin Miller
Washington Bureau Chief
Yesterday at 11:31 PM

WASHINGTON - Two weeks a year for six years, Carroll Jandreau stepped away from life in far northern Maine to dig, crawl and sleep in the dirt of a massive military training base in neighboring Canada.

"When we would go there, they would say, 'Make sure not to bathe in the pools of water, not to drink the water and not to eat the vegetation,"' Jandreau said. "But we couldn't eat the vegetation because the leaves were all brown and crisp."

Jandreau, a member of the Maine Army National Guard, would learn decades later why the grass and shrubs covering the training grounds at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown appeared burnt.

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, Canadian officials applied massive quantities of chemical herbicides and defoliants -- including a small amount of Agent Orange -- to Gagetown's fields to keep the vegetation at bay.