Aerial spraying of malathion over Portola Valley, July 20, 1981
Source: Mike Maloney/San Francisco Chronicle
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The helicopters came at night. Their distant juddering whine was our cue to get inside the building and close the windows. Flying in groups of six, they floated in low over the Bay mudflats before rising in a line above the twilight horizon and sweeping back and forth across the suburban neighborhoods in the same military formations the pilots used in Vietnam. Then, all at once, they were overhead, whapwhapping 200 feet above the ground with a noise and force that shook everything below. And then they were gone.
This was the sound of a war zone, the sound of an occupation.
This was the sound of helicopters spraying poison over Palo Alto.