Unlike napalm, which in Vietnam left villagers and enemies alike with massive burns all over their bodies, white phosphorus burns down to the bone.
Le The Thrung, a Vietnamese doctor studying white phosphorus burns in 1969, describes its effects on the skin: “urning phosphorus produces 800-1,000 degrees centigrade heat. Scattered phosphorus particles go on consuming themselves and deepen burn wounds.” Next, chemical compounds “create a chemical burn, like an acid, drawing water from the cells. This process generates great pain in the nervous system.” Finally, white phosphorus compounds oxygenate and penetrate “the blood stream and white blood cells in the dermis, subdermis, and deeper skin layers.” This creates what he calls an “organic toxicity [that] blocks off all blood circulation with the burn area.”
It wasn't just medical professionals noting the brutal effects of white phosphorus. A U.S. serviceperson, at the height of the Vietnam War, remarked, “We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at Dow. The original product wasn't so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willy Peter so's to make it burn better. It'll even burn under water now. And one drop is enough; it'll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorus poisoning.”
This is what our military and political leaders currently define as a “potent psychological weapon?” These are the actions that citizens of empire are to support and legitimize, even if tacitly, in the name of spreading democracy and securing our own nebulous borders?
No, this is not about our national feelings of moral fortitude. This is about civilians and “enemies” alike having chemicals dropped on them like rain and their skin bubbling, melting, wasting away with no way to scrape off the pain of oxidizing phosphorus and no way to cauterize the slow, painful melting into the nervous system and bloodstream. No, for those getting “smoked out of their holes,” there is very little, if anything, psychological about Willy Peter.
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