Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  “I served in Vietnam from 1966 through 1967,” Clarks explains, glancing at his wife for what I first mistook to be confirmation, but later realized was simply an open display of trust and love for the woman who, like so many wives of Vietnam veterans, had seen him through the long, difficult, post-Vietnam adjustment period. “And in 1972 I developed cancer of the bladder. I also have a heart problem, which is a common problem among Nam veterans. When I first went into the VA hospital for a checkup, the doctors kept asking me if I had ever worked in a chemical plant, or if I had been exposed to radiation. And I had to say no to these questions because I worked in an appliance store before I went in the service, and as far as I know I was never exposed to any chemicals. And of course doctors were surprised at my age, because this type of cancer usually affects men between sixty and eighty years of age. We also discovered, going back through my records, that VA doctors had kept my heart murmur a secret from my family and myself. Suddenly I found myself in the hospital, with monitors all over me, and they announce: ‘Ray, you’ve got a heart problem.’ I was in intensive care for a week. Before that they had told me nothing about it.”

  Describing his frustration with the Veterans Administration, Clark reveals a familiar pattern that has both angered and embittered Vietnam veterans. “Their attitude,” one veteran told me, “is ‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.’ In other words, what they don’t know can’t hurt us!” Even before a veteran enters the hospital he may be aware of what his symptoms mean, only to be informed by staff doctors that “It’s all in your head.” So many veterans have heard this from the VA that it would take a massive outreach and publicity campaign to change the negative attitudes many veterans have toward the bureaucracy in Washington and the majority of regional VA hospitals.

  “In the beginning, when I first started urinating blood,” Clark continues, “they insisted I was putting ketchup and water in the specimen jars. They said I was doing something to myself so I could receive disability, and that the problem was all in my mind. They also scheduled me for an appointment with the staff psychiatrist because they said my illness was self-inflicted. I would get really upset with them and say, ‘Look, when I start urinating blood I’ll just fill a test tube and bring it in so you can see for yourself I’m not lying.’ So I brought it in and the doctor looked at it and said, ‘Oh sure, Ray, that’s ketchup and water.’ Or, ’C’mon, Ray, that’s just ketchup and urine and you know it.

  “They tested me for everything but bladder cancer. They gave me a brain scan, shot dye into my kidneys, announced that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown, and even tested me for epilepsy. They did every test you could possibly do, except the one that would determine if I had bladder cancer. After a month and a half of testing they finally said, ‘Okay, we’re going to look inside your bladder.’ So they looked inside, and of course they saw the cancer. They told me to go home and get my affairs in order and to come in for the operation, which I did. I’ve been going in every three months for treatment since then.”

  At the Veterans Administration hospital in Syracuse, New York, veterans who went in for what had been advertised as an “Agent Orange examination” were given a routine physical by a physician’s assistant.

  “The funny thing is that they were always asking me if I had been in Vietnam,” Clark says, pouring another cup of coffee and shaking his head as though he cannot quite believe what he is saying. “And they kept wanting to know if I had been exposed to chemicals. But they never mentioned Agent Orange or dioxin. I never even heard of Agent Orange until I discovered Agent Orange Victims International. After I read an article about a veteran who was dying of a rare form of cancer, I wrote to my congressman asking if he knew anything about this issue. A few days later my wife answered the phone, and it was the congressman, or one of his aides, wanting to know just how much we knew about this ’Agent Orange. They actually thought we knew an espionage agent by that name, and they wanted to find out just who this fellow was, and what we knew about him. Rather than an herbicide that is killing Vietnam veterans, they thought we were talking about a spy. The Veterans Administration was little help, because either they knew nothing about Agent Orange, or what they did know they were not about to tell Vietnam veterans.

  “After my operation I filed a claim for service-connected disability. I went to the Veterans Administration counselor and told him what I wanted to do, but he didn’t know anything about Agent Orange—absolutely nothing. I actually had to bring in the paperwork and show him how to fill it out. About a month after I filed my claim I received a form letter from the VA stating that ‘there is no evidence supporting a connection between Agent Orange exposure and any disease, except for chloracne.’ They didn’t send any documents or articles about Agent Orange, just their statement that ‘these are the facts.’ And when I did write asking for documentation on Agent Orange, they said their information had all been consumed in a fire. Then of course we received the next good laugh in the mail when they wrote that they had lost all of my service records while I was overseas. How could they just lose all our records? I did receive some information, some records, but they still don’t have any of my records from Vietnam, or my first two years in the military. But I’ve corresponded with enough veterans who were in the area I was in and who were exposed to Agent Orange, and they can verify that we were exposed.”[1]

