Talking Out of One Side of Their Mouth

Yesterday, I listened intently for some of those crazy things old men say that makes us young ones roll our eyes.   With one cousin and one uncle though, I was among the old men.

I thought I’d get one funny old man quote.  No such luck.    I did get this from an old neighbor,

““At first we just strapped 55 gallon drums of the stuff (Agent Orange) onto the belly of the plane & the pilot would pull a wire cord to open the cap.   I mean, I was just a mechanic.  They told us to figure out ways to disperse this stuff from planes.  We didn’t know what it was.  We dropped thousands of gallons of it all over Orlanda,  well what they call Orlanda and Kissimmee and all that mess now.  It was just scrub woods then.”
He’s a former Air-force mechanic describing how his crew in Florida tested dispersal mechanisms for the herbicide now known to have have caused over a million birth defects in Viet Nam alone.

Ironically, he’s talking about the late 50s and early 60s; the same time Rachael Carson was writing Silent Spring.  And a time I’ve been writing about as a great change in, a new trust that we put into government for monitoring and keeping us and our other earthly inhabitants safe from toxins.