Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  Irritated by her mother’s remarks, Sandy responds that the child is just naturally quiet and cannot be expected to develop at the same speed as her older sister. Yes, she admits, Lori is not yet able to sit up, rolling sideways when propped on the couch and crying until someone picks her up again. But why rush things the way they had with Heather?

  Shortly after Christmas Sandy tells the doctor about her mother’s observation, but he shows little concern. Lori, he explains, is simply experiencing a “delay in her development.” Demonstrating an eight-week series of exercises the Straits can use to strengthen their daughter’s limbs, the physician says they should see some improvement shortly thereafter. For the next month Sandy and Jerry exercise their daughter’s limbs several times each day, but without results. By seven months Lori still can not roll over or sit up, and they are worried. Sandy calls the doctor’s office and demands an appointment for the next day. Something is wrong with her baby, she says, and she wants to know exactly what it is.

  Wrapping Lori in several layers of blankets, Sandy drives through a snowstorm and watches with a mixture of optimism and dread as the pediatrician taps Lori’s limbs with a small rubber hammer. Circling the table on which Lori lies smiling and gurgling, the doctor shakes his head sadly, pats his tiny patient on the head once or twice, and tells Sandy he has some bad news. Her daughter, he says, is suffering from cerebral palsy. It will not shorten her life; however, it will pose special…

  Sandy is no longer listening. Like someone who jogs five miles to their physician’s office for a routine checkup, only to be told they will be dead within six months, Sandy sees but does not hear the doctor.

  During the following weeks Lori develops seizures, and the Straits admit her to the hospital for further tests. The seizures occur less frequently, then stop altogether when she is given Phenobarbital. After ten days the Straits are told they can take their baby home. But as they walk toward the elevator, they are stopped by a physician who explains that their daughter is suffering from a debilitating nerve disease for which there is no cure. In the final stages of the disease the patient becomes deaf, blind, and then dies. He cannot be certain how long medication will help their daughter, but at least for now the seizures have stopped. The only thing he can recommend for Lori is that they take her home and love her. If the seizures reoccur, they should call him at once.

  Two weeks later, Lori has another seizure and is rushed to the emergency ward. Exhausted, frustrated, and angry, the Straits begin to wonder if medical science will ever provide a satisfactory explanation for their daughter’s problems. Does she suffer from cerebral palsy, or is she dying from a disease of the nervous system? Might it be possible, Sandy wonders, waving a small piece of colored cloth in front of her daughter to check her eyesight, that Lori will defy the doctor’s prognosis and grow up to be healthy and intelligent child.

  One morning Sandy notices that a small crowd has gathered near her daughter’s door. Surrounded by nurses and interns, Lori’s doctor appears to be giving a lecture. As she approaches Sandy observes that one of the nurses is holding Lori “like a new puppy that all the kids wanted to see.” The neurologist motions for Sandy, the nurse, and an intern to follow him down the hall where he pauses in front of a linen closet. Removing a flashlight from the pocket of his smock, he clicks it on and off several times and, satisfied that it works, orders everyone into the closet. Snapping off the overhead light the doctor presses his flashlight to the right side of Lori’s head and holds it there for a moment before announcing: “This is what healthy brain tissue looks like. The light, as you can see, makes only a faint red glow. That is because it cannot penetrate the brain tissue’s denseness.” Moving the light to the left side of Lori’s tiny head, he continues: “And this is what it looks like when there is not brain tissue. You see the pink glow? Where the light penetrates? Your daughter was born with half of her brain missing.” Turning on the overhead light and pocketing his flashlight, the doctor orders the nurse to return Lori to her room. At the moment, he tells Sandy, he does not have time to discuss her daughter’s prognosis in depth, but he will be glad to clarify matters later. Then he leaves.