  One of the early ploys which the Veterans Administration used to avoid paying service-connected disability to victims of Agent Orange was to argue that veterans could not really prove they were exposed to herbicides in Vietnam. The Department of Defense also used this argument to discredit veterans’ claims of cancer and birth defects due to exposure to Agent Orange. In testimony before the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, United States Senate, Major General William S. Augerson, at the time deputy assistant secretary of defense, argued a retrospective epidemiological study of Vietnam veterans. Because there “are generally no data exposure concentrations and exposure times,” said Augerson, the results of such a study would be “highly unreliable.” Given the existence of HERBS tapes that constitute a computerized record of the time, date, place, and amount of herbicide sprayed, the major general’s statement would appear at best based upon bureaucratic rhetoric. And had he attended any of the hearings that are being held throughout the country on the problems and perils of dioxin exposure, he would have heard hundreds of veterans testify that they were exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. For example, a veteran who had served with the First Aircraft, Air Mobile, told the New York State Temporary Commission on Dioxin Exposure: “After the LZ [landing zone] was sprayed, we walked around the perimeters, strung barbed wire all around it. Then we sat down, the helicopters flew in, and this stuff was blowing all over the place. Most of us drank out of bomb craters, showered in bomb craters. All the guys know about that. That’s the only time we could wash up. And all that water was polluted with Agent Orange.”

  Clark spreads the form letters denying him service-connected disability payments for his bladder cancer on the table, and waits while I examine them. They are succinct, designed to make the readers feel hopeless, as though appealing the decision would be a folly. There is no “Thank you for serving your country.” Or “We are sorry you are suffering and only hope that, once further research is done into this matter, we can be of help.” Nothing to soften the blow. Just flat denial. In one letter, however, the VA does elaborate on its reason for rejecting Clark’s request for disability. The letter reveals that while undergoing an examination Clark once fainted and that this has led the VA to conclude that he just might have a “hysterical personality.” That he might have lost consciousness because his body was reacting to a serious assault from cancer seems not to have occurred to the Veterans Administration. “They think we’re all nuts,” said one veteran. “And if they can prove that, then they don’t really have to help us. And they claim we’re just looking for pity or a fast buck.”

  “But even if the VA hospitals we
re really interested in helping veterans of what they insist on calling the ‘Vietnam era’—they refuse to call it a war—they couldn’t do it because they don’t have the facilities or the staff,” Clark says, tossing the rejection letters into a folder. “They couldn’t do it because last year the Syracuse VA Hospital lost half of its staff and millions of dollars in funding, and it’s just one part of a rapidly deteriorating system. They don’t have any facilities for testing you for exposure to toxic chemicals, and even if Congress orders them to treat us with respect, to give so-called Agent Orange examinations, the VA hospitals will continue to attract incompetent staff, and it would take a monumental effort for them to get veterans to trust the VA again. But assuming they make that effort and manage to get the veterans whom they’ve alienated to return for tests, they would have to do 2.9 million fat biopsies at a cost of billions of dollars. Given our rank on the ‘fiscal priority list’ it is unlikely that the tests will ever be run.”

  Like nearly all of the men and women who served in Vietnam, Ray Clark was in top physical condition when he entered the service; and like every veteran with whom I’ve spoken or heard testify at state-sponsored hearings into dioxin exposure, he can recall little if any illness before he went to Vietnam. Before the war, veterans say, they never suffered from skin rashes, weakness of limbs, nervous disorders, liver disease, heart murmurs, cancer, loss of libido. Ten years after their return from Asia, they are aging with frightening rapidity, afraid for themselves, their children, and their childrens’ children. And in their attempts to find answers, to explain the tragedy that has befallen them and their children, they research through their family trees to discern if there might be a pattern of cancer or birth defects in their lineage. Quite often they discover, as Ray Clark and his wife discovered, that no pattern exists.

  “When I got out of high school I was in perfect health, and there is no history of cancer in my family. And what amazes me is that out of the millions of men who went to Vietnam, a sizable percentage now have health problems. Most of these men are in the thirty-five-year-old age bracket, the prime of life, and yet their problems are severe, and quite often rare from a medical point of view. Ed Juteau, vice president of Agent Orange Victims International, died of lymphatic cancer, and after his death the VA cut off payments to his wife and son because the VA claims he died of ‘kidney failure.’ In the past few years I’ve met veterans with cancer of the colon, testicular cancer, liver dysfunctions, heart ailments, veterans whose children were born with as many as sixteen birth defects. And yet for so long no one was willing to do studies to determine just what is causing all these problems. They’ve studied rats, mice, rabbits, chickens, and monkeys, and found that dioxin gives them cancer, causes their death, deforms and kills their offspring. But all this doesn’t apply to us. Well, no one has ever shown that dioxin didn’t poison us. And we know that shortly after they began spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam the chemical companies sent a letter to the government advising them that there could be health problems from the herbicide. But of course the government doesn’t want to admit that the stuff they were spraying on people was 2,000 percent—almost twenty times—more contaminated by dioxin than the domestic 2,4,5-T that was banned in 1979 by the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the stuff sprayed on Nam was 47,000 percent more contaminated. And they sprayed it over and over on the same areas. What the government doesn’t want to admit is that it is responsible for killing its own troops.”

  Clark explains that he has dropped out of most of the lawsuits in which he had been a plaintiff following his operation for bladder cancer. And since the Veterans Administration has never notified eligible claimants of favorable changes in benefit rules, it is unlikely that he will hear from the VA again, even if he is ruled eligible for disability payments.

