Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  “I was really concerned because I just couldn’t walk. The whole of my body, all over my groin and everywhere, was covered with a rash. But it was weeping and everything was just short of falling off. And I said to these guys, ‘What the bloody hell have I got?’ And they said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, we think we know what it is. We think we can …’ But I says, ‘Yeah, you think you can what?’ And they said, ‘Oh, just take it easy, mate, we can fix you up.’ But hell, when you’ve got nine doctors looking at you and they don’t know, and when they come back with some younger doctors and start pointin’ and lookin’, it makes you a little bit worried. And still to this day the VA isn’t able to tell me what is was, or is.”

  Draining his glass, Wares grimaces and with mincing sarcasm announces, “Why, it was the heat, mate, don’t you know that? The heat of course. We accepted that explanation at the time because that was all they ever told us, all we ever heard. It’s the tropics, boys, that’s what it is. And that, we now know, is just so much bullshit. Because people here in Queensland live in the tropics, and do they all run around with bloody skin diseases? We accepted the explanation at the time that our rashes were due to the heat, but we don’t believe a bloody word of it anymore. And I can tell you this. Never, never did they tell us anything about herbicide spraying, or about putting on any extra clothing or taking precautions against the spray. In fact at the time I wouldn’t have known what the word ‘defoliant’ meant, and that’s a fact, mate. I just wouldn’t have known. Bob Gibson of course knew something more because he actually sprayed, but the average serviceman, the average Australian, wouldn’t have had a clue.”

  Gibson nods his head in sad agreement. Since his return from Phuoc Tuy Province he has suffered from skin rashes, insomnia, violent rages, and other problems symptomatic of dioxin exposure. His ability to work impaired by physical and emotional conditions for which he could find no cure, Gibson applied to the Australian Repatriation Commission for disability payments. But the commission, using language that might easily have been excerpted from an American VA form letter, rejected his request. About Gibson the commission’s psychiatrist wrote: “In this particular case, the patient is a thirty-two-year-old man who has a mild anxiety state. He sets himself up as a martyr and has suffered basically at his own hand by not allowing the memories of Vietnam and their associated emotions to fade with time. His present condition is due to his basic inherited personality pattern and his wish for martyrdom.”

  During the twelve months he spent in Vietnam, Gibson had gone on numerous ambushes and had fought in a fierce two-day battle with North Vietnamese regulars in which the Australians were outnumbered and nearly destroyed. His unit’s motor positions wiped out, ammunition running low, and the NVA preparing for a final assault, Gibson had given up all hope of surviving the battle when American helicopter gunships arrived. Before the “Puffs”[7] appeared, says Gibson, he had concluded that “we were all dead men.” In its initial rejection of his request for disability, the commission informed Gibson that he had spent very little time in combat; therefore, wrote the commission’s psychiatrist, “Vietnam could not really have been as traumatic as he now tells.” But later the commission reversed itself, acknowledging that Gibson was indeed a combat veteran while continuing to argue that his experiences in Vietnam were not responsible for his “anxiety condition.”

  In retrospect Gibson says that he and the nineteen-year-olds with whom he served may have placed too much trust in people who either did not know or did not care what the effects of toxic chemicals might be on Australian soldiers. “As infantry soldiers we thought we knew what the hell we were doing, but really we were so naïve. We never thought that our government or our own military commanders would allow the use of anything that might have adverse effects on us as troops. And we used to walk through plantations of rotten banana trees that were just burstin’ at the bottom, you know, rottin’, stinkin’, with these tiny dwarf bananas on them. So we’d just walk through and pick them. They were sweet as hell, and we used to eat them all the time. No one ever told us not to. And the water, we used to get it out of streams and drink it. And one time I can really recall quite well. We went through this thick foliage, and it had all this sticky shiny stuff on it, and it stunk, I mean it really stunk. And we were going through this stuff and there was no two ways about it, it had been defoliated. And yet no one ever gave it one second thought that we were there, touching the stuff, getting it on our arms and face. No one thought.”

