When a war is illegal, the methods of warfare are bound to go beyond what is permissible under the laws of war. But don't expect the American media to tell you any of this.
Fiction:
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning." Lt. Col. William Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, 1979.
Non-fiction:
"At the end of the fight we thought back on some of the things we were the proudest of. What jumped to the forefront was infantry and tank platoon sergeants ... telling us that the artillery and mortars were awesome. At the end of the day, that is what it is all about: our maneuver brethren recognizing why we are called the `King of Battle'." Captain James T. Cobb, First Lieutenant Christopher A. LaCour, and Sergeant William H. Hight in "The Fight for Fallujah," Field Artillery magazine, 2005. (Among the 'awesome' mortars fired were White Phosphorous chemical munitions).Concerned at the environmental consequences of having dumped thousands of pounds of chemical weapons of various types into the ocean off its coast soon after World War II, the U.S. in the 1980s decided to prepare a master-list of all such dumps for future monitoring.
The report, authored by William R. Brankowitz of the Army Chemical Materials Agency, was titled "Summary of Some Chemical Munitions Sea Dumps by the United States" and was printed for internal circulation on January 30, 1989. Among the 50-plus incidents catalogued involving mustard gas, lewisite, and other nasty chemicals were the following two: Between September 14 and December 21, 1945, 924 canisters of White Phosphorous (WP) cluster bomb munitions from the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland were loose-dumped in the Atlantic Ocean along with WP smoke canisters and smoke projectiles and arsenic trichloride; and then on June 18, 1962, 5,252 WP munitions were dumped in the Atlantic along with mustard projectiles, 20 drums of cyanide and 421,157 pounds of radiological waste. Another report prepared in March 2001 titled "Offshore disposal of chemical agents and weapons conducted by the United States" by the Historical Research and Response Team of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, corroborated the same information, including the dumping of WP.
These reports are significant because they tell us that as far as the U.S. military's own inventory of weapons was concerned, White Phosphorous was classified as a "chemical munition" or a "chemical agent and weapon" as recently as 1989 and 2001. And for good reason too. The WP had been dumped into the ocean in 1945 and 1962 but was obviously considered dangerous enough for the U.S. Army to be concerned about its toxicity five decades later.