  “I don’t need the money,” he says. “Money isn’t going to do me any good. What I really want to see is the money used to create a government agency, or should I say a governing agency, that would stop them from experimenting with radiation and herbicides. I don’t care about winning a million dollars. My health, which is the most important thing a person can have, is gone now. It’s all in my past. I just don’t want the same thing to happen to my children that has happened to me. I volunteered for the military, and through some quirk of fate I got sent to Vietnam, but once I got there I didn’t have any choice about being subjected to herbicides and other dangerous chemicals. And I resent that. I want the system changed so that we’re not guinea pigs, and so we don’t let the government, or anyone else, do this again. Every time I walk into the Veterans Hospital in Syracuse, I see this quote from President Lincoln: WE SHALL TAKE CARE OF THE WIDOWS AND CHILDREN OF THOSE WHO SERVED. Well, they’re not. They have completely forgotten about us. I think they’re just waiting for all of us to die, and then someone can say, ‘Oh, dear, maybe we did make a mistake with this Agent Orange.’ At the rate things are going they won’t have to wait very long.”

  Clark walks me to my car and we shake hands. Three of his five children are playing on a nearby swing set and we talk for a moment about our children and how much they mean to us. On the drive home I think about what has brought Ray Clark, a former Marine, and me, a former antiwar activist, together. In the sixties we might have met in a bar and argued, perhaps even fought, over the war. But now we have spent a rainy afternoon discussing the aftermath of chemical warfare. Clark’s cancer, in remission for nearly five years, has reappeared, and every three months he must visit the VA hospital where a tube is inserted into his urethra to search for new signs of damage to his bladder.

  Not long before our interview, two dead owls were discovered a short distance from the Clarks’ home, and state officials said it was possible they had eaten fish or small animals contaminated with dioxin from Lake Ontario. “Lately,” Mrs. Clark said, unfolding a map of the United States shortly before I left, “we’ve been looking for a safe place to move. But the more we looked, the more we realized there really is no place to hide.”

  2. The Doomed Platoon

  Growing up in New York City, Ron DeBoer played in an abandoned tenement that was frightening and, he thought, very dark. But years later, hunkered down in the jungle with members of the 17th Air Cavalry, he discovered a shade of darkness so impenetrable that he felt suspended in a void, a black hole into which, unless he was extremely careful, he might vanish. Staring into the dark and praying for sunrise, DeBoer realized that nothing he might experience during the next twelve months would be more terrifying than that first night in the bush.

  From April 1968 to April 1969, DeBoer and his unit searched for and engaged in combat with enemy units in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, sometimes walking through areas that appeared to have been bombed with such intensity that the earth was scorched, entire sides of mountains burned away. But the men in his platoon saw no bomb craters, and thought it odd that such devastating air strike would fail to turn the jungle into a crazy quilt of water-filled pockmarks. Filling their canteens with water from pools or streams in the defoliated zone, they would pass on, leaving the mystery behind; in the scheme of things at the time, it really didn’t seem that important.

  For months DeBoer suffered from splitting headaches that he attributed to stress. His skin, as well as that of nearly every member of his unit, was massively discolored from what they called the “creeping crud.” Some of the men had chloracne on their necks and shoulders, which DeBoer recalls as being “really hideous”; but they had been told nothing about the nature of the spraying around their base camps, never observed a formation of C-123s saturating the side of a mountain with herbicides, and attributed any skin problems they might have to infrequent bathing or to the ferocious heat.

  Ron DeBoer survived his twelve-month tour of duty and returned to New York City, where he spent the next ten years putting the war behind him and pursuing, he says, the “Great American Dream.” He started his own construction company and soon owned a suburban home complete with a t
wo-car garage, patio, and swimming pool. Sometimes he thought about the men he had known who didn’t make it back, but he disdained war stories and made no effort to explain what the war had been like for him; he knew he could not substitute words for experience. The past, he told himself, was the past. Let it be. And even when he first began feeling ill, when the lump in his groin began to swell and he suspected it wouldn’t go away, he dismissed the articles his wife was clipping from the paper about a herbicide that had been sprayed, quite possibly, upon the area of Vietnam where he had served.

  But the lump in his scrotom did not go away, and DeBoer’s wife, Linda, persisted in her attempts to get him to take seriously the stories about dioxin and Agent Orange that were appearing with increasing frequency in periodicals and newspapers. One of the articles was about a scientific experiment in which mice given minute doses of dioxin developed testicular cancer, a disease so rare that it affects only six out of every one hundred thousand white males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. DeBoer was only twenty-eight at the time, but doctors told him that the lump in his scrotom was malignant, and that if he wanted to live, they would have to operate. Bewildered, confused, angry, hardly able to believe that he had survived twelve months of guerilla warfare only to succumb to a disease that hardly ever attacked men his age, DeBoer phoned a local attorney to ask if he knew of other Vietnam veterans who were suffering from testicular cancer.