  Gibson’s observations are substantiated by Australian authors John Dux and P. J. Young, who through careful examination of US General Accounting Office reports, including “grid coordinates and details of all missions flown by C-123s from 1965 to 1968,” found that Phuoc Tuy Province had been heavily sprayed with Agent Orange. Matching the GAO reports with Australian Defense Department maps, the authors concluded: “One can prove conclusively that Australian troops operated in defoliated areas, sometimes within a day of missions.”2 Dux and Young also point out that although the US Ranch Hand operations may have been responsible for the destruction of 12 to 21 percent of the total land in South Vietnam (an area approximately the size of Massachusetts), C-123s spraying was only one source of the toxic herbicides to which Australian and American veterans were exposed. Helicopter pilots, for example, needed only the approval of their unit commander before leaving on a defoliation mission, and it is quite possible that some areas of the province—particularly around base camps—were unofficially sprayed on numerous occasions. Spraying from trucks, riverboats, and by backpack also required only the approval of the unit commander.

  Another possible source of contamination was from tanks that were used to spray both pesticides and herbicides directly upon or near base camps. Australian pilots have stated that following herbicide missions, empty spray tanks were refilled with pesticides that were then sprayed directly upon the base camp. Commenting on the possibility that residues from herbicides might have been dispersed in this way, one pilot said: “An interesting thing is that after the spraying missions, which occurred about every month with these aircraft, the rubber trees with which the Task Force area was covered shed their leaves rather alarmingly. After spraying for anti-malarial purposes there would be a sudden increase in skin infections for no particular attributable cause, apart from the fact that it followed the spraying.”3

  When one considers the amount of semi-authorized, unauthorized, and clandestine spraying in Vietnam, as well as wind drift and the fact that an estimated 14 percent of the Agent Orange sent to Vietnam is unaccounted for, it is apparent that the full extent of the defoliation campaign may never be known. What is clear is that Vietnam veterans whose units are not listed by the Department of Defense or General Accounting Office as having been in spray zones could very well have been exposed to toxic chemicals either in and around their base camps or on ambushes and search-and-destroy missions in the surrounding jungle.

  When his son Cameron was born with a “noncorrectable” birth defect, Jim Wares wanted to know why. But doctors were unable to give him a satisfactory explanation, and he decided not to dwell on the boy’s misfortune. After all, Wares told himself, he had survived Vietnam, was married to a fine woman, had a good job, and the boy, except for missing fingers, was beautifully formed, an optimistic and intelligent child whom Wares says is fond of making up stories and playing practical jokes with his hand. One evening, for example, Wares and his wife left their son with a babysitter who, summoned to the bathroom by the boy’s cries, discovered him standing near the toilet bowl. Feigning distress and holding out his hand with the missing fingers, the boy announced that he had accidentally “flushed the fingers away.” The babysitter, says Wares, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Wares had heard stories about Agent Orange and wondered if it might have something to do to with Cameron’s deformity, but the government’s official position was that Orange had not been used in Nui Dat. Besides, argued government officials, scienti
sts had found “no link” between exposure to herbicides and human health problems. But the Australian news media were becoming increasingly interested in the veterans’ problems, and after reading an interview with a veteran whose eyesight was failing and who was suffering from constant trembling, diarrhea, fatigue, and vomiting, Wares decided to begin his own research into the matter. Calling people whose names had appeared in news articles, Wares was amazed to discover that each person he contacted knew other veterans who were sick, whose wives had suffered miscarriages, or whose children were deformed. Wares soon realized that something was seriously, perhaps disastrously, wrong with his fellow Vietnam veterans.

