In recent years, Agent Orange has re-entered scholarly discourse as a fertile site for investigating the confluence of slow violence, intergenerational trauma, and the molecularization of chemical regimes. This study analyzes how the political economy that gave way to the discovery and tactical use of Agent Orange “abroad” during times of “war,” finds several new homes on US soil. First, I discuss how Agent Orange was tested domestically at Eglin Air Force Base in the western Florida Panhandle, prior to and during its use in Vietnam, to trace how civilian workers who worked on base were made into surplus labor through banal daily exposure to the chemical compounds. Second, I analyze how Vietnamese refugees were transported to Eglin Air Force Base in 1975 as it became one of four relocation centers used as temporary “homes” for refugees awaiting sponsorship by US American families. Finally, I trace how herbicides are being reintroduced in the Mekong Delta within rural farming communities to help maintain the demand of global agricultural circuits. By tracing these three interwoven examples of how military herbicides were domesticated, this essay weaves analyses of the spectacular violence of chemical warfare, with their more mundane iterations, to home in on the forms of toxicity that linger and are reproduced at home.

In the spring of 2018, our journey to Lan’s childhood home near Cần Thơ, Vietnam, consisted of a five-hour bus ride followed by another thirty-minute trip in a local commuter van.¹ The van didn’t stop, it only slowed as it neared destinations, so we lurched out on to the dirt road once we rounded the bend in front of the house. At the time, I was a graduate student aiming to research the ongoing effects of Agent Orange and the larger intergenerational effects of the 1970s wars in Southeast Asia—many of which I experienced in my own refugee family. Lan, who was just a few years older, recently finished medical school in Vietnam where she was born and grew up. She contacted me a few months earlier hoping to connect about my research and how disability was understood in other national contexts. We made our friendship swiftly over dark ca phe sửa đá and translations of disability-related terms hastily scribbled on the back of napkins.

Arriving at her home in the Mekong Delta, a region known for its sweet food, and as the local saying goes, equally “sweet” people, we were greeted by Lan’s father. He was a man of few words. He smirked, opened the driveway gate, and unlocked the door to the house. As the door squeaked open, a dusty humid air blew past my face, unveiling the living room and kitchen, which had furniture strewn about, still covered in white sheets to protect from dust and other elements during the house’s remodel. Most strikingly, the windows of the home were not enclosed by glass but rather open to the outside, save for a few metal bars and old wooden shutters that were crookedly propped open. Mosquitos and geckos crossed freely through the boundaries of the home. An old ceiling fan teetered above. These were our quarters for the night.

As we settled in, a distinctly metal stench punctured the space and wafted through the bedroom. My nervous system bristled at the chemical smell. Out the window—which was more of a portal than a barrier—I saw Lan’s father gathering trash into a round metal drum in which he lit a large pile of refuse ablaze. I noted to myself that the drum was not unlike the steel barrels once used to hold herbicides during the war—perhaps it was indeed one of them? It was almost as if I could feel the melting particles of plastic waft up with the embers and affix themselves onto the bronchioles in my lungs.

On my way to the shower, a much-needed reprieve from our sweat-filled ride, Lan told me there is no running water because the bathrooms are being fixed, but we can use water from the nearby well to bathe. I was struck. My desire to be a gracious guest, paired with hyperawareness of my diasporic status in my supposed home country, and my longing to be perceived as assimilable into my colleague’s childhood home all balanced precariously on my decision to use the water. And yet, my research on Agent Orange betrayed the pretense of my belonging as knowledge about the geography of herbicide dispersion knocked at the back of my mind and I couldn’t help but feel multiply exposed. First, to the particulates that pierced through the air from the garbage fire, and second, to the supposedly invisible effects of chemical warfare that I knew lingered in the ground water in this region. Suddenly, my politics of exposure were put on trial.

In recounting my experience of the somatic and ethical complexities of ongoing herbicide exposure in the Mekong Delta, I introduce how chemical warfare persists across transnational domestic spaces. My colleague’s childhood home became the site of unexpected material and affective encounters with the ongoing afterlives of Agent Orange, the primary herbicide used in Operation Ranch Hand, which was a US military tactical mission that took place between 1961 and 1971 and which aimed to defoliate dense jungle foliage during the wars in Southeast Asia. Scholars, activists, and popular media sources have detailed the ways that the herbicide indiscriminately debilitated human populations and multispecies landscapes, including how it continues to render certain regions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia uninhabitable (Fox 2007, 2013, 2016; Martini 2012; Black 2021; Tu 2021).

In recent years, high-profile lawsuits regarding the widespread global use of the herbicide Roundup (chemical name glyphosate) have reignited interest in chemical compounds that were used as herbicides on international soils during times of war (Yan 2018). Glyphosate was originally manufactured by Monsanto in the 1970s, concurrent with its development and use of military-grade herbicides used in Operation Ranch Hand. As a result, Agent Orange has re-entered scholarly discourse as a fertile site for investigating the confluence of slow violence, intergenerational trauma, chemical kinships, and the molecularization of chemical regimes (Nixon 2011; Zierler 2011; Lee 2020; Morgan and Fortun 2020; Tu 2021). Many of these studies articulate the spatial and temporal scope of the herbicides as a limited geography bounded by rural regions of Southeast Asia and the decade-long Operation Ranch Hand.

This essay alternatively analyzes how the political economy that gave way to the discovery and tactical use of Agent Orange “abroad” during times of “war” finds several new homes on US soil. The chemical experimentation that led to the development of herbicides, after all, originated as a search for growth-enhancing compounds that were meant to increase soybean production domestically in the US and make the US a viable agricultural competitor against the rise of agricultural producers in Asia. It was not until after biochemical graduate student Arthur Galston observed the defoliating effects of high concentrations of the chemical compounds that the US government funded the development of these domestic elixirs into herbicidal agents to be used in warfare. Agrochemical companies, such as Monsanto, then re-engineered herbicide-resistant crops, including a variant of soybeans that were specifically designed to survive the dispersal of the very same herbicides they themselves engineered. The companies were, in this way, profiting from both the proliferation and destruction of plant life by engaging in a biopolitics of vegetation that continues to undergird global agricultural systems today. I consequently trace how capitalist investments in fast growth ultimately leads to the slow deaths of civilian communities that span the Pacific, who often become the unnamed “collateral damage” of ongoing militarization in domestic spaces.

