“If I might interject,” says Sutton, obviously in pain and impatient to talk about his long struggle to get the VA to recognize his many ailments as genuine and service-connected. “It’s really ironic, because I would say that Joe and I have about 95 percent of the same symptoms, only he doesn’t vomit after meals like I do. I’ve had the headaches, abnormal electroencephalograms, chronic diarrhea, a Class I enlarged prostate gland, my sperm looks like tapioca pudding, and after four years of trying, my wife and I lost our first child after a half-term pregnancy, which really set both of us back. My knees buckle from under me, and I have photosensitivity of the eyes, that’s why I have to wear sunglasses. I suffer from peripheral neuropathies. The VA says I don’t have them, but they’ve issued this device to kill the pain they say I don’t have,” lifting his shirt and pointing to a small box from which several wires protrude. “The box is supposed to send electrical impulses which will block the pain messages to my brain; that’s why I have these electrodes attached to my lower back and thighs. But I ache all over, really. I get pains that come right out of left field, the left-field bleachers, and it hurts, that’s all.
“And another thing, they try to treat us like psychos at the VA. You’re automatically a drug addict, baby burner, or maniac. Every time anybody goes in it’s the same questions: ‘What kind of drugs are you takin’,’ and ‘You’re an alcoholic, aren’t you?’ Hell, Joe can’t drink. I can’t drink. A lot of vets can’t even take one beer without fallin’ on their ass. One beer, man, and I’m just done.”
Naples nods, shakes his head sadly, and, lighting a cigarette, adds, “When I went into the clinic with my lesions they asked me if I wanted to see a psychiatrist. And I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ But it wasn’t because of the lesions. I wanted to see him because I was gettin’ the nightmares and flashbacks. But the first thing they ask you is, ‘You’re an alcoholic, aren’t you?’ Any Nam vet that has been in contact with herbicides will tell you that you can’t drink. You have a headache that will last for three days, and it starts while you are drinkin’; I mean you’re actually hung over after just a few sips of beer. And you’ll vomit your intestines out, for christsake. I take a drink of beer now and I’m just gone. Before even a half of a can goes down the headache is there, it just starts pounding.”
“Dioxin,” Sutton explains, “collects in the fatty tissues of your liver, and you can’t filter out the poisons. It also affects the DNA process. When a baby is forming in the womb and the genes are splitting to form the phalanges, the facial muscles, the different organs, just one molecule of dioxin can take the place of a normal gene splay. And that’s where you get polygenetic birth defects, the same as the Vietnamese people are having.”
In spite of the treatment he has received from the VA, Naples who augments the family income by training attack Doberman pinschers, finds a certain grim humor in the VA’s incompetence. “I went in for a compensation hearing and this doctor had me sit down and he says, ‘Joe, can I see the flamethrower burns?’ I says, ‘What flamethrower burns?’ He says, ‘You were burned by a flamethrower, that’s what those things on your arms are, aren’t they?’ I says, ‘No, I was never burned by a flamethrower; these are rashes that have been comin’ up for the past fourteen years, and every year they intensify. And this is the worst they’ve ever been!’ ‘Oh well,’ he says, ‘I thought they were flamethrower burns.’”
Naples laughs and, after a brief conference with his wife, continues. “Then they tried to tell me it was from the tattoos, the color from the tattoos was causin’ my chloracne. On my legs? I don’t have tattoos on my legs. And then,” laughing, “I go down the hall to see this next doctor and I tell him about the headaches, the stomach cramps, and everything, and he says, and this is exactly what he said, he says, ‘Joe, the headaches are just tension. And we consider you a “breather” or a “sigher.” ’ That’s what he said I was, that was his entire diagnosis.”
“And I’m considered an air swallower,” Sutton announces with a touch of pride. “But see, it’s true that some of us have difficulty getting air into our lungs or oxygen to our blood. So the VA calls people like Joe who may need to take an extra breath now and then ‘breathers’ or ‘sighers.’”