  Wares began listing on filing cards the symptoms of veterans with whom he had spoken or corresponded by mail. Sorting through a stack of fifty cards one afternoon, he discovered that nearly one in four of the men he had contacted had fathered a deformed child. Four of the cards actually listed children born with deformed hands, and three out of the four were born with four fingers and half the thumb missing from one hand. On other cards Wares had listed cases of deformed legs, clubfeet, deafness, and missing ears. With each passing day Wares found himself increasingly involved in trying to sort out the truth about his own and his fellow veterans’ exposure to toxic chemicals. With each rebuff from the government his anger—and the veterans’ movement in Australia—grew. The country’s enormous size and the scarcity of money sometimes made logistics rather difficult; but like their counterparts in the States, Australian Vietnam veterans drew support from the realization that they had at least three things in common: they had served in an area of Southeast Asia that had been heavily sprayed with defoliants; many of them were sick, dying, or had fathered children with birth defects; government officials, while expressing concern, were doing little to resolve the issues in a fair and compassionate manner.

  “When we first got involved with the movement in Australia,” Wares explains, “I went to the Royal Alexandria Hospital for Children in Sydney, saw the chief pediatrician, and asked some questions. I said, ‘My son has been born with no fingers on one hand.’ And I asked if he had any statistics on that kind of deformity. Now, in Australia most of the hospitals don’t keep that kind of statistics. There’s no national statistics on birth deformities. Some hospitals keep them, some don’t; it’s very ad hoc. So I told this guy that my son was born with no fingers, ‘but his arm isn’t withered, it’s not short, there’s just no fingers. It’s only affected one limb, which in itself I understand is rather unusual.’ And I said, ‘What are the chances of this happening?’ And he said, ‘Well, I would say that using statistics, one in fifty thousand is way over the odds.’

  “So I told him, ‘What would you say if I told you that I know another two kids with exactly this same deformity? Exactly the same.’ And he said, ‘My God, that’s incredible.’ And I said, ‘Well, if I told you that both their fathers were Vietnam veterans, and there were only forty-five thousand men from this country who went to Vietnam, and of the three children I know with this deformity all of their fathers are veterans, how would that affect you?’ He was absolutely staggered. To such an extent that he said, ‘What we will do is we’ll test all of the veterans’ children who are deformed free of charge at this hospital.’ And that was in the Sydney press, and in the Australian national press. But one week later that decision was reversed. Politics. The hospital board decided it wouldn’t be done!”

  Wares, Holt McMinn, and John Harper eventually formed the Vietnam Veterans Action Association. McMinn had served in Vietnam with an elite commando unit, the Special Air Service Regiment; but after several months in the bush he began coughing blood, his hands were covered with rashes, and, diagnosing his condition as bronchial asthma, Army doctors sent him back to Australia. McMinn attempted to return to Vietnam in 1968, but after examining his health records the Army refused to grant his request. His health continued to deteriorate and he was forced to enter a repatriation hospital where, after three months of tests, doctors told him they could find no reason for his hemorrhaging. His problem, they said, was obviously psychological. Discharged from the military and given a 20 percent disability pension, McMinn was accused by an examining doctor of being a “malingerer” who was trying to “rip off the government.”

  Although Wares and Harper had each fathered a deformed child—Harper’s daughter was born with two clubfeet and had already undergone five corrective operations when the two veterans met—they were not suffering from the kind of catastrophic health problems that seemed to be endemic among other Vietnam veterans. “I wasn’t angry for myself,” says Wares, “because even though I had suffered from a rash in Vietnam and had experienced this strange tingling sensation in my limbs since my return home, I was fairly healthy compared to Bob Gibson, Holt McMinn, and too many others I could name. But I wanted to know whether my son could ever have children. I really didn’t think the government owed me a damn thing, but for christsake they do owe it to these kids to try and find out what caused their deformity, and whether or not they can ever have normal children. Because that is the bit that I just can’t handle, I mean the kids and their kids, the generations that are not yet born that might end up with two noses or one ear missing or no arms, no bones, no brains—that is the bit that is just so hard to take.”

