Zumwalt chastises the Veterans’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Hazards for its “blanket lack of impartiality. In fact, some members of the Advisory Committee and other VA officials have, even before reviewing the evidence, [author’s italics] publically denied the existence of a correlation between exposure to dioxin and adverse health effects.”2
He charges that Monsanto Corporation studies conducted on its employees to ascertain the effects of their exposure to dioxin were not only fraudulent, but had been “repeatedly cited by government officials to deny the existence of a relationship between health problems and exposure to agent Orange….”3
“Any Vietnam Veteran, or Vietnam Veteran’s child who has a birth defect,” writes Admiral Zumwalt, “should be presumed to have a service-connected health effect if that person suffers from the type of health effects consistent with dioxin exposure….”4
Vietnam veterans had been right all along. The government and the chemical companies had conspired for many years to deny them help. Government officials had in fact lied, scientists had cooked the research books, the Ranch Hand Study was a fraud, and officials sworn to support veterans had, instead, worked diligently to undermine them.
No one really knows, or ever will know, the exact number of US servicemen who have died from the effects of Agent Orange. We do not know how many veterans’ children were born with serious birth defects, how many young wives suffered numerous spontaneous abortions, or how many victims of Agent Orange, suffering from chronic pain and depression, might have taken their own lives.
Published in 1983, Waiting for an Army to Die ended with this warning:
“Vietnam veterans are our future, and that future is now.”
Since then, the cancer epidemic in this country and other parts of the world has killed millions of men, women, and children. According to the Institute of Medicine (202), cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. “This year alone,” says the IOM, “approximately 560,000 Americans will die of cancer-related causes and almost 1.4 million new cancer cases are expected to be diagnosed. (IOM report, August 2002). The report goes on to say that there are approximately eighty thousand industrial chemicals now registered for use in the United States, “but very few have been tested for their health effects, singly, synergistically, or with different kinds of genetic patterns.”5
The United States of America is a chemical warzone, a place of never ending fear that our family members, friends and neighbors will develop cancer. We watch loved ones undergo radiation treatment, chemotherapy and major operations. We wait, hope, and pray for miracles. The news media encourage us not to despair. Scientists will find a cure for cancer. Our children will live long lives. We will be there to see them marry. We will get to watch our grandchildren grow up. Meanwhile, corporations that place profit over people continue to poison our world with impunity.
For US soldiers and those who served from other countries in Vietnam, the Vietnamese people and their majestic rain forests, and children born so disabled they will never walk or talk or marry or have children of their own, Agent Orange is a monumental tragedy. Vietnam veterans were a throwaway army; the Vietnamese were a throwaway people. Children in this country and throughout the world are throwaway children. We are all Vietnam veterans; we are all Vietnamese, all guinea pigs in one the most diabolical experiments in human history.
Through the determined, unrelenting efforts of Vietnam veterans and their supporters, the Veterans Administration has finally agreed to pay “presumptive” compensation for a number of illnesses related to Agent Orange exposure. A partial list of these illnesses includes: Bell Cell Leukemias, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, Diabetes, Hodgkins Disease, Prostrate cancer, Soft Tissue Sarcoma, and other diseases.
In January 2009, president Obama nominated General Erik Shinseki to head the Department of Veterans Affairs. A Vietnam veteran with thirty-eight years in the army, Gen. Shinseki promised to transform the Department by streamlining access to health care for veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), and for veterans who are seriously ill due to their exposure to Agent Orange. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, one hundred thousand Vietnam veterans will apply for disability compensation over the next two years. Veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars also need help coping with wounds, PTSD, and illnesses related to exposure to depleted uranium (DU), and other toxins.
Money cannot ameliorate the pain of veterans who are dying of cancer and other Agent Orange related diseases. It won’t bring back soldiers who expired knowing their government had stonewalled, deceived, and abandoned them. Money pays for bills, hospital stays, hospice care and funeral expenses. It will never compensate an army poisoned on the field of battle and left to die when it returned home.
More than three million Vietnamese are suffering from exposure to Agent Orange/dioxin, including at least five hundred thousand to one million children. I have spent time with these children in Hanoi’s Friendship Village, family homes outside of Danang, and in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tu Du Hospital. Some are missing arms and legs and eyes; some have enormous heads or strange burned bark skin. My son took photographs of these children, and I wrote Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam. Agent Orange families welcomed us into their homes, they answered our questions, and asked us to share what we’d seen and heard in Vietnam with the world.
I wanted to write this new introduction to Waiting for an Army to Die, while keeping the original content of the book, as a kind of segue into the legacies of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people.
It is my hope that the tragedy of Agent Orange will convince, perhaps shock, the American people and others throughout the world into demanding that corporations and governments stop turning Mother Earth into a toxic sewer. All human beings have the right to live long, productive, healthy lives without having to worry about the threat of cancer. The United Nations and other international bodies should create a World Environmental Bill of Rights, making it a crime against humanity to poison the word’s rivers, lakes, oceans and land. If we fail to do that, we are condemning future generations to suffer unnecessary pain and premature death.