In the beginning, says Sutton, the VA tried to tell him that he could not have been exposed to toxic herbicides because he served with the Navy in Vietnam. “Yeah, they’ll take my service records and say, ‘But you were in the Navy, you couldn’t have been exposed.’ But look,” opening his photo album to a page of zippo monitors, “you see how close we were to the riverbank. Our flamethrowers were pressurized at two thousand pounds per square inch and could reach the length of a football field, but sometimes we were as close to the bank as we are right now from that fence,” pointing to the fence that surrounds his backyard, a distance of no more than thirty feet. “So when the wind was from the wrong direction it came right back in our face, you got it, you got the smoke. And you’ve got to remember too that when plants and wood take up the Agent Orange and it is burned, you can get more dioxin. And we were always in and out of the water, taking baths, and even swimming in places where there was obviously run-off from the defoliated banks. We had one of those fifty-five-gallon herbicide drums on our boat too, and we cut it in half, painted it green, and used it for a shower. Now what was in that drum I wouldn’t know, and some of the guys even used those drums to store watermelons in, or for barbeques, or God knows what all.”
According to the Department of Defense, US military personnel didn’t enter a sprayed zone until six weeks after it had been saturated with herbicides, but Naples and Sutton hotly dispute this, “Six weeks,” says Naples, “that’s ridiculous. We would be dropped off at an ambush site and spend hours actually lying in the stuff. It would actually be comin’ down on us. Whether they knew we were in there or not I’ll never know. I spent a lot of time on my stomach in Nam, and in and out of water that would have contained the stuff either from direct spray or run-off. You’d bathe in a bomb crater, so you’d be drinkin’ it, you’d be takin’ a bath in it, you’d wash your clothes in it. You’d get the rice and sweet potatoes in the field that had been sprayed with this stuff, but we didn’t know that. I also saw guys pile empty barrels around their bunkers, and if the bunker took a hit, they would get sprayed with whatever was left of the stuff inside those barrels.”
“You see,” Sutton explains, “we know now that they weren’t just defoliating the jungle to destroy the enemy’s ambush sites. They were also trying to destroy his food supplies so that he would be forced into the open. Hindsight may be terrible sight, but it’s better than no sight at all. And we also know from Dow Chemical’s own statistics that the year I was there was the year they sprayed the most Agent Orange on Vietnam. But I think, Joe, that we should also be concerned with Agent Blue, because that’s what they were usin’ a lot of in the delta to kill of the rice crop. It’s a carcinogen, and some of the Australian veterans who were in the Mekong area have been suffering the effects of it. Between Blue and Orange they really had us by the short hairs, didn’t they.”
Naples glances about the room as though this were all a disappointing film for which the manager would give him a refund. The humor of a few moments earlier has left him, and he speaks even more slowly. “My wife and I went up there to Northport to check on the tumor registry. We were looking for a registry number, and they said they had no such thing at that hospital, no such registry. But Bobby had showed me this door, and it stuck in my mind. I could have sworn I seen that sign somewhere before: TUMOR REGISTRY. And my wife remembered it too. And sure enough, we’re walkin’ through the halls, and behind the ETA on the first floor there’s a door with a big sign, TUMOR REGISTRY. And yet they insist that there’s no such thing.”
Sutton shuffles a stack of papers, closes his photo albums, and says, “Right before you, you have literature on an international level. Now if they know in Amsterdam, Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Sweden, as well as the Un
ited States, that dioxin makes people sick, kills people, is carcinogenic and teratogenic, then why doesn’t the VA know it? Why doesn’t our government admit it? If I, with a high school education, can find this out, if I can take the data you see here and put it in its proper perspective, then the VA sure as hell can. They know. They know, but they don’t want to admit it because it’s gonna cost them a lot of money. Money, that’s what it’s really about. You know, when Joe was in the hospital the nurses wouldn’t even touch his chloracne. They thought it was contagious, so they left him alone. He had to change his own bandages, take care of himself—right there in the hospital. Did you ever hear of anyone in a civilian hospital changing his own dressings?”
Pain and exhaustion fill the room like a fog. We have been talking for nearly three hours, and it appears we can go no further; the interview is over.
Sutton, holding back the tears, breaks the silence. “Listen, I used to be a very patriotic person. Like Joe, I was on my second enlistment. I loved going to sea, loved my rate; I took great pride in it. I had planned on making the service a career. We still hold to a lot of values that our peers have thrown away a long time ago, but how long can we be patient? I’m nobody’s asshole. And I’ve just about fuckin’ had it. Sometimes it seems like you have to do somethin’ bloody and gory to get attention, and by God we’re capable of it. But we’ve seen enough of that. I’ve got a conscience. I don’t want to hurt my fellow Americans. I don’t really want to hurt anybody, but so help me God there may come a day when…
“You know, when I came back I was a union steamfitter. I was strong. I could do as good a day’s work as anyone. But my muscles are just giving out. I can’t do that kind of work no more. I can’t work at all now. The old Archie Bunkers say, ‘It’s a great system, fellas, the price is right, don’t complain, I got this and I got that, and it only took me thirty-five years …’ Well, we’re not gonna be here thirty-five years from now. Some of us ain’t gonna be around three to five years from now. We’re going to succumb to the bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals in our bodies.”
Naples mentions the difficulty he has had in acquiring records to substantiate his argument that he was exposed to herbicides while serving in Vietnam. To secure service-connected disability he needs records that appear to be nonexistent. “They have the records from the time I left Colorado, California, and beginning again when I returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But the three years in Vietnam are totally gone. And I’m not the only Nam vet who has had this problem. We just can’t get those records.”
Sutton stands beside the dining room table, working to control his anger. “Supposedly, under the Freedom of Information Act we should be allowed to get those records, but they tell you the old familiar theme that the records were destroyed in a fire in St. Louis, Missouri. But even Dow’s attorney, Leonard Rivkin himself, said that was a very minimal fire and the records are not missing. I mean, where else are you going to find a guy in his early thirties dying from not just one, but two, three, four blasts of cancer? And some of these cancers are inoperable. Why did the VA destroy all the cancer registry numbers of all the Vietnam veterans? Why was that? Do they have something to hide? You’re goddamn right they do!”
The tabby cat appears to be deep in thought or perhaps meditating on the vicissitudes and (because he has lived more than a decade) the pleasures of a long life. I have missed the four o’clock train to Brooklyn and wonder whether or not my car will still be there when I return. The sky is turning subway gray, with patches of blue and pink graffiti here and there.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Sutton says flatly. “Yeah, I listened to that bullshit when I was about seventeen years old. Oh, you remember. It sunk in. My father was in World War II, and my father-in-law was a prisoner of war, and Joe’s father fought in World War II also. I guess we wanted to be just like daddy. I think this is more than a disgrace. We didn’t disgrace this nation, and I think it’s disgusting that our policymakers are doing this to a segment of society that did nothing more than answer the call to arms when it was asked.”
Mrs. Naples, who until now has whispered quiet encouragement to her husband, is suddenly angry. “There is constant clicking on our phone, like a tape rewind. And an echo, and Joe here, he’s seen government cars taking pictures of our house with telescopic lenses.”
“I’ve had the hang-ups,” Joe confirms, “got cut off mid-sentence. I won’t say who or why. I know who, and I hope you get it in the book and they get a gander at it. It seems like ever since this thing has started to build and I got involved in it, all this other craziness has started to happen, the tapping of the phone, the pictures from government cars, and all this other nonsense.”
Sutton’s wife returns from work with two bags of cat food and a stack of Xeroxed copies of a recent article about the discovery of a government memorandum that says Agent Blue, used for rice-crop destruction in Vietnam, had been clinically shown to be a human carcinogen.[4] The memo’s author, the date it was sent, and the person to whom it was written have been masked out, and Leonard Rivkin, attorney for Dow Chemical, is quoted as accusing the government of engaging in a “cover-up” on the Agent Orange issue. Sutton scrutinizes the article for a moment and then, ushering Joe Naples and me to the door, announces: “I got news for those bastards. It’s just a matter of time. We’re gonna win this thing. We ain’t gonna wait forever. We’re gonna win it either on their terms or on ours, and you can just take that any way you want. We’re sick, we’re dying, and they keep on playing games with our fucking lives. That just can’t go on forever.”