First, I discuss how Agent Orange was tested domestically in the US at Eglin Air Force Base in western Florida—prior to and during its use in Vietnam—to trace how civilian workers who worked on base were made into surplus labor through banal daily exposure to the chemical compounds. The workers performed the “domestic” labor of washing the equipment used to concoct chemical poisons; while in their suburban homes, the workers and their families repeated the domestic labor of washing their clothes, which were made stiff from aerial exposure to the herbicide tests. Because workers were hired by Vitro Services, a private company contracted by the US Department of Defense, they were not offered the same protections or reparations afforded to military personnel even if their proximity to, and duration of, exposure may have exceeded that of the US soldiers who carried out Operation Ranch Hand abroad. In this manner, Agent Orange exposures, which are generally thought to have only occurred on foreign soils and in international waters, were in fact replicated on domestic land and in domestic spheres within the US.

Second, I analyze how Vietnamese refugees were transported to Eglin Air Force Base as it became one of four relocation centers used as temporary “homes” for refugees awaiting sponsorship by US American families in 1975. Refugees were re-homed in a site that was already exposed to the same herbicidal chemicals from which they were seeking refuge, epitomizing what Yến Lê Espiritu (2014) has defined as “militarized refuge(e)s,” populations who are given refuge by the same imperialist forces that are responsible for the violence from which they are seeking refuge. The potential re-exposure of Vietnamese refugees to military-grade herbicides on domestic soil reveals the fallacy of refuge that subtends relocation programs and the ways that refugee populations are subjected to multiple forms of slow violence both in their countries of origin and in their newly established homes.

Finally, this essay locates a third “home” of Agent Orange in the domestication of herbicides that have returned to their original domestic geographies and are now commonly used by average households across the globe to eliminate undesirable vegetal life. I discuss how Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018 to become one of the largest agrochemical conglomerates, reinvested in agricultural industries in Vietnam, hoping to cultivate a new generation of international farmers who are dependent on their chemical products—even going as far as to host an annual contest and gifting pesticide sprayers to contestants in regions where Agent Orange was once sprayed during the wars in Southeast Asia. By tracing these three interwoven examples of how herbicides were domesticated, this essay weaves analyses of the spectacular violence of chemical warfare with its more mundane iterations to home in on the forms of herbicidal toxicity that linger and are reproduced in and at home.

The home has long been a generative site of feminist theorizing, ranging from early critiques of the gendering of domestic labor through more contemporary analyses of how the home becomes narrated as a site of supposed purity and protection (hooks 1990; I. Young 1997; Alaimo 2016). Scales of home extend from the most intimate cellular level, where one’s body is figured as a place of dwelling, through the constructed physical space of inhabitation and the resonant affects that circulate with the idea of home, to legal negotiations about possession and property and the ways that nation-states are imagined as a bounded space of belonging. Of course, across each of these scales, it becomes apparent that domestic spaces are not always the safest places; rather, they can become sites of harm as attempts to construct, imagine, and protect homes often perpetuate violence. This essay consequently traces how militarized domestic spaces are co-constituted by the renewal and redeployment of military technologies and the desire to wield biopolitical power against undomesticated others across multispecies environments.

In her book Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasure in Posthuman Times, Stacy Alaimo (2016) traces how imagined narratives about the individual home become conscripted on to geopolitical policies such that the US nation-state is portrayed as a bounded site needing protection (in the form of homeland security) from the perceived threat of the outside invader. In extending Alaimo’s analysis of how the home is figured as protected space, I’m further interested in how this rhetoric of purity and protectionism maps onto smaller-scale invasions wherein the home also becomes the “human” sphere and the intrusion of chemicals, contaminants, insects, and other nonhuman life threaten the very boundaries of who and what are allowed to live. As domestic household herbicides and pesticides have become commonplace in suburban homes, fences also delineate the spaces of wilderness that are acceptable by reinforcing the boundary of property and protection. Home and the domestic are consequently defined as the limit of liveliness wherein those who belong inside are worthy of care and those who are cast out are differentially exposed to premature death. At stake, then, is a biopolitics of exposure, wherein the domestic is manufactured to be the place of protection and anything external to it becomes a threat. As domestic-grade herbicides become increasingly pervasive, in what has become known as the unavoidability of banal daily exposures to toxic contaminants, I demonstrate how the militarized logics that were used to justify the “extermination” of enemy combatants are expanded and replicated in civilian and domestic settings by groundskeepers and novice gardeners alike (Stack Whitney 2023). In each of these circumstances, herbicides are wielded against the racialized other, either through the imaginary of a racialized enemy or through the disproportionate effects of pesticides and herbicides on low-income agricultural communities of color (Sánchez Barba 2020; Zárate 2023). They are used to protect the notion of a white middle-class suburban domesticity through the selective expulsion of plant, animal, and human-animal life (Lester 2021).

