US defense chief tours contaminated Vietnam War-era Agent Orange site

BIEN HOA, Vietnam - US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis toured a former Agent Orange storage site in southern Vietnam on Wednesday, revisiting one of the war's darkest chapters that lives on among a million Vietnamese with severe birth defects, cancers and disabilities linked to the toxic defoliant.

Standing near a weedy field contaminated with dioxin, Mattis surveyed a map of the Bien Hoa airport outside Ho Chi Minh City, one of the main staging grounds for Agent Orange that was hastily cleared by soldiers near the war's end more than four decades ago.

US forces sprayed 80 million liters of Agent Orange over South Vietnam during 1962-71 in a desperate bid to flush out Viet Cong guerrillas by depriving them of tree cover and food.