Agent Orange. Let's sit with this for a moment. The U.S. military, between 1961 and 1971, sprayed approximately 20 million gallons of herbicidal chemicals over approximately 4.5 million acres of Vietnamese land. Primarily a compound called Agent Orange, contaminated with dioxin, one of the most toxic substances known to human science. The stated purpose was "defoliation." Destroy the jungle canopy. Deprive Vietnamese fighters of cover. What it actually did was poison a country for generations. The people who were directly exposed developed cancers at catastrophic rates. They died of diseases their bodies had never been designed to fight. They had children with devastating birth defects: missing limbs, destroyed nervous systems, bodies that could not function. Those children had children who were also affected. The dioxin settled into the soil, into the water, into the food chain, into the bodies of everyone who ate and drank and breathed in contaminated areas. This did not stop in 1971. The poison is still there. The birth defects are still happening. The cancers are still happening. There are Vietnamese people alive today, born decades after the war, whose bodies bear the mark of a chemical weapon deployed before their parents were old enough to fight. The U.S. government spent decades denying responsibility. Fought legal battles to avoid compensation. Eventually offered amounts so insulting they functioned more as mockery than reparation. And then, this is the part that should make every person with a conscience unable to sleep, they continued to present themselves to the world as the "moral authority." The defenders of the "rules-based order." The nation that other nations should model themselves on. Vietnam did not model itself on America. Vietnam defeated America. And Vietnam is still here.