Since the boundaries of the home are, ultimately, constructed, malleable, porous, and fungible, a domesticated garden in an urban homesteading project is a welcome extension of the home—just as certain national borders are made more fluid than others. Feminist biologists have demonstrated how eugenicist narratives about racial purity are co-constituted alongside rhetoric that compares human migrants to insect or plant invasions. Banu Subramaniam, for example, notes how her contingent belonging as an “alien” citizen in the US fluctuated in parallel to the types of nonhuman biological life that were deemed acceptable forms of being (2014, 145). Contrastingly, caring for a garden can extend the sphere of cultivation beyond the immediate borders of the home. Sociologist Manuel Tironi recounts how some women in Puchuncaví, Chile, wipe off the toxic ash from nearby industrial factories from the leaves of their tomato plants as an act of care he names “hypo-intervention” (2018, 439). The persistence of their care despite their knowledge that the polluted debris will again rain down on their homes and gardens is a form of resistance that Tironi recognizes as “intimate activism,” a repertoire of life-enabling practices that counters state violence, corporate monopolies, and climate disaster at the most immediate scale. In pairing these two examples of how the domestic sphere is selectively extended, it also becomes apparent how hierarchies of animated being place non-white humans closer to the figure of invading insects and chemicals, and how, alternatively, caring for nonhuman, plant, and animal life extends the domain of care beyond the realm of white domesticity (Chen 2012).

The bounds of “home” can also be extended unwillingly by imperial powers attempting to “domesticate” the racialized other, resulting in the use of protectionist tactics that have disastrous effects obscured under the pretense of “care.” Alaimo cites geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s reminder that “domestication means domination: the two words have the same root sense of mastery over another being—of bringing it into one’s house or domain” (2016, 19). In accordance with this logic, military-grade herbicides were used as an extension of Cold War policies during US imperial interventions in Colombia between their use during the wars in Southeast Asia and the widespread use of glyphosate in contemporary domestic spaces. Anthropologist Kristina Lyons (2o18) recounts the ways that residents in Colombia endured militarized aerial fumigation between 1994 and 2015 as part of the joint US-Colombia antidrug policy. The dual-government strategy aerially deployed a concentrated form of Monsanto’s glyphosate indiscriminately across farmland, destroying the agricultural yield on small plot farms for decades under the guise of inhibiting the suspected growth of illicit coca, marijuana, and opium poppy crops. This “war on drugs” was ultimately waged by a form of glyphosate that was reportedly 110 times the concentration of Roundup Ultra, which Monsanto (now Bayer) continues to distribute for household use (Lyons 2018, 415). Though the campaign was advertised as a necessary intervention into the illicit drug industry, the wholesale deployment of herbicides affected individual farmers and their living quarters as well. This indiscriminate aerial dispersion of herbicides and their ongoing debilitating effects is also true of the examples I later describe in this essay.

The act of domestication is not only about mastery but also about the biopower necessary to make the wild and unruly into the kept and manageable. According to these settler logics, an animal who is domesticated becomes worthy of care from its human companion. A plant that is domesticated serves the appetites of human consumption. Domesticated beings, then, are those who would presumably not survive without the care afforded to them by their contingent belonging to the home worlds of humans. Herbicides have been recruited to perform this domesticating function, essentially turning spaces, beings, and populations that are perceived to be threats into conscripted laborers. In other words, the strategies that maintain the use of chemical warfare “abroad” are also central to the tactical and biopolitical management of racialized life on domestic soil.

The constructed separation between poisonous matters used during wartime and the potential dangers that could infiltrate the home is thus a false binary that ultimately upholds what Rachel C. Lee (2020) calls the “fiction of comfort” that the “domestic” provides for elite subjects in the Global North. Lee marks the types of “border-wall thinking” that purport that violence “abroad” is necessary in order to maintain and protect domestic spaces, noting that, in fact, chemical and herbicidal movements betray these logics of separation. In other words, violent exposures are deemed necessary tactics to protect domestic spaces, yet domestic spaces are multiply exposed, and become the collateral damage that ultimately protects multinational corporations (Kaplan 2023). By surfacing these lesser known exposures of military-grade herbicides on domestic soil, and connecting them with the ongoing mundane quotidian exposures that maintain the fiction of a protected domestic space, this essay explores how the home is rendered a site of ongoing war and how militarized domestic spaces are perpetually maintained.

In the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to protect domestic interests, the US military conducted a series of herbicide tests within the borders of the nation-state to determine their destructive efficacy abroad. The US Department of Defense charged agricultural scientist Alvin L. Young with conducting a series of longitudinal studies at Eglin Air Force Base in western Florida where the “rainbow herbicides” used in the wars in Southeast Asia were test sprayed.² The base was chosen because the environment of western Florida, with its humidity and proximity to the ocean, was said to be most similar to the atmosphere of Vietnam.³ From 1962 to 1970, field tests were conducted to examine the efficacy of the military-grade herbicides that were being used in Operation Ranch Hand.⁴ During the eight-year span, 74,970 liters of Agent Orange, 61,180 liters of Agent Purple, 15,790 liters of Agent White, and 16,635 liters of Agent Blue were sprayed on the C-52 test quadrant (Young 2008, 17). In the spring of 1964, the Armament Development and Test Center at Eglin began monitoring the levels of toxins, including tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) (the main toxic dioxin found in the herbicides), in the soil and water sources proximal to the test site after farmers in nearby Walton and Holmes Counties complained of crop destruction. In other words, it was because the herbicides were affecting areas outside of the parameters of the military base, in neighboring residential areas, that the longitudinal tests were ordered. At that time, the presumed separation between the base and nearby civilian communities was already in question.

A report written to the Armament Development and Test Center in July 1966 reported the extent of the toxins’ potential spread:

It is noted that all herbicides are generally moderately toxic to man and in some instances are cumulative in their action…Further the use of herbicides will alter the plant growth of the test site which will cause wild animals of all types to leave the area due to lack of food or cover. Rain water from a severely contaminated site will flow into the creeks and estuaries of the drainage basin destroying the plankton, algae, and other fish food which will, in turn, destroy the area outside the controlled test grid for productive sport fishing. (Young 2008, 21)

In these early stages, only four years after the beginning of Operation Ranch Hand, scientists working for the US government reported the potential toxic spread of herbicides in a multispecies ecology around Eglin Air Force Base. Of the 342 species that were tested for detectable levels of toxins, about one-third of them were determined to be affected (Young 2008, 45). And while the concern in the quoted report about toxicity fell under the purview of harmful effects on “sport fishing” in western Florida, which were deemed to be only “moderately toxic to man,” several class-action lawsuits against Monsanto have since arisen from veterans and civilians who lived and worked on Eglin Air Force Base and in nearby Walton and Holmes Counties (Thompson 2019).

