Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  “Yet it took us forever to get any information from the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense. We’ve had so little cooperation from the people who were involved in administrating the war. Every step along the way we’ve had to file a Freedom of Information Act claim to get information. It’s been like pulling teeth since day one to get any information out of the Veterans Administration. But why do they behave this way? I still don’t quite understand it. I’ve met with them, and it seems rather obvious to me that the heavy lobbying of Dow, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, and Uniroyal have an influence on the government’s decisions. As an individual, and as a Vietnam veteran, I can only think that when they all get together in the friendly back room or by the poolside and they dip their well-manicured fingers into the caviar jar, the conversation is ‘How are we going to keep these young guys who have in fact been poisoned by dioxin from collecting what’s justly theirs?’ And the way they decide to do that is through the bureaucracy: Just keep putting up the barrier of no cause and effect, no correlation, and never do the tests that might prove we’re right. When you do spend over a hundred thousand dollars to design a study, just make sure it’s like the UCLA epidemiological protocol, that it’s doctored up and utterly useless. That way you can stall progress for another two, five, ten years. No, I think it’s dollars, big money, and that’s what’s really behind all this. We Vietnam veterans have been given a price tag, and the tag seems to be too high for the government to afford.”

  In Vietnam, DeBoer did not feel that he was fighting for the state of New York, California, or Ohio. He and his fellow soldiers were there “as Americans, not as representatives of our individual states.” Thus he finds it difficult to understand “why the courthouse door is being closed to us now. In eighteen states veterans are time-barred by statute of limitations from arguing for compensation from the war contractors once the class action suit has been heard, and, we assume, won. And this is probably the most terrible, the most tragic thing that has happened to the Vietnam veterans. It’s the ultimate slap in the face to a people who were fighting tyranny and communism, or so they were told, to come home and be informed—and this may well include hundreds of thousands of men—that ‘No, you are not going to have your day in court. Yes, your brother veteran in California will be able to have his day in court, but you who live in any of the eighteen states where you are time-barred will not have your day.’”

  Ron DeBoer was nineteen when he went to Vietnam. Today he is thirty-four. The organization that he founded three years ago no longer exists, and now he wants nothing more than to write about what it felt like to be a nineteen-year-old kid in Vietnam, to spend that first terrifying night in the jungle, to see the dead and the wounded, and to survive. But he has not given up the hope that his “brother veterans will be accorded the dignity and compassion to which they are entitled,” even though he knows that, in spite of cosmetic proclamations, rhetorical flourishes, and public relations scams, very little has changed at VA headquarters. The Agent Orange examination is still a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, useless and humiliating to the eighty thousand veterans who, distressed over their own deteriorating health and concerned that their future children might be born with a myriad of birth defects, have sought help at VA clinics. The anger and shock that followed his discovery that he had testicular cancer and that propelled him to work nonstop for three years on behalf of other Agent Orange victims has been replaced by stoicism.

  “There’s nothing left anymore that these people can do that will affect me on an individual basis—you know, get me upset. They are beyond scruples. They are beyond decency. They will do anything. They will sit there and cover up, and they will tell you that there was absolutely no spraying in Laos, no spraying in Cambodia. And just as soon as we file a Freedom of Information Act they will admit that ‘Yes, we sprayed there. Yes, we lied all along.’ All the war contractors present this façade of true patriotism, but I’ve been saying ‘Profit before Patriotism’ for three years. They knew, or they damn well should have known, that their herbicide was contaminated with dioxin. As a matter of fact, their scientists knew years before anyone else just how toxic this substance was. And I really wouldn’t be that concerned with Dow’s credibility or sincerity if we had only dumped a couple hundred thousand gallons of Agent Orange on Vietnam, but when you consider eleven million gallons there is no one who can tell me that at some time Dow’s scientists didn’t sit down and ask, ‘Now wait a minute, just what the hell are they doing with all this stuff?’ We’re talking about three hundred and sixty-eight pounds of dioxin! A substance that kills laboratory animals in parts per billion, which is really only a microscopic dose.

