In 1970, the Department of Defense Military Assistance Command – Vietnam (MACV) created a database that it called the Herbicide Reporting System (HERBS). The database is described in a Command Manual, which details the various fields in the files.1 Throughout this website we refer to the database as the HERBS file. Chemical Operations Division, MACJ3-09 officers collected primary source spray data from the Air Force bases from which Operation Ranch Hand missions were flown. They compiled a logbook that was keypunched to create the HERBS file. Although the Command Manual does not identify the primary data sources, they are probably the Daily Air Activity Reports (DAARs), which have the same data elements as described in the Command Manual and appear in the HERBS file. DAARS are provided with their corresponding HERBS missions, where available.
One version of the HERBS file was supplied to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for its initial groundbreaking on the evaluating the effects of military herbicides on Vietnam. The scientists on the NAS Committee analyzed the HERBS file extensively, as described in the Summary Document. The complete NAS Committee studies are available here. Both the NAS and Department of Defense also analyzed the file for data quality.2,3
The NAS found the HERBS file to be a useful and authoritative source of information on the spraying but eliminated many records because of inconsistencies, such as flight paths that were too long. Also, the file was known to be incomplete. First, the HERBS database began in 1965, but herbicide missions began in 1962, with very limited test spraying in 1961. Second, the HERBS database recorded only the herbicide missions carried out by the Air Force under Operation Ranch Hand using UC-123 adapted fixed wing aircraft, not Army operations. We describe Operation Ranch Hand in more detail here.
The Army sprayed a small percentage of the total herbicides used during the War by helicopter, spray backpacks and truck-mounted spray equipment. Most of these missions were for localized herbicide clearance around army base perimeters and for limited clearance operations related to base construction. Engineer units and Chemical Corps personnel were primarily responsible for much of the Army operations, although some infantry units also sprayed. There is also evidence that a small amount of herbicide was used by US Navy personnel on inland waterways, but Naval herbicide operations appear to have been ad hoc and very limited. Records are incomplete on such usage and none was recorded in any version of the HERBS files. (The armed forces of the Republic of Vietnam also carried out herbicide missions - but no consistent records of these have been found.)
On May 21st 1980, the Army Agent Orange Task Force was formed to provide military research support to several government agencies concerned with possible adverse health effects of Vietnam veterans to the herbicide known as Agent Orange. One part of its mission was to review all available records to assure the completeness of the HERBS database and to supplement it with data on helicopter and ground spray missions. In 1985 the Department of Defense (DoD) produced a report and data file that documents helicopter, ground spraying missions and incidents, such as the jettisoning of fuel loads (dumps) when a fixed wing mission needed to be aborted. This file was called the Services-HERBS file.4
In 1998, under contract to the NAS, our team investigated the HERBS files and its underlying documentation, in collaboration with the DoD Center for Research on Unit Records. The Center for Research on Unit Records (CRUR) was the organization that had pulled together the Services-HERBS file, as well as providing other essential support for research on Vietnam. It had been known as the US Army & Joint Services Environmental Support Group (ESG) at the time. Some of its activities are described by Richard Christian, its director. Much of the basic data that is available on our website, such as the much of data on troop locations that are in the data layers pages is the result of collaboration with Christian and CRUR (ESG).5 Some ESG files are available at the US National Archives.6
During the course of our quality control work on the HERBS files, we discovered that the National Archives held several different, inconsistent versions of the HERBS File. These additional data are identified in the HERBS file that is online here. In addition, we carried out extensive cleaning and proofreading of the data, with all changes corroborated by CRUR. Thus we were able to restore many of the records found to be inconsistent by the earlier analyses in the 1970s. We describe this process in our 2003 article in Nature.7 The HERBS file on our website is the cleaned and consolidated version. Statistics and further analysis of the HERBS files and on the spray missions is discussed elsewhere on our website.
Return to "Records from the HERBS File"
 | |