Many of the studies that refute the toxic persistence of Agent Orange rely upon research methods that test core samples of soil located in discrete plots of land within the borders of these former air bases (Young and Newton 2004; Humphrey 2016b; Thompson 2020). However, the studies also anticipate the challenge of measuring concentrations of dioxins due to their mobility in wind, water, and in the fatty tissues of ambulatory species. Some studies even surmised the potential harmful effects of TCDD on humans by extrapolating from measurements of its toxic harm on other species ranging from primates to ground mice (Stevens 1981; Young and Newton 2004). The research, nevertheless, indicates that the spread of exposure continues to exceed the expected scope of testing both in temporal and spatial dimensions. The chemospheres created by the herbicides ultimately challenge the presumed boundaries that uphold the idea of an insulated “domestic space,” whether at the scale of the home or the nation, by seeping through perimeters and revealing the porosity and construction of the false borders of domesticity.

Accordingly, the division between military personnel and civilian workers who worked on base continues to determine whose exposure is recognized by the US government and the corporations named in legal arbitrations.⁵ Civilian workers who were contracted as “range technicians” by Vitro Services (which has since been subsumed by BAE Systems) have received no recognition of the danger of their exposures (Thompson 2019; Young and Miller-Medzon 2019). In investigative reports about Walton and Holmes Counties, a politically conservative area heavily intertwined culturally and materially with the military, the base was cited as one of the only sustainable sources of work in the region, often paying much higher wages than any other nearby employers (Kalish 2018). Consequently, the residents of nearby counties were hired to perform the “domestic” work that was seen as “unskilled” labor in comparison to the tests conducted by military personnel. As a result, the workers were also paid less than their military counterparts and they did not receive the same level of security clearance to access knowledge about the potential dangers of exposure to the herbicides.⁶

In an interview with reporter Jon Kalish for the environmental justice podcast Living Downstream, one contracted worker, Sam Jordan, who was a resident of the nearby town of Crestview, recounts working at Eglin’s Biological and Chemical Laboratory without being warned of the precautions he should take to ensure his safety from the herbicide testing occurring on site (Kalish 2018). The contracted workers performed the supportive labor that enabled the testing: washing beakers filled with chemical concoctions, collecting cardboard screens that were laid out in the field so they could be chemically analyzed in the lab, operating large film cameras that aimed to capture and record the dispersal. Another worker, Tommy C. Brown, reports at times being drenched in chemicals that felt like “thin mud,” citing that Vitro made sure that workers cleaned and washed the camera equipment without warning them to take the same precautions with their own bodies (Kalish 2018). Describing the somatic experience of exposure, Brown recounts to Kalish, “Sometimes, it’d be like a mist…But I remember one time, we got sprayed and it was like mud. It was like a thin mud. It kind of covered us up. If I seen mist, I would not cut that camera off. I would sit right there in my position unless they told me otherwise” (Kalish 2018). Brown’s compliance with Vitro’s instructions reveals the trust he placed in his employer to advise him of the potential hazards associated with exposure. The company’s unabashed protection of their capital investment (the cameras and equipment) over the bodies of workers doubly highlights how civilian workers were treated as surplus labor, indefinitely expendable and replaceable by the racial capitalist machine of war. In another interview with a local newspaper, Jordan reflects on his exposure and further laments, “It turned out to be Roundup on steroids” (Humphrey 2016b). By comparing the military-grade herbicides to the household weed killer, Jordan inadvertently demonstrates the nefarious connections between the US government’s biopolitical destruction of crops in supposed hostile territories and the ongoing repetition of those exposures on smaller, more intimate scales at home. The economy of war also ensured that even if civilians questioned the safety of their work, and suspected that their somatic experiences of chemical exposures should be concerning, the economic realities of needing employment to sustain their livelihoods could not be ignored. In describing their experiences, the exposed workers suggest that even if the corporations had explicitly alerted them of the potential hazards, they would have perhaps continued to work (Kalish 2018).

As is often true with occupational hazards and exposures to industrial chemospheres, the toxic chemicals that affected Vitro workers also seeped past the boundaries of their work spaces (Boudia et al. 2018, 167). In their interviews with Kalish, workers described how their clothes, which were soaked in military-grade herbicides, were washed in their household laundry machines. They described tracking herbicidal residues found on their shoes and bodies into their domestic spaces, exposing their families by proximity even in the assumed safety of their suburban homes. One worker, Bobby Collinsworth, worked at Eglin for thirty-four years, including operating the cameras that documented the aerial spray tests of herbicides. He described to Kalish how he believed Agent Orange drifted twelve miles from the base during the late 1960s to his farm nearby, where he also made a living by growing soybeans, corn, and cotton (Kalish 2018). The herbicide most noticeably destroyed the cotton crop, and, with it, the Collinsworth family’s main source of income for several years. Collinsworth’s work on base inadvertently affected his farm, his home, and the communities his farm supplied through the same debilitating tactics that were being used as warfare in Southeast Asia. These examples illustrate other ways that the herbicides’ mobility traversed the boundaries of military and civilian space to pollute multiple domestic spheres.