Cleaning up the environment is not the cure for cancer, but it will slow down and in time dramatically reduce the rate of illness and death from this disease.
Paul Rhetershan wanted the world to know that toxic chemicals like dioxin kill human beings. Were he alive today, I’m sure he would be pleased to see how many people are working, in so many ways, to spread this message, even if government officials refuse to act and corporations still refuse to listen.
1. Ketchup and Water
(BIEN HOA, SOUTH VIETNAM, 1966) The twin-engine C-123 Provider transports are loaded, the booms on their wings checked. There is no real damage to any of the craft from the hits they took the day before, and the crews are checking the coordinates, air speed, and other details of the day’s mission. They will be airborne before daybreak, flying south, then east, and after circling at high altitudes they will descend in tight formation to spread thousands of gallons of Agent Orange over a target approximately 8.5 miles long, with each plane covering a swath about 250 feet wide. Within the dense mangrove forests are colonies of Viet Cong who have struck at the surrounding countryside for years, only to vanish into an impenetrable stronghold. But the men who participate in Operation Ranch Hand are not always told what lies beneath the foliage, or what they are spraying. Their assignment is to strip away the enemy’s cover, flushing him into the open where, tacticians believe, he will be destroyed by American and South Vietnamese ground forces. Until 1970, when the Air Force suspends use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, the Ranch Hand team will fly hundreds of missions, destroying thousands, then millions, of acres of mangrove forests, jungle, and crops.
Because of navigational difficulties, and the possibility of losing crew members when a plane is shot down, night flights have been ruled out. The slow-moving planes, skimming in broad daylight
just 150 feet about the trees, make tempting targets to enemy gunners. The planes move in patterns similar to those one makes when mowing the lawn, forward and back until a predetermined area has been fully covered. Although a mission can be completed in three to five minutes, the Ranch Handers take many hits, making them among the most decorated veterans of the Vietnam War.
Sometimes the C-123s spray around the perimeters of base camps, where shirtless men carrying tanks of herbicides on their backs now and then playfully spray one another, or Huey helicopters mounted with spray booms work and rework approaches to the base. Some of the troops complain of headaches that last for hours, even days, and skin rashes that cover their arms, necks, and faces. But no one collapses or dies following his exposure to Agent Orange, and the defoliated Maginot Line between base camp and jungle might mean the difference between life and death. The defoliation campaign, though a topic of casual conversation among the troops, is accepted as just one part of the overall effort to defeat the enemy.
“I really didn’t know what they were spraying,” explained John Green, who served as a medic in Vietnam. “Some people thought it was for mosquitoes, but I never really gave it much thought. I do remember walking through defoliated zones. Everything was dead. The trees had literally grown to death, because that’s how Agent Orange works—it accelerates growth in a plant’s cells until finally the plant or tree dies. Did we drink the water? Of course we did. Where we were there was nothing else to drink. If we found a bomb crater full of water we just scooped it out and drank it, no matter how brown or scummy it looked. Some of our food was undoubtedly sprayed with Agent Orange. But how were we to know? The army told us the stuff was harmless. And we were told it was supposed to be saving our lives. The ‘strategists’ had this idea that the enemy moved in neat little patterns, like a highway grid or something. You eliminate the pattern and you shut the man off, he can’t move anymore. But that, unfortunately, was nonsense. If they shut off one of his trails, he just found another. It was his country, and he really knew how to compensate.”
Because of the frequency with which men and equipment were moved from one location to another, some veterans are not certain where they were at any given time. But they do remember being doused with herbicides or walking through defoliated moonscapes. They remember that even before they left Vietnam, their bodies were covered with rashes; they felt dizzy, nauseous, and suffered from migraine headaches, stomach cramps, and black depressions. The rashes were considered just another variety of “jungle rot” by medical personnel, while other symptoms of dioxin exposure were dismissed as the result of stress brought on by the war. Some soldiers realized that their problems had something to do with the spraying, but there was little they could do to stop it or to protect themselves from further poisoning. They had not been issued protective gear, had no idea when or where a spray mission might occur, and lived in the same clothing for days, even weeks, while in the field. If they survived twelve months they would be home free. They had little reason to believe otherwise.
One of the men who believed he had escaped serious injury in Vietnam now lives near Syracuse, New York, just fifty miles from where the first large-scale tests of herbicides for military use took place. On the walls of the small rented house where Ray Clark lives with his wife and five children, there are no medals framed in glass, no photographs of smiling young men in battle dress, no captured enemy weapons or flags. Unlike veterans of World War II, who are fond of displaying the booty of a victorious army, Vietnam veterans seldom reserve a room—or even one wall—of their home for a shrine to the glories of war. And, though he once walked point as a minesweeper in Vietnam, one of the most dangerous assignments of the war, Ray Clark, with his pipe and sorrowful blue eyes, reminds one more of a history professor than of Hollywood’s gung-ho Marine. While recuperating from battle fatigue Clark learned that his battalion had been nearly wiped out when their newly arrived M16s misfired during a battle. Six years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he would discover that he was suffering from bladder cancer.