  “I’m familiar with all their arguments. We all are. That dioxin breaks down in sunlight. Well, sure it does if you place it on a petri dish in a laboratory, but in Vietnam it got into the muck, the water, and in the jungle where there was no sunlight. And Matthew Meselson [Harvard University] found it in fish that had been caught several kilometers from where we had sprayed, so it was dispersed into the food chain, and into our bodies.”

  DeBoer believes that eventually “justice will be done to the Vietnam veterans and their families who have suffered because of their exposure to dioxin,” but he admits that he is not altogether certain what he means when he uses the word “justice.”

  “I’ve asked myself that question so many times, and I know that there will be no victory in a traditional sense. This thing will never end with a victory party or people waving some sort of banners or something like that. But I think there will be an accounting for corporate irresponsibility, for chemical warfare, for the cover-ups. People are going to be exposed for what they were, and for what they are, because what do you say to a thirty-year-old widow? What do you say to a kid born with a missing arm or leg, a cleft palate, or duplicate sex organs? What are you going to say to that kid? That I won, that Ron DeBoer and all the other people, the Ryans and the McCarthys and the Mullers and everybody else involved won? What did we really do for you? We didn’t really do anything except get involved in something which we believed in, and something which, when you’ve had cancer and you think you might be dying and you look at all your brother veterans and see their problems, there really isn’t much choice but to get into it.

  “But I can tell you this: without a doubt the number of people who have come forward with problems this far, as astronomical as it may seem, is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more out there. So many guys who were superficially wounded in Nam but who refused medical treatment, those guys who saw death and dying and considered themselves lucky and now they look back on it all and if they are sick they just say, ‘What’s a little pain, or numbness in the legs, or violent headaches? I’m alive, aren’t I? So I’ll just hang in there and live with it.’ But most of all they just want to leave the whole Vietnam experience in the closet where they feel it belongs. They just don’t want to be stereotyped any further. They want to believe that they survived the war, and I ask you, can you really blame them? We may be the first army in history that has had to keep fighting for our lives after the war is over.”

  3. Seals and River Rats

  The wind is from the south, but bitter, sweeping across the deserted platform in great bone-chilling gusts. Opposite the Long Island Rail Road station is a tavern that once might have been a warehouse—squat, battered, uninviting.

  The voice over the phone says, “Just stand by the escalator and face the direction you came from. Look for a blue ’66 Chevrolet.” I pace between the station and the escalator to the elevated platform. The man who arrives a few moments later wears a black beret, and introduces himself as a former “river rat.”

  When he was still in high school, Bobby Sutton joined the Naval Reserve, was later assigned to a precommissioning detail in Newport, Rhode Island, and eventually spent a year on the USS Wainwright off the coast of Haiphong.

  “We were a kind of ‘radar picket’—that is, positive iden
tification radar air zone,” Sutton explains. “We controlled all the aircraft in the Gulf of Tonkin. They had to come up on our air frequency or they’d get blown out of the sky. Fortunately we didn’t have any combat, just long hours.” Sutton finished his tour of duty and, after only fifty-six days as a civilian, reenlisted. “I was then on the USS Newell, and I would see these little green boats being tested off one of the main piers at Pearl Harbor. And believe me I felt safe on the fantail of that ship. ‘Damn!’ I said, ‘I know where they’re goin’. I’m glad I’m on this ship.’ And lo and behold, just three weeks later I had my orders for training at Mare Island and Coronado, California, at the naval inshore operations training center and was assigned to Rivron 9.”

  Assigned to a “zippo monitor,” or flamethrower boat, Sutton cruised the rivers and streams of the Mekong Delta, burning off “dead brush or half-living foliage” to expose enemy bunkers and ambush sites. Sutton estimates that there were over fifty thousand miles of rivers and streams in the Mekong Delta, many of them “laced with bunkers, underground hospitals, VC R&R areas, and spider holes. Did I know some of the areas we were burning had been sprayed with herbicides?” Sutton demands. “Absolutely not. I never even heard of Agent Orange until late 1978, even though I’ve been sick since 1976.”

