Agent Orange not only affects the soldiers and civilians it directly sprays, but the chemical also has lasting harmful effects on the bases where it is stored and in the surrounding areas. Nguyen Van Dung ( Nguyen Van Dung), who was involved in cleaning the sewers at Da Nang airport in 1996, did not know at the time that the United States had stored large quantities of the herbicide, which contains highly toxic compounds that can cause more than a dozen illnesses, at this airport during the Vietnam War. He was even less aware that the compound had leached into the soil and was maintaining very high and dangerous levels. Nguyen and his wife, with their still-infant daughter, took up residence in an adjoining house to this former U.S. airbase, and worked together at the airport for the next 13 years, where they gave birth to two children who both suffered from fatal ailments, including rare blood and bone disorders they suspected were caused by the airport's tainted soil. Their second daughter died at the age of seven as a result, and now their 10-month-old son, who suffers from the same illnesses, has to have a blood transfusion every month to survive. The man, now 41, sat on the floor with his legs crossed and wept as he rocked the frail baby in its cradle. He said, "I am a man who never sheds tears easily, but every time my son gets a blood transfusion I shed tears."

For the past three years, Hatfield Consulting and Vietnamese aestheticians, who measure blood and breast milk dioxin levels of workers inside Da Nang airport, have found that those levels are an astonishing 100 times the levels deemed safe by the WHO. Dioxin is considered the most persistent toxin known. In the environment, its half-life can be decades, which is just how long it would take for it to be reduced by half; in the human body, dioxin has a half-life of about seven-and-a-half years, which means that some of the residents that Hatfield Consulting tested 10 years ago would now have levels of the toxin in their bodies that are at much higher levels. Studies have shown that exposure to dioxin raises the incidence of cancer and other dangerous diseases, but its effects on the human body don't show up for decades, and some exposed people don't even develop the disease for life. However, scientists believe the chemical can disrupt cell development and even alter a person's genes.

After the Vietnam War, the after-effects of Agent Orange became apparent. In the mountainous regions of southern Vietnam, people often find deformed children with missing arms and legs or ulcers all over their bodies, as well as many idiotic children, who are the direct victims of Agent Orange.

The U.S. military sprayed about 20 million gallons of Agent Orange on the battlefields of Vietnam during the 10 years of the Vietnam War. According to statistics, about 5 million Vietnamese are still suffering from the effects, including 150,000 children, and 600,000 people are terminally ill.

Because Agent Orange-poisoned women are susceptible to reproductive diseases such as uterine cancer, a large number of Vietnamese children are born with a variety of lifelong, incurable congenital diseases. Not only that, Agent Orange, which is now left in the soil, continues to poison generations of Vietnamese.

U.S. soldiers have not escaped disaster by leaving Vietnam, and many of them have been found to have lifelong illnesses such as heart disease and Parkinson's disease, as well as a 30 percent increase in spontaneous miscarriages by their wives and birth defects in their children. Studies by the American Institute of Medical Research (AIMR) have shown that it is "Agent Orange", which contains a large amount of dioxin, that is responsible for these tragedies.