  Wares knew that establishing a correlation between his exposure to toxic chemicals and Cameron’s birth defects would not be an easy task. By 1969 public opinion in Australia had already turned sour on the war, and a decade later most people simply did not want to be reminded of Vietnam. To those who would rather practice selective amnesia than disentomb a bitterness that had once swept the nation like a virus, Wares, Gibson, McMinn, and other veterans’ advocates were considered “gadflies,” distraught over the fact that they had not been given a hero’s welcome when they returned home and intent on making someone suffer for their neglect. The premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, incensed by the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Action Association, suggested that the veterans’ physical and emotional problems were the result of their having been exposed to a particularly virulent strain of venereal disease. Damaged livers, cancer, and deformed children were apparently just a few of the wages of sin. “And do you know what the man does for a living?” Gibson laughs. “He grows peanuts, and he’s got his own crop-spraying company. That’s right. His own spraying company.”

  “They call us communists, radical environmentalists, hippies, you name it,” says Wares, who immigrated to Australia as a boy and is fiercely patriotic, “but that is just so much bullshit. I’ll admit that I was a bit surprised at the animosity toward me and my mates when we returned home, but I didn’t go to Vietnam to save Australia from the screaming communist hordes. I went because my country wanted me to go, and because at the time I just never, never believed that my own country would lie to me.”

  Concerned over the growing number of complaints about the domestic use of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, the Australian government commissioned its National Health and Medical Research Council to review the current scientific literature on these herbicides. NHMRC’s research found no link between herbicide use and an increase in the number of birth defects and spontaneous abortions; lauding the council’s work, the Australian government cheerfully concluded that it had found a scientific cornerstone for its refusal to take the Agent Orange issue seriously. Some scientists, however, were not willing to accept the council’s report with such alacrity, arguing, as did Dr. Donald MacPhee, a geneticist at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, that the council “might just as honestly have said that neither is there any scientific basis to disprove a link.”4The council’s conclusions were also criticized by Dr. Barbara Field, a pediatrician with an extensive background in the study of birth defects, and Dr. Charles Kerr of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In the course of their research, Drs. Field and Kerr discovered a “linear correlation” between the use of 2,4,5-T and the frequency of birth defects.

  But perhaps
the most serious criticism of NHMRC’s review came from Vietnam veterans, who pointed out that the study had been based on the domestic use of 2,4,5-T in bush control, thus failing to take into account the fact that the T used in Vietnam was five hundred times more potent than that used for domestic purposes. Samples of 2,4,5-T used in Vietnam contained up to fifty parts per million TCCD dioxin, while that used in Australia was limited by law to .1 part per million. Veterans’ advocates also argued that the government’s “cornerstone” was rather shaky because undiluted herbicides were used in Vietnam and the same areas were sprayed again and again—making it quite possible that dioxin, which can remain in the soil for up to thirty years, would accumulate and enter the food chain.

  While chairman of the New South Wales branch of Vietnam Veterans Action Association, Wares became increasingly aware of what he calls the “uncanny similarities” between the Australian and American governments’ approaches to the toxic chemical issue. After much lobbying by Vietnam veterans and veterans’ advocates, officials of both nations had agreed that something had to be done to “test the validity” of the veterans’ complaints. The “acid test,” officials decided, would take the form of an epidemiological study, which, though it might take as long as a decade to complete, would answer “some if not all of the many perplexing questions surrounding this complicated issue.” Ordered by the US Congress to commence such a study, the Veterans Administration, after a game of bureaucratic cat-and-mouse, invested $125,000 in a study design that took eighteen months to complete and was rejected by reviewers from the Office of Technology Assessment and scientists at the Center for Disease Control. In Australia, a proposed study of 41,000 Vietnam veterans, 100,000 of their children, and a 20,000-person control group had cost the government $1.2 million and gone absolutely nowhere after twelve months.