  On the door to Sutton’s basement apartment, where he lives with his wife, Patty, his twenty-one-pound tabby cat, and hundreds of articles, books, scientific papers, government documents, and tapes on the defoliation campaign and the health effects of herbicides, is a sign: THIS PROPERTY PROTECTED BY AN ARMED VIETNAM VETERAN.

  “I’ve spent the past two and a half years researching this problem,” says Sutton, leading me into his living room, “and they don’t like me very much at the VA because I tend to be very outspoken about this thing. I just won’t put up with any more of their bullshit. See, I don’t have much education. In fact, when I write to the VA now I put down that I’m a research analyst, which is what I am, really. But they don’t wanna hear about it because they just don’t wanna admit that our government might have killed its own troops.”

  We return to the dining room table, and Sutton puts water on the stove for tea. Pointing to one of the many documents stacked and strewn about the table, he says, “This information isn’t top secret, just look at it. I got this stuff from them, from the very people who deny that we are sick. They deny that we’re sick and dying, but their own literature describes the teratogenic and carcinogenic effects of the stuff we were exposed to in Nam.” Opening one of his photo albums, Sutton points to a picture of the zippo monitor on which he served. In the photograph a small craft—Sutton explains the zippos were about fifty-seven feet long—is spraying a riverbank with fire. Another photograph shows two zippo monitors cruising the Mekong Delta, one just a few hundred yards behind the other. Between the two crafts a mortar shell has landed, sending up a geyser. Beneath the photograph a caption reads: “This one missed. The next one didn’t.”

  Sutton talks in short bursts of rage, in monologues replete with technical references to the harmful effects of herbicides. The effort seems to exhaust him, and he closes his eyes, stroking the enormous cat that reclines atop the dining room table’s clutter. Regaining his composure, Sutton announces that in a few moments a “Seal” and his wife will be arriving. “I thought you might want to talk to him,” Sutton says, “because he’s sick too, and he can tell you that we’re not just makin’ this whole thing up.”

  Joe Naples and his wife Charlotte arrive, and Sutton explains that he and Naples have been living just a few blocks apart for years and only recently discovered that they spent time on the same boat in the Mekong Delta. Mrs. Naples says that she doesn’t really wish to talk, preferring to give her husband support and, when necessary, prompting him with details about the years he has spent fighting the debilitating effects of herbicides on his health. “It’s not unusual,” Sutton explains, referring to Naples’ temporary memory lapses. “You’ll talk to a lot of vets who have this problem. It’s just part of the effect of dioxin on the central nervous system. I sometimes forget what I’m saying or doing, too.”

  Naples, who spent three years in Vietnam as a Navy Seal, but “more in the bush than on a boat,” removes his leather jacket and, shoving the sleeves of his sweater to his elbows, exposes tattooed forearms heavily scarred by chloracne and “punch biopsies.” The biopsies, Naples explains, were taken by VA doctors to determine whether or not his fatty tissue contains traces of dioxin. He has had the rashes for many years and when they spread to his arms and legs and the sores broke, covering his skin with a “pussy glaze,” he went to the Veterans Administration for help.

  “All that’s left here,” says Naples, pointing to his left forearm, “is scar tissue. They took a skin biopsy, and after about a month I went back to Northport Hospital [Long Island, New York]. The biopsy had been sent to the Bronx to be analyzed and Northport was trying to get the results from there. And the two doctors that were taking care of me in Northport were really honest; they were very interested in it, and one of them called me into her office. So I asked her about the results of the biopsy; and she said she hadn’t gotten any results on the biopsy, and that they couldn’t get the slides. So I says, ‘How come?’ And she says, ‘Joe, there are just three things that possibly could have happened to them slides. One, somebody took the slides and wants to study them some more. Two, they were on their way here in the mail and got lost. Or three, they were conveniently lost, dropped through a hole in the floor.’ And she says, ‘If you want my opinion it was probably the last one. I just feel that this is what happened.’”