Still, the legal separation of veteran and civilian maps onto the separation of those who are protected for their service and those whose “domestic” work remains unrecognized—even when the boundaries between veteran and civilian are muddied. In a subsequent set of interviews for a follow-up podcast, Kalish reported on several cases that complicated the distinction between veteran and civilian workers in the region around Eglin. He described one worker, Von Jones, who did serve in the military prior to the Vietnam War, and who was rehired by a contracted company to perform herbicide tests on base, but because his exposure did not occur during his military service, he was not eligible for benefits from the VA (Kalish 2019). In contrast, Wesley T. Carter piloted a legal case that advocated for compensation for all operators of C-123 aircrafts (that were originally used in Vietnam to disperse herbicides), even though the crews were made up of reservists who only flew the aircrafts domestically within the US as part of medical and cargo missions and thus were not “full-fledged veterans” (Kalish 2019, 13:05). As of 2015 these operators became eligible for benefits while Vitro workers remained ineligible.

As the US Department of Veteran Affairs expands its list of health conditions associated with Agent Orange and other military-grade herbicide exposures, and broadens the geographical scope it recognizes as being exposed to herbicides, civilian communities in the surrounding areas near air force bases have yet to receive legal recognition. This is also true of civilian communities in regions occupied by US air bases beyond the borders of the US, including Cambodia, Canada, India, Japan, Korea, Laos, and Thailand. As of the time of this writing, those civilian communities are still awaiting legal reparations as well (Chisholm, Chisholm & Kilpatrick Ltd. 2017).

In addition to the exposures that have been studied amongst communities of veterans and long-term residents of western Florida, Vietnamese refugees were likely also inadvertently exposed to the herbicides at Eglin Air Force Base. Between April 27 and September 19, 1975, Eglin Air Force Base became one of four main Vietnamese refugee relocation centers as part of Operation New Arrivals (Jans-Thomas et al. 2014, 1115). At any one time, only 2,500 refugees inhabited the camp, but ultimately 10,085 refugees passed through Eglin Air Force Base before receiving sponsorship and legal citizenship in the US (1123). As the temporary homes, nicknamed “Tent City,” were hastily constructed on base, the housing units were also unusually exposed to the elements. The units had open air portals or mere canvas coverings for windows, which was a welcome reprieve from the Floridian heat, but also ensured that refugees were regularly exposed to the outside elements (1122). This haphazard construction demonstrates another way in which the homes built for refugees were imagined as a place of safety when they were in fact also exposed. Because studies of Agent Orange usually focus on its exposures abroad rather than in places where it was tested on US soil, there have been no studies to date that, to my knowledge, enumerate how Vietnamese refugees were housed in an area adjacent to where the herbicides were previously tested.

By comparing archival materials about the geography of Eglin Air Force Base, I discerned that the testing grounds for Agent Orange (quadrant C-52) were less than ten miles from where Vietnamese refugees came to live, in an area called Auxiliary Two, just five years after testing concluded. While it cannot be conclusively determined that refugees would have been exposed to Agent Orange at the base, the proximity and short duration since initial spraying suggests that exposure was probable given that trace exposures are still being measured in the soil and groundwater four decades after the war in Vietnam.

As feminist science and technology scholars have demonstrated, it is also this stated indeterminacy that shrouds definitive legal and scientific claims about herbicide harm and that constricts epistemologies of exposure (Murphy 2006; Chen 2012; Liboiron 2021). In a summative study of feminist approaches to toxicology, Melina Packer argues, “given this inherently uncertain science, we come to know toxicants not through toxicology, but through violence done to other/ed bodies” (2021, 30). Because the chemical compounds that make up Agent Orange have a vexed history of occupying both commercial and military industries, Edwin A. Martini (2012) further argues that a “politics of uncertainty” surrounding Agent Orange’s toxic drift remains a chief cause for the lack of legal reparations for civilians. In spite of these politics that aim to deflect definitive and causal reports of toxic harm, transpacific communities construct ways of determining harmful exposures that rely upon sensorial and affective registers rather than the precarity of toxicological studies. From her ethnographic research in a beauty spa in Ho Chi Minh City, Thuy Linh Tu recounts how the salon workers made sense of the uncertainty of exposure by describing the latency of chemicals as “resting” (nằm nghĩ) within a particular body, awaiting the right environmental and social factors to appear (2021, 18). For the workers, bioscientific “uncertainty” did not prohibit them from honing their own affective and material epistemologies for sensing and knowing when bodies have been exposed. Across both the examples of the spa in Vietnam and the refugee relocation center in Florida, the chemical diaspora of Agent Orange becomes even more explicitly intertwined with the Vietnamese diaspora as it is commonly understood.

Yet, if we consider Espiritu’s (2014) important critique that refuge is more often than not militarized, it is not surprising that the very sites that were foundational to the development of chemical violence throughout WWII and the Vietnam War became the same places where refuge was supposed to be sought. Militarized refuge, as defined by Espiritu, aims to highlight the ways that war extends into the refugee condition even after the proposed end of spectacular violence because the spread of empire produces the conditions that require refugees to seek refuge from the very forces that produce their displacement (2014, 36). This is one way that the war extends into civilian life, and domesticated spaces, for refugees who must endure, in explicit and less explicit ways, exposure to the violence that uprooted them. The military logics that deemed western Florida an ideal site for testing the dispersal of herbicides justified the use of the base as a relocation site for Southeast Asian refugees, just as landscapes within the domestic US are made to metonymically stand in for the rehearsal of wars abroad.

