Waiting for an Army to Die

by Fred A. Wilcox

  The story of 2,4-D reregistration by the EPA in April 1976 is typical of the EPA’s casual and cursory approach to the reregistration of pesticides.

  On April 8, 1976, EPA mailed reregistration guideline packages to manufacturers of 670 products containing 2,4-D for which more than 45 residue tolerances have been granted on such foods as dairy milk, eggs, poultry, meat, corn, apples, vegetables, and citrus fruits. The guidance packages cited a two-year rat and dog feeding study performed by FDA in 1963 as “sufficient” to satisfy the “chronic” safety testing requirements for reregistration. Yet a summary report on the study in EPA’s files stated that there was “increased tumor formation” in the rats… An independent pathologist, who reviewed the raw data on the study at the request of subcommittee staff, concluded that 2,4-D “is carcinogenic in rats.”9

  Despite its rather slipshod methods of determining whether a particular chemical should be reregistered, the EPA cannot be held responsible for the quality of the data upon which it must base its decisions. Nor can one hold the EPA accountable for the fact that some of the data it has received is not only poor in quality but fraudulent. According to a federal grand jury’s indictments against four former officials of Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, once considered one of the most important industrial laboratories in America, the company fabricated results of two cancer studies on the herbicide Sencor and the insecticide Nemacur, submitting the results of “tests” to the EPA in support of registration of those products.

  The indictment also accuses the officials of “concealing the fact that TCC (trichlorocarbanilide), an antibacterial agent used in deodorant soaps manufactured by Monsanto Corp., caused atrophy in the testes at the lowest dose tested in mice…”10 “They also fabricated results of blood and urine studies which were never performed on Syntex Corp.’s anti-arthritic drug Naprosyn, according to the indictment.”11 Curiously enough, even though the EPA may have based its decision to register a product or products on falsified laboratory data, this is not considered grounds for removing the product from the market. After receiving permission from the EPA, Mobay, a Pittsburgh-based subsidiary of Bayer AG of West Germany, continued selling Sencor and Nemacur.12

  Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories is bankrupt, its deserted laboratories a mausoleum to bad faith. And yet, in spite of the fact that the EPA has declared many similar tests “worthless,” one has to wonder how many products are still on the market because of “data” submitted to the EPA for review by manufacturers who trusted the results of “scientific studies” performed by a “reputable” laboratory.

  “You know,” Bonnie Hill says, pausing as though she has just remembered a very important and unpleasant fact, “I don’t really think they will bring 2,4,5-T back. They will probably just let it remain where it is, that is, not pass a ban, but refuse Dow’s request to lift the suspension order. I may be fooling myself, but I can’t conceive of them bringing it back after all that has gone on. I think there will be a lot of very angry and very frustrated people if they do. