What projectagentorange.com used to host, and the history behind the name.
For a time, projectagentorange.com hosted a page titled 'Our Project Agent Orange Grant,' devoted to the continuing harm caused by wartime herbicide spraying in Vietnam. An archive snapshot from July 25, 2021 preserves the page's contacts and fiscal agent; search listings add a few more fragments. This record assembles only what is verifiably known about the site — and says plainly where the evidence runs out.
The clearest surviving evidence is an archive snapshot captured on July 25, 2021. It records a page titled 'Our Project Agent Orange Grant' that opens with contact information and an introduction beginning, 'In present day Viet Nam people continue to be affected by ex—' before the preserved text cuts off. Search listings from the same era fill in the theme: Agent Orange 'continues to cause serious problems,' and 'Vietnamese and Americans are giving birth to babies with such terrible birth defects something must be' done.
The contact block names Michael Brownstein as a primary contact for the grant and lists a fiscal agent: Veterans for Peace — Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign, with Merle Ratner and Michael Brownstein named alongside it. A fiscal agent is the registered organization that receives and administers funds on a project's behalf, which suggests the grant operated under the campaign's nonprofit umbrella rather than as a standalone entity.
Judging by the surviving fragments, the grant was relief-oriented. It framed Agent Orange not as a closed chapter of the Vietnam War but as a live public-health emergency, pointing to severe birth defects in newborns in both Vietnamese and American families as the reason action was still required. That framing matches the broader record: dioxin exposure has been documented among Vietnamese communities near former spray zones and storage sites, and U.S. authorities recognize certain illnesses in exposed veterans — and spina bifida in their children — as service-connected.
No application forms, award amounts, deadlines, or lists of recipients survive in the accessible record, and this page does not attempt to reconstruct them. What can responsibly be said is narrow: the site presented a grant, named the people responsible for it, and anchored it to an established veterans' campaign.
Agent Orange was the most heavily used of the tactical herbicides sprayed by the U.S. military over South Vietnam between 1961 and 1971, during what was called Operation Ranch Hand. It combined two herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T; the second was contaminated in production with TCDD, among the most toxic dioxins known. On the order of 11 to 12 million gallons of Agent Orange were dispersed before spraying stopped.
TCDD does not break down quickly. It settles into soil and river sediment, concentrates as it moves up the food chain, and accumulates in human tissue. Vietnam's Red Cross has estimated that as many as three million Vietnamese — including children born long after the war — live with health problems attributed to dioxin, and former bases such as Da Nang, Bien Hoa, and Phu Cat remain designated contamination hot spots. Among the conditions U.S. authorities presume to be service-connected for exposed veterans are:
Veterans for Peace is a U.S. nonprofit of military veterans founded in 1985. Its Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign — the organization the archived page names as fiscal agent — was created to press for justice for Vietnamese victims of the spraying and to channel material aid to them. The campaign has supported humanitarian programs in Vietnam and lobbied in Washington for U.S.-funded health care, disability services, and environmental remediation, backing congressional efforts such as the repeatedly introduced Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act.
Acting as fiscal agent placed the Project Agent Orange grant inside this advocacy ecosystem: a small, donor-supported effort administered through an established nonprofit rather than incorporated on its own. The archived page does not state the grant's size, its duration, or the projects it funded, and no independent record of awards has been located.
The name 'Project Agent Orange' surfaces in at least two other contexts that should not be merged with the grant page. Search listings reference a 'Project Agent Orange Poetry Blog,' which a writers' directory notes does not qualify for its listings — evidence that poetry formed part of the project's public face at some point, though the blog's contents are not preserved in the sources reviewed here.
Separately, in 2012 a New York movement collective led by founder and artistic director Natalia Duong presented 'Project Agent Orange,' an evening-length dance work described as investigating 'how war is inherited through the body.' Listings from March and May of that year document the piece in New York City. Nothing in the archived grant page connects the two efforts; they appear to be independent projects sharing a name.