  Pacing the hospital room with Lori in her arms, Sandy asks herself questions. How common is Lori’s birth defect? Why, when there is no history of birth defects in her own or Jerry’s family, has this happened? And how, providing her daughter lives, will she ever tell her that she was born with the left half of her brain missing? When the neurologist returns he advises Mrs. Strait to stop worrying about how she might tell Lori about her birth defect. He has seen only one case like her daughter’s and that was nine-month-old boy who could not follow light with his eyes and never developed beyond that point. Their daughter, says the neurologist, will never develop physically or mentally. In essence, Lori is a hopeless case.

  A few days later, Sandy brings Lori home from the hospital. But Lori does not lose her hearing or eyesight, nor does she lapse into a coma and die. At the Polk County Easter Seals Center, in Des Moines, the Straits talk with a physical therapist who does not agree with their doctor’s pessimistic predictions. Instead, he says, they must take their baby home, remove her clothing, and lay her on the cold floor so she will be uncomfortable enough to want to roll over. If Lori is to develop, they must resist the inclination to make her comfortable; their daughter says the therapist, simply cannot be allowed to be content. For the next twenty-four months the Straits spend hours each day rolling their daughter on a beach ball so her toes and fingers will touch the floor to stimulate crawling, watching her flail about on the kitchen floor and resisting the temptation to help her as she struggles.

  After ten months Lori can roll over and she follows her mother about the room this way, rolling from room to room, her mother says, “like a baby seal.” After eighteen months Lori can sit up without support and is able to say “Mama,” and by two years she is walking, though with a sideways gait because her right leg is still weak. By putting peanut butter behind Lori’s teeth and encouraging her to move her tongue toward the treat, a speech therapist teaches Lori how to form sounds, then words. By the age of three she has progressed to the point where she is enrolled in a nursery school for handicapped children; her mother kisses Lori goodbye, pinning a small notebook to her daughter’s collar so the teacher can write down some of the day’s events. Before the year is over, Lori’s memory has so improved that the notebook is no longer necessary. She is now able to recall some of the things that happen during the school day.

  While his daughter continues to make miraculous progress, Jerry Strait is beginning to experience symptoms that, like Lori’s birth defect, seem mysterious in origin. Nine years after his return from Vietnam, an irritating rash is spreading across his face and scalp, and there are times when his head aches so badly that he is overcome with nausea. But it does not occur to him that his symptoms or Lori’s birth defect might be related to his tour of duty in Vietnam, all but a few days of which he spent in the bush. The Department of Defense has not advised him that he spent more than three hundred days in the most heavily sprayed region of Vietnam or that the food he ate and water he drank may have been contaminated by dioxin.

  One evening Strait is preparing for bed when his mother calls to ask if he has read the newspaper article about “something called Agent Orange.” She also wants to know if he recalls having been exposed to herbicides. As he reads, Strait is surprised not only by the statements some of the veterans are making, but by how much he seems to have forgotten since his return home. Examining a photograph of a C-123 spraying herbicides, Strait wonders why he has given so little thought to the cysts that spread across his body in Vietnam, clinging to his back, legs, and arms like leeches; or the headaches, dizziness, rashes, and stomach cramps that he and others in his platoon had attributed to the heat. Closing his eyes and leaning back on the couch, Strait remembers the A Shau Valley in 1969. The trees are leafless, rotting, and from a distance appear petrified. The ground is littered with decay
ing jungle birds; on the surface of a slow-moving stream, clusters of dead fish shimmer like giant buttons. A new arrival “in country” remarks that the scene is spooky, but Strait only shrugs. For him, after several months in the bush, the defoliated area is not more spooky than the corner drugstore in his hometown. Leaving the area, the men walk downstream for thirty minutes before pausing to fill their canteens and helmets with cool water. Some of the men drop in purifying tablets, other do not.[5] After satiating their thirst they splash the remaining water over their necks and faces and then move on.