Naples offers me a ride to the station, and on the way he talks about his two sons, one of whom was born with webbed toes and suffers from sleep disturbances, seizures, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, and brain damage. “He’s only seven years old,” Naples says, “and wears coke-bottle glasses, has an abnormal EEG, and wakes in the night screaming. His mom and me, we’ll go in the room and we can’t stop him; he just keeps it up. And when he does wake up if we ask him what was wrong he’ll say, ‘I dunno.’ He’ll be doing something, like writing with his pen, and he’ll put it down, go over to get a drink, and forget what he did with the pen. His concentration just blows. He can’t keep his mind on anything. We took him down for an EEG and the doctor said, ‘This boy’s got many, many problems.’ And yet there’s nothing in my family or my wife’s family about anyone having psychiatric problems or anything like this. Our oldest boy stopped breathin’ when my wife brought him home, and she brought him back with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He was in the hospital in oxygen for a month, then we brought him home and within an hour he stopped breathin’ again, and the second time he had to be in oxygen for three months. You know, we suffered from this stuff they sprayed in Nam, and it’s bad, and now our kids are gonna suffer from it, and God only knows, how far down the line this stuff gonna carry through?
“Not long ago my oldest boy was askin’ about the war. He wants to hear about it. But there’s only so much I can tell him. And one time he said, ‘If I get called, I’m not goin’!’ So I says, ‘If you get called, you’ll go, I’ll see to it.’ But just recently he asked again and we got talkin’ and I said, if they don’t settle this thing I’ll be the first to take you to Canada. I’ll lock and load it if I have to. But I’m not gonna let what happened to me happen to my son.”
4. A Maimed Generation
Driving home from the hospital, Sandy and Jerry Strait are exceptionally happy. The sky is blue and cloudless, and the grass sparkles from an early morning rain. Adjusting the tiny bundle on her lap so that she can see her daughter’s sleeping face, Sandy taps her foot in time with the song on the radio. Just five more minutes and they will be home, so they have to make a decision. Before they can turn off the car’s engine, their four-year-old will be tugging at the door, demanding to hold her new “sissy.” She will want to carry her seven-pound, six-ounce sibling across the living room to her ro
cking chair and rock “our baby” to sleep. After a brief discussion the Straits agree that no harm can result from allowing Heather to play mother. After all, just seventy-two hours earlier an obstetrician had called their new daughter “a perfect, beautiful baby.”
Glancing at her husband, Sandy notices that he has regained the twenty pounds he lost shortly before she learned she was pregnant. How much better things are now than four years ago when Heather was born. Jerry had been back from Vietnam only a year; they were living in a cramped house and had little money and no hospital insurance. When their daughter was only nine weeks old, Sandy had been forced to return to work, but this time, she tells friends and relatives, things will be different. She will be there when her baby utters her first words or takes her first wobbly steps. Having decided that this will be their last child, Sandy just wants to coddle, pamper, even spoil her baby for as long as she can. Pulling into the drive the Straits laugh. Clad in a pink sunsuit Heather races across the yard, her arms held high and her hands spread-eagled.
July and August pass quickly, giving way to a luxurious Indian summer that ends, as Midwestern falls often do, in a sudden, vicious blizzard. Heather can hardly wait for Christmas, demanding to know if her little sister will be talking or walking by then, and if she will want to see Santa Claus or watch the elves making toys in the window of a downtown department store. On Christmas day Sandy’s mother arrives with presents and, while her daughter prepares dinner, she goes into the living room to tend to her new grandchild. But as she watches her granddaughter exercise, Sandy’s mother notices something peculiar. Reaching into the crib she lifts first Lori’s right foot, then her left. The left heel of her pajamas is frayed, nearly worn through, while the right is perfectly intact. “Have you noticed,” she asks her daughter later that evening, “that Lori favors her left leg and hardly moves her right?”
Waiting for an Army to Die Page 6