Like the civilian workers at Eglin Air Force Base, Vietnamese civilians exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam have yet to receive monetary compensation or reparations from the US government or the agrochemical manufacturing companies, though there are Vietnamese government-sponsored programs that provide small monthly stipends to Vietnamese national citizens if one is able to “prove” one’s exposure. USAID sponsors the environmental remediation of former US air bases and financially contributes to medical infrastructures in Vietnam, even though the US has not conceded that the herbicides have deleterious effects on humans in Vietnam. Because there have been no studies of how or when Vietnamese refugees may have been exposed on US soil yet, Vietnamese Americans living within the US are often obfuscated in conversations about the transnational spread of Agent Orange and potential occasions for compensation or other forms of retributive justice. In fact, many choose to distance themselves from discussions of Agent Orange, as it is commonly misunderstood as being contained within Vietnamese geographies and consequently a specter of past wars rather than ongoing chemical circuits. Though other important questions surrounding toxic conditions are emerging as a labor concern amongst nail salon workers, Vietnamese American refugees are not often represented or considered part of the larger diaspora of those exposed to chemical warfare. Given this myopic view of domestic herbicide exposure, what might knowledge of these entangled ecologies—as extensions of war and the refugee condition—further contribute to diasporic solidarity calling for supranational action? How might chemical diasporas provide an infrastructure for understanding the networks built between generations being born with elevated dioxin levels, while also unsettling any facile attempts to universalize the susceptibility of bodies as it is ever more important to remember differentiated predispositions to debilitation and death? Because it is not solely investments in death that are at stake but rather, to cite Jasbir Puar’s (2017) articulation of the biopolitics of maiming, what’s at stake is that the investment in some lives causes other deaths to be claimed as “collateral damage.” Puar critically reminds that the statistical data surrounding the number of lives lost due to warfare is politically calculated such that the debilitation of communities does not get evaluated by the same standard that complete destruction does. Moreover, in the case of Agent Orange, it was through the debilitation of the environment and food infrastructures that the US aimed to debilitate those who were, at the time, considered enemy forces. Consequently, a Vietnamese refugee who develops cancers years after exposure to dioxins, whether in Vietnam or in the US, at Eglin Air Force Base or elsewhere, does not become part of the calculus for determining who will receive monetary retribution for exposure, nor who is recognized as being harmed. Though, if we remember the racialized histories of herbicide use, it is clear that Vietnamese refugees were never intended to be the sites of protection even under the guise of militarized refuge. Rather, a liberal humanist approach conditionally assimilates refugees into the national narrative of domestic safety even as ecologies of warfare recursively return to (re)expose them in their newfound homes.

Monsanto contemporarily manufactured both the rainbow herbicides that were engineered for military purposes, and glyphosate, which was concocted for commercial agricultural use. While Agent Orange has become rightfully vilified for its destructive effects over the past couple decades, glyphosate remains the most widely used herbicide worldwide (Benbrook 2016). Despite recent lawsuits, glyphosate’s long-term effects are largely ignored by the average household. Accordingly, the sales of commercial-grade Roundup and Ranger Pro account for 10 percent of Monsanto’s revenue. It is also the most commonly used herbicide in global agriculture, such that Monsanto began inventing and manufacturing modified seeds known as Roundup Ready crops that are resistant to or immune from their own herbicide. Together, the full line of Roundup products account for half of Monsanto’s annual profit. Many speculate that due to glyphosate’s widespread use, exposure to the herbicide is now unavoidable; moreover, that glyphosate should be considered an integral and ubiquitous node in the chemical geographies that make up contemporary life (Werner, Berndt, and Mansfield 2022). At the same time, because of the types of labor that demand herbicide use, it is critical to remember how agricultural farm workers and groundskeepers are disproportionately exposed at concentrations and durations that far exceed the average use of a single domestic household. This also means that low-income communities of color are, again, the most exposed (Sánchez Barba 2020; Zárate 2023).

In June 2018 German multinational corporation Bayer completed its acquisition of Monsanto and it has since attempted to drop the Monsanto name, which many speculate carries the company’s blemished reputation as a company that proliferates toxic products. As the parent company, they have nevertheless inherited Monsanto’s lawsuits. Bayer, on the other hand, is largely known as a healthcare company who works to enliven bodies. Yet, according to its 2020 annual report, Bayer’s revenue for its “crop science” division is almost ten times more than its pharmaceutical profit (Bayer 2020, 79).

In an ironic attempt to further domesticate global agricultural circuits, and as part of an effort to erase Monsanto’s blemished reputation, Bayer rebranded its role in Vietnam’s agricultural and health industries to market itself as a symbol of technological innovation. Bayer’s local Vietnamese offices began offering education programs for farmers in the Mekong Delta about how to increase the yield of their rice crops to ensure higher profit. The company even went as far as to host an annual Bayer Farmer Millionaire contest—a gameshow-like competition in which farmers compete about agricultural knowledge. In a Bayer-funded newsletter about its global agricultural community efforts, the 2018 winner of the contest, Mr. Trương Tân Phúc, beamed, “I am very happy to be the champion of the ‘Bayer Farmer Millionaire’ contest 2018. Thanks to the competition, I have the opportunity to exchange and learn from the experience of rational farming to make the fields more productive, hopefully there will be more competitions for farmers” (Bayer VietNam 2018, emphasis added). As Trương adulates the opportunity to learn “rational farming” from Bayer’s investment in the region, he omits or ignores that the same “rational” commitment to increased botanic yield contributed to what resulted in the dispersal of Agent Orange within kilometers of his rural hometown just decades ago. In doing so, Trương also highlights how global agricultural markets structurally leave him with little choice, as Bayer’s technology ultimately allows him to remain competitive in an ever-growing transnational market for rice, coffee, and other modified crops. In many ways, his reliance on herbicides ironically returns to the origin of Agent Orange and the initial purpose of chemically modified plant production, which originated with an effort to maintain US dominance in agricultural markets. These labors, and exposures, have since been deferred to regions in the Global South.