  According to the new article, the VA is offering “Agent Orange examinations” and Strait decides to visit the VA medical clinic. There he is given a four-page questionnaire asking for the time, date, place, and amount of his exposure to Agent Orange. Strait finds the questions peculiar and perplexing. In Vietnam he paid little attention to the spraying, and ten years later it seems ludicrous that he should be asked to remember such details. Although he can vividly recall being in defoliated zones, he did not keep a log of his entry and exit from such areas. “We were fighting a war,” says Strait, “not conducting an archeological expedition. It just never really occurred to us that it mattered.” Nor was it the Army’s policy to tell its troops how recently an area had been sprayed or how much dioxin they might ingest if they drank the water or ate food contaminated with Agent Orange. How much was he exposed to? That’s precisely what Strait wants the VA to tell him.

  An hour passes before a physician enters the examining room and, after “poking and prodding” Strait for a few minutes, he explains that he has “received special training in these Agent Orange cases” and can assure the former paratrooper that “Agent Orange and dioxin have never hurt anyone, are not hurting and never will hurt anyone.” After briefly examining Strait’s complete questionnaire, the physician informs him that his headaches are “obviously due to war-related stress” and recommends that he pay a visit to the clinic’s psychologist. A consultation with the hospital’s dietician, says the doctor, will undoubtedly help Strait’s skin rash.

  Strait is surprised, even angry. What word has he used, he asks, himself, that the man doesn’t understand? Did he not just explain that he is working at a steady job, does not drink excessively or take drugs, and does not feel he is suffering from “post-Vietnam syndrome?” Realizing that his efforts to persuade Strait to see a psychiatrist are futile, the doctor says that he will make an appointment for him to see a dermatologist. Meanwhile, he tells Strait, “My advice to you is that you go home and stop worrying about all this Agent Orange stuff.”

  During the following weeks the Straits wait anxiously for the results of Jerry’s blood and urine analysis; but when weeks, months, and finally a year pass without notice from the clinic, they conclude that they will never hear from the VA again. Two years and three months later, Sandy is astonished to discover a pamphlet in the mail from the VA’s Washington headquarters. “We could hardly believe our eyes after all this time,” she explains. “On the outside it said, ‘WORRIED ABOUT AGENT ORANGE?’ And on the inside there is a picture of Max Cleland and he is saying, ‘Oh heavens, don’t worry about anything like that. Agent Orange never did anybody any real harm.’ I guess they think we’re pretty dumb, because Jerry and I know that Cleland has not been the VA’s director for some time. Why they’re still sending his picture around is a mystery to me.”

  Although no one knows—because no government agency has bothered to count—how many children fathered by Vietnam veterans have suffered birth defects similar to those seen in the offspring of female laboratory animals exposed to dioxin, everyone agrees that this is one of the most volatile aspects of the Agent Orange issue. To parents of children like Lori Strait, the question of whether dioxin damages the chromosomes or sperm cells of exposed males should have been answered “before one drop” of Agent Orange was used in Vietnam. Yet two decades after the first defoliation mission was flown, there is still no unanimity among scientists on whether TCDD acts as a mutagen in male laboratory animals or in human beings. Citing a study of male mice treated with agent Orange, the VA continues to argue in its public relations pamphlets that “there is no medical evidence that exposure to Agent Orange has caused birth defects in the children of Vietnam veterans.”1 But according to attorneys for Vietnam veterans involved in the class action suit, “At least 2,000 children may be born with catastrophic deformities due to the chemical poisons their fathers carried home from the war.”2 In addition, the VA’s pamphlets fail to mention that TCDD-dioxin is a depressant of spermatogenesis in male rats, and causes mutations in salmonella and drosophila.3

  Evidence of the possible mutagenic effects of TCDD on exposed males is not limited to bacteria or laboratory rats. In Vietnam, Dr. Ton That Tung and his colleagues have been studying the possible effects of dioxin on North Vietnamese soldiers exposed to herbicides while serving in the South. Among the birth defects Dr. Tung and his colleagues have observed are cleft lips, shortened limbs, absence of nose and eyes, malformed ears, clubfeet, absence of forearm, hydrocephaly (water on the brain) and anencephaly (a condition in which all or a major part of the brain is missing), and a variety of heart problems.