Before our interview, I had phoned to ask directions to the Clarks’ home and, as I passed dilapidated trailers and patchwork houses with smoke curling from crooked little chimneys, I thought about the many veterans I knew who had grown up in impoverished areas like this. It was here that, during the sixties and early seventies, military recruiters scoured the high schools looking for adolescents willing to be turned into Marines, Green Berets, Rangers, and grunts. And it was here that the military, offering young men the chance to become authentic heroes, easily filled their monthly quotas, sending hundreds of thousands to fight in a country about which the majority of Americans knew virtually nothing. Passing through the village near the Clarks’ house, I half expected to see a monument to those who fought, and died, in Vietnam.
When Clark returned home there were no parades, no crowds, no politicians handing out keys to “grateful cities.” If they survived their tour of duty, Vietnam veterans boarded “freedom birds” at Tan Son Nhut Airport and were whisked through the twilight zone to San Francisco, where they were often met by antiwar demonstrators. Then they flew home to cities that were bitterly divided over the war, or took a bus that deposited them at 3:00 AM on the deserted streets of their hometown. Others hitchhiked home and, when a car stopped to offer them a lift, wondered whether they should keep quiet, or perhaps even lie, about where they had spent the past twelve months. While still in Vietnam they had heard that many Americans were angry about the war—angry, strangely enough, at them. They would discover that their arrival in California was a portent of things to come. “I got sick of the stereotypes,” Clark explains. “The movies, books, radio, newspapers had us typed as baby killers, psychos, drug addicts. I just didn’t want to walk down the street and have someone say, ‘Hey, there goes Ray Clark. He takes drugs, kill babies, rapes women. He’s really weird, man.” ’
Ray married, found a job, and started school. He didn’t want to talk about the war, and most of all he just wanted to be left alone to raise his children and live a “normal” life. “I joined the American Legion once,” Clark says. “And all they wanted to do was parade around saying, ‘We fought a good war. We fought a good old war, didn’t we.’ Well, we didn’t fight a good war. We lost. We lost fifty-four thousand men for absolutely nothing.” Then he found that before he would celebrate his thirtieth birthday, he might die of a form of cancer that rarely kills anyone under fifty. The fighting hadn’t killed him, but something with which he had come into contact in the jungles of Vietnam just might.
In his aversion to war stories and his desire to put the war behind him, Ray Clark is typical of most Vietnam veterans. But unlike many veterans, he does not have to work at forgetting his combat experiences. Because, except for arriving in and returning from Vietnam, Clark has little conscious recollection of his experiences there. With his wife’s help, and by talking to other veterans, he has managed to piece together fragments of the period he spent in Vietnam, but there are still gaps, the picture remains incomplete. “He would talk in his sleep,” Mrs. Clark explains, “or not really talk, but mutter, and he wouldn’t sleep. He would go into a kind of agitated state or trance, talking all night and, in the morning, remembering little, if anything, he said.” Like all of the veterans with whom I’ve talked, Clark has never received a letter from the Department of Defense or Veterans Administration advising him that he might have spent time in a region sprayed with Agent Orange. But by talking with Vietnam veterans who served in the same region as he did, and who remember being sprayed with Agent Orange, walking through defoliated areas, and drinking water contaminated with herbicides, Ray has verified his suspicion that he was exposed to deadly chemicals. Only after becoming involved with Agent Orange Victims International, however, did Clark learn about the many symptoms of dioxin exposure, one of which is loss of memory.
Although he can remember little about his combat experiences, Ray Clark’s recollection of his nearly ten-year battle w
ith the Veterans Administration is vivid. As the youngest patient to be treated for bladder cancer at a VA hospital, he has fought bureaucratic stonewalling, indifference, and incompetence. Even when VA doctors finally admitted that Clark had bladder cancer and decided to operate, his family was not told the cancer could be controlled. “They told me,” Clark says, “to get my insurance in order. That’s about all.” It was only after his mother-in-law obtained a booklet from the American Cancer Society that Ray’s family discovered his cancer was not terminal.
Leafing through a stack of letters from the Veterans Administration, congressmen, and the Department of Defense, Clark sips coffee and answers my questions slowly, carefully, and at times with the irritation of having gone over the same painful ground too often. Mrs. Clark joins us at the kitchen table, but her involvement with politics has made her skeptical, even slightly bitter. Recalling a press conference at which Senator Moynihan was to appear with her husband and other Vietnam veterans, she explains that the senator arrived more than an hour late and, placing his hands on Clark’s chest, made an inane comment about Agent Orange. Except for the senator’s entourage, no one laughed. “He was lucky,” Mrs. Clark says, “that one of the veterans standing nearby didn’t hit him.”
In the beginning she believed that her idealism, indeed her fervor, would inspire local and national leaders to take action on behalf of Vietnam veterans and their families. But she has discovered that promises are not always kept, headlines do not necessarily mean progress, and unless it can be quantified by a government agency or verified by a panel of experts, human suffering does not inspire bureaucracies to action. Vietnam veterans, she now believes, might be one more commodity in a throwaway society. “They were used over there, and now they’re being used here,” Mrs. Clark says. Her husband nods, but declines to elaborate.
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