  Angered over having undergone minor surgery, only to be told that he might never find out the results of lab tests performed on the dime-sized pieces of skin removed from his arms, Naples went to Victor Yannacone, attorney for Vietnam veterans in their suit against the VA for gross negligence, to see if the slides could be subpoenaed. But Yannacone told Naples this wasn’t possible, that the slides had obviously disappeared and little could be done to find them. The rash continued to spread over Naples’ forearms, thighs, calves, stomach, and face, making him so uncomfortable at times that he couldn’t sleep. And when the Manhattan VA called to say the doctors there would like to take a look at his lesions, Naples thought that perhaps he might get help after all.

  “They called us in,” says Naples, “and on the day we got there, all of a sudden the doctor was called away. So we went home. And they call us back a second time and we went in to see the doctor, and she was friendly, really responding to us, genuinely interested in the rashes. And then she said, ‘Oh, I’ve got to make a phone call. I’m gonna try to call the Bronx VA to find out just what happened to those slides.’ She went out of the room for a few minutes, came back in and announced: ‘Okay, Joe, we’ve found out what we needed to know, you can go home now, we don’t have to do anything more.’ I had hand-carried my records to Manhattan, signed a release of information form so they could get whatever they needed, and I said, ‘What about this release of information form I signed?’ And she said, ‘No, when your lesions come back up you come and see me then.’ And since then we haven’t heard anything more about it. The thing was, she was really warm, friendly, till she made that phone call, and then all of a sudden it was zap, gone, just get outta here.”

  While Joe Naples and Bobby Sutton talk, I think about the many times I have seen men like them leaving a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, an auto assembly plant in Detroit, or a coal mine in West Virginia, lunch box under the left arm. And in how many neighborhood bars we have sat together on a Saturday afternoon, chugging shots and sipping beer while watching reruns of sporting events. But for Naples and Sutton, that was before Vietnam. Because of the slow debilitating effects of dioxin and phenoxyacetic acid, they find it difficult to work, and the damage to their livers rules out drinking.

  “I thought the stuff they were spraying was insect repellent,” says Naples, “and of course some of it was. But I didn’t know n
othin’ about herbicides at the time. When I first got to Dong Tam, there was a lot of vegetation. But by the time I left, the mangrove forest that had been there was so burnt out we ended up playin’ softball on it. And I hear from Bobby that when he got there the place was almost like a desert.”

  “Listen,” Sutton says, “when a place is so fertile that you can take a piss and ten minutes later something will grow there, you know somethin’s wrong when it turns to muck, just dirt.” Opening one of his photo albums, Sutton points to a picture of something that resembles a brown sheet of construction paper superimposed on a tiny pool table, leaving only a thin green margin. “There it is,” he says, pointing to the brown sheet, “that’s the softball field Joe’s talkin’ about. One time it was jungle, but that’s the way it looked in 1969.”

  “Before I entered the service,” Naples continues, pulling his sleeves carefully over his forearms, as though by covering the chloracne he can stop the rash from spreading or anesthetize the terrible itching and burning, “I lettered in almost every sport in high school. I was on the wrestling team, played Triple A baseball, and had no physical problems whatsoever. But for the past ten, maybe twelve years, I’ve had these rashes that have gotten progressively worse. I’m losing my balance. I’m dizzy, I’ve got constant headaches. My eyes are sensitive to light, and I’d just say my health has been goin’ downhill most of the time. As time goes by, it just gets worse.”

  Charlotte Naples nods painfully in agreement after each statement, massaging her husband’s arms and occasionally whispering encouragement. During his three-year tour of duty, Naples was “mostly involved in reconnaissance, setting up ambushes, intercepting gun runners and tax collectors.” He was wounded three times—once in the neck by a .30-caliber machine gun—and was with “the very first group, or one of the first,” to enter Cambodia in 1966, four years before the war “officially” spread to that country. He was in his teens when he went to war; but now, though he has not yet celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday, he feels like an old man, confused, bewildered, angry at the nation that seems to want to punish him for the thirty-six months he spent in combat.