Blowback: A Canadian History of Agent Orange and the War at Home Paperback - 2009

Chronicling the horrific story of the Agent Orange experiments near Oromocto, New Brunswick, this shocking history reveals the tragic accounts of numerous families who lost loved ones due to military testing. Depicting the initial spraying of the deadly defoliant near Gagetown, this document portrays how the United States military, searching for a terrain similar to Vietnam, began conducting tests in this area. Although the Americans discontinued their trials in the late 1960s, this record uncovers more than an additional decade's worth of continued use by Canadian forces, who discovered it was cheaper to clear brush and kill trees with a dangerous chemical than to hire workers to perform the task. As this astonishing study demonstrates, what they did not know at the time was that Agent Orange also killed people. Hundreds of locals suffered and died, and cancer and other diseases ran rampant among military personnel and civilians who worked on the base. This stunning recollection investigates the stories of those who didn't survive as well as their relatives' daunting struggle to obtain compensation for their suffering and loss, exposing countless years of government complicity.