  Because Dr. Tung was aware that laboratory research had already proven dioxin teratogenic and fetotoxic in rats and mice, he was careful to inquire whether the wives of former North Vietnamese soldiers had been exposed to herbicides. Through interviews with the veterans and their families, Tung’s research teams learned that none of the women who had given birth to deformed children had been exposed to herbicides; yet in one district where the researchers found a total of nine birth deformed children were fathered by veterans. In another district, where veterans comprised only a small percentage of the population, Dr. Tung found that half of the deformed children born during a four-year period were fathered by veterans. Six out of the thirty children born with defects were anencephalic, and all six were fathered by veterans.

  Statistically, writes Dr. Tung, his findings are extraordinary: In the region he was studying there should have been “one anencephalia in every 2,777 births, whereas we have one anencephalia per 197.7 births among veterans from the south. Furthermore, we must emphasize the great number of cardiac deformities: fifteen cases out of forty-three defects: i.e. 34.8 percent of the defects. The involvement of the neural tube seems to be in agreement with the studies of Barbara Field, who proved that in Australia there is a linear relationship between the rising rate of spina bifida [a condition where the spine is improperly fused] in newborns in the first generation and the rate of 2,4,5-T utilized each year.” Dr. Tung has also found that the wives of exposed veterans have an abnormally high rate of miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths, while an unusual number of the veterans suffer from sterility. The fathers of deformed children, writes Dr. Tung, exhibited “signs of direct contact with herbicide sprays in South Vietnam.” Concluding his paper, he states: “by comparing reproductive outcomes of Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange and those who were not exposed, there appears to be an excess of birth defects in children of the exposed veterans. This suggests that dioxin may act as a mutagen and thus would represent the first example of teratogenic damage due to male exposure in humans.”4

  In 1967, Arthur W. Galston, a professor of botany at Yale, tried to warn the US against the continued unbridled use of herbicides in Vietnam. “We are too ignorant of the interplay of forces in ecological problems to know how far-reaching and how lasting will be the changes in ecology brought about by the widespread spraying of herbicides. The changes may include immediate harm to people in sprayed areas…”5

  Galston’s warning turned out to be prophetic. Just two years later, reports of birth defects in the offspring of Vietnamese women began appearing in Saigon newspapers, but the US government dismissed the peasants’ complaints as communist propaganda, arguing that there was no scientific proof that Agent Orange harmed human beings. Today the government’s response, through the Veterans Administration,
remains essentially unchanged, in spite of the fact that Vietnam veterans have fathered hundreds and perhaps even thousands of seriously deformed children. At the New York State Temporary Commission of Dioxin Exposure hearings, a veteran testified that “before my son was ten and a half months old he had to have two operations because he had bilateral inguinal hernia, which means his scrotum didn’t close, and his intestine was where his scrotum was, and his scrotum was the size of a grapefruit. He also has deformed feet… My oldest daughter has a heart murmur and a bad heart. Once she becomes active, you can see her heart beat through her chest as though the chest cavity is not even there, as though you were looking at the heart.”

  Before Vietnam, said the veteran, he had “never even had an aspirin,” but since his return he has been given more than a hundred medications for skin rashes, stomach problems, urine in his blood, and inflamed kidneys. The VA, he testified, has written him off as a “hypochondriac.”

  At the same hearings a Vietnam veteran’s wife made the following statement: “I am married to a Vietnam veteran who was a combat veteran in 1967 and 1968. We have two sons, a four-year-old and one who is four months. Our first son was born with his bladder on the outside of his body, a sprung pelvis, a double hernia, a split penis, and a perforated anus. The doctors are attempting to reconstruct the bladder and his penis. He has had five operations, and is due for a sixth operation in the fall. There is no way of telling how many more operations he will have to suffer through before the reconstruction is successful. The question of his being able to father his own children cannot be answered until he reaches puberty.