ABSTRACT
With an etymology that is remarkably similar to that of PTSD, Agent Orange (AO) burst into public awareness in the late 1970s as a counterweight to the antiwar veterans’ movement. From there, it morphed into an environmental cause that enlisted the involvement of science and mustered on its behalf the spectacular photographs of deforestation and human birth defects with which it is now widely associated. It was the emotional energy of those images that flowed back into the trauma discourse of PTSD creating a layered and symbiotic notion of an “Agent Orange” with psychological connotations. The nodal events for that convergence were Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM’s 1978 news special Agent Orange: Vietnam’s Deadly Fog, and its remake for the 1986 film Unnatural Causes: The Agent Orange Story, starring John Ritter, that transformed its documentarian qualities into entertainment spectacle. In the backstory to those events, we see the interplay of political, scientific, and informational forces that pushed AO onto the stage.