As the winner of the contest, Trương was awarded a tractor. The second-place winner received a lesser model tractor and the third-place winner won a Honda Wave motorbike. However, it’s the consolation prize given to the rest of the contestants that was most alarming. While reviewing a picture of the competition within the Bayer report, I noticed that the consolation prizes were pesticide and herbicide sprayers whose labels in Vietnamese say “máy phun thuốc,” which translates to “machine to spray drugs.” In Vietnamese the word for drug, medicine, and cure can all be expressed by the word “thuốc”—and that term is also used to name pesticides and herbicides. While in colloquial English, names for chemical defoliants are referred to as compounds that kill pests and plants, in Vietnamese the chemical compounds are called plant cures. This nomenclature is mirrored in the contemporary reframing of herbicides by agrochemical companies as “crop protection solutions” a move that ultimately reflects their investment in protecting agricultural capital over civilian life. Bayer thus performed its benevolence by essentially giving the farmers tools that ensured their reliance on glyphosate. As the living quarters and farming fields for rural farmers in the southern delta regions of Vietnam are more closely intertwined, the herbicides comingle the geographies of exposure, extending Monsanto’s historic presence in the region and muddying the bounds of domestic space. Bayer, while being persecuted by the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs for being associated with glyphosate and its possible connections to Agent Orange, is the very same corporation being praised by local farmers for distributing rational knowledge to increase agricultural yield through the distribution of herbicide variants for which it is being reprimanded.

Furthermore, the image of the winners reveals another layer of war rhetoric that cycles back in this contest. All contestants wore matching brown outfits with checkered kerchiefs around their heads. Each shirt is branded at the top right corner with Bayer’s logo: a medicinal cross made from the company’s name spelled horizontally and vertically and circumscribed in a circle. Without the logo, these uniforms have been associated with farmers for decades; however, those who are familiar with Vietnam War imagery may also recognize that these outfits were associated with guerilla soldiers and particularly the icon of what Lynn Ly has termed the “Vietnamese Sniper Woman,” female insurgent soldiers who fought against the US, were associated with rural rice farmlands, and were also one of the stated targets of herbicides used in Operation Ranch Hand (2017, 137). Thus, in this image is the rhetorical domestication of the enemy soldier, as the multinational manufacturer of toxic herbicides returns as a benevolent pharmaceutical and agricultural educator, whose brand materially changes the bodies of the enemy into the laborer who will disperse the medicinal drug to produce more crops. Again, the very same tactics used to target the destruction of life returns under the guise of benevolent aid with life-giving forces.

By illuminating networks of exposure between civilian workers outside Eglin Air Force Base in western Florida, and farm workers in southern Vietnam who are reintroducing domestic-grade herbicides and pesticides in the Mekong Delta today, I’ve demonstrated the insidious ways that corporations wield biopower over plant, animal, and human-animal life. Though the exposures during wartime are tied to the same systems of racial capital that differentiate between wanted and unwanted plant life in today’s home gardens, legal systems still preferentially award US veterans while barring remunerations for civilians in the name of needing more precise scientific proof. As more legal cases surface the multitudes of populations who were exposed to Agent Orange and glyphosate—whether US civilians who worked on bases or refugee populations who were relocated to contaminated refuge zones—it is important to remember the communities who are continually obscured from these narratives of exposures. As witnessed in the example of Vietnamese farmers adopting Bayer’s strategies and products, the ubiquity of exposures is sometimes outweighed by the need to remain ever competitive in a global economy.

For if biopolitics is ultimately about prescribing the elimination of populations deemed anachronous, or underdeveloped, it is no surprise then that technological interventions are viewed as the ultimate solutions to the management of life. As military innovation continues to be the site of US government investment, military apparatuses are also continually domesticated for corporate profit. In fact, Bayer’s newest agricultural innovation is herbicide and pesticide dispersal by drone. On Bayer’s crop science website, drones are described as revolutionary technology, depicted not only as crop protectors but also as liberators of rice farmers. The site deploys the image of a woman and her child, this time appearing to be dressed in the traditional garments of Hmong farmers from a northern Vietnamese region. In describing their development of agricultural technologies, Bayer admits that drones are useful since they ultimately decrease the use of diesel-based farming equipment and “limit human exposure to crop protection solutions,” thereby inadvertently confessing to their herbicides’ toxic potentiality (Bayer AG 2022). In tracing yet another way that military technologies become domesticated and narrated as benefiting—in fact, liberating—human populations, I illustrate how the tactics of herbicidal war and debilitation are surreptitiously extended into contemporary civilian life.

Against these pervasive agribiopolitics, we might ask, how Mr. Trương, as the winner of the Bayer Farmer Millionaire contest, both acknowledges the history of herbicide harm and simultaneously materially depends upon Bayer and military technologies to sustain his livelihood as a rice farmer supplying increasingly complex global food economies. By tracing these unmarked circuits, we might also come to remember and scrutinize how military bases are settled upon unceded Indigenous land; Eglin Air Force Base, for example, occupies Muscogee and Chatot land, bordering Choctaw Beach and Choctawatchee Bay even as the Choctaw Nation of Florida was denied federal recognition. Or we might further consider the enslaved labor that fundamentally seeded the racial capitalist system that culminated in the cotton crop that was farmed by the Collinsworth family even though it was ultimately destroyed by toxic drift. How might telling this somatic and affective history of herbicides provide alternate avenues for seeking reparation and environmental justice for plaintiffs who are not otherwise acknowledged as being exposed, whether civilian workers in western Florida, contemporary farm workers in the Mekong Delta, or the many other entangled populations I have yet to describe here?

And still, perhaps current transnational and supranational legal forms of justice fall short of recognizing the ongoing complexities of living through multiple exposures of militarized empire. Over dinner, Lan confesses how she struggled with acne and other skin conditions as a child, and how she sometimes wondered if the contaminated environment near her childhood home ultimately affected her reproductive capacities. She describes how she earned a medical degree to parse the puzzles of exposure, and how now, as a doctor she disidentifies with the disabled patients whom she serves. In sharing her home with me, she assures me of the safety within. I admit to her that part of my interest in traveling to her home was entwined with the fact that my grandfather shared a hometown with her ancestors, an endearing term of belonging simply summed in Vietnamese by the word quê. To share quês with another person is an uncanny affective intimacy that far exceeds nominations of ethnicity, nation, or even “home.” It is a shared declaration of kinship that extends beyond any singular person. As such, the journey to Lan’s childhood home was perhaps also an unspoken desire to come to terms with how the war still lingered in my own family’s genealogy even without definitive proof of chemical exposure.

Yet, as I mull these questions atop the makeshift mattress propped on the floor of Lan’s bedroom, the material realities of exposure thwart any misplaced romanticization of shared exposure; our experiences were incommensurable. Lan nevertheless demonstrates one of the many ways in which homes are made atop landscapes that others have deemed scorched earth. In figuring her domestic space in this way, she both acknowledges histories of harms that have occurred and forges a way to dwell in the ubiquitous realms of exposure. In many ways, the home she welcomed me into more closely resembled the reality of militarized domestic spaces where the porosity of the borders between the home and the outside were traversed by natural elements and the nonhuman critters that also found temporary refuge there. Like the women in Puchuncaví whose stories Tironi recounts, Lan extends care through the maintenance of her living space and through banal daily actions that could, in the eyes of some, seem futile considering endless global chains of consumption that demand continuous production and structural forms of uneven exposure. And yet it is these moments of intimate activism that perhaps tell a different story of herbicidal genealogies that is not constituted by the maintenance of perfect suburban lawns but rather by dwelling in the entangled ecologies of shared exposures. In seeking recognition of the material histories that flow from civilian communities near Eglin Air Force Base, through Vietnamese refugees who were welcomed there and who have since relocated to other regions, to the structural ways that Vietnamese farmers redeploy herbicidal variants on crops that then themselves circulate amongst global agricultural markets, and into the bodies of consumers everywhere, there emerge cycles of exposure that are, in fact, inevitable. To recognize this connectedness is also perhaps to recognize our own vexed complicity and embeddedness within the maintenance of domestic life through the extension of military technologies into everyday existence and into all the spaces we make home.

This work would not have been possible without the support and intellectual generosity of several communities. I am grateful to the special section editors, Xan Chacko, Astrida Neimanis, Jennifer Terry, and Diana Pardo Pedraza for their editorial comments and facilitation of workshops that allowed this special section to be a true dialogue and collaboration between contributors. I am also thankful for Heidi Amin-Hong, C.N.E Corbin, Melina Packer, and Reena Shadaan, who offered invaluable feedback in early stages of the development of this work. Finally, I am grateful to my many interlocutors, but especially Lan, whose generous invitations, stern feedback, and friendship guided my thinking about the circuits of toxicity and militarized violence that bind us, and still inevitably divide the places we call home.

¹ For the purposes of maintaining confidentiality, the name of my colleague has been changed and the exact location of her home has been purposefully left vague (though the region remains one that was listed as being exposed to Agent Orange).

² Though Alvin L. Young was hired as the main agronomist (herbicide physiology and environmental toxicology) by the US government, several studies later showed that Young often revised his research to claim the opposite of what his studies initially reported; at first, Young found trace amounts of dioxin and concluded that herbicide exposure had minimal effects on nearby human and nonhuman life, whereas he later reported that exposure did in fact have the potential to harm nearby ecologies (Ornstein, Wei, and Hixenbaugh 2016).

³ Eglin Air Force Base was originally established in 1931 by personnel of the Army Air Corps Tactical School as a potential bombing site and gunnery range due to the “sparsely populated forested areas around Valparaiso, Florida, and the vast expanse of the adjacent Gulf of Mexico” (US Air Force 2022). With the onset of World War II, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold selected Eglin to be a site for aircraft armament, and by June 27, 1940, the US Forestry Service ceded 384,000 acres of the Choctawhatchee National Forest to the War Department for the expansion of the air base. Several historians note how national forests were changed from sites where nature was protected to sites of military exercises (Havlick 2015; Krupar 2016).

⁴ Agent Orange, Agent Purple, Agent White, and Agent Blue were four of the “rainbow herbicides” used during Operation Ranch Hand (1961–1971) in Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos. The herbicides were named after the color-coded bands on the outside of barrels they were stored in. The active ingredient in Agent Orange is equal parts 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T), which had trace but noticeable amounts of TCDD. TCDD is the most toxic dioxin named by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The most common health conditions from acute and long-term exposure to TCDD include chloracne, hypertension, diabetes, vascular ocular changes, signs of neural system damage, and peripheral and central neurotoxicity. The US Department of Veteran Affairs also recognizes several types of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma to be an indication of dioxin exposure (Institute of Medicine 1994, 90).

⁵ In 2019 local northwest Floridian lawyer Ruston (Rusty) Sanders joined New York–based lawyer Victor Yannacone (who was the primary prosecutor in the initial 1984 class-action lawsuit of US veterans exposed to Agent Orange against the manufacturing companies of the rainbow herbicides) to propose a federal complaint that they hoped would lead to a larger class-action lawsuit on behalf of the civilian residents and Vitro workers. The potential lawsuit named BAE Systems PLC, Bayer AG, as well as Valero Energy Corporation, which the lawsuit identified as a successor to herbicide manufacturer NOPOCO Chemical, the Dow Chemical Company, Occidental Petroleum, Michelin, Harcros Chemicals, Philips Electronics, and Johnson Controls (Thompson 2019). As of December 2022, no official lawsuit has been filed.

⁶ At the time of this writing, the class-action lawsuit on behalf of Vitro Services workers has not been filed, and consequently, the names and other identifying details about the thirty defendants have not been made public. Besides descriptions of the workers in local newspapers as “blue-collar” and low-income at the time of their employment, and pictures of select defendants photographed by Jon Kalish during his investigative documentary podcast interviews that portray older white men and women, there is little known about how the workers would identify along lines of race, gender, and ability. As of the 2020 US census, Walton and Holmes Counties are approximately 89 percent white. It is not immediately apparent that specific demographics were overly represented among the defendants.

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Natalia Duong is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles where her research examines the transnational spread of Agent Orange through a study of cultural media, disability law, and place-based research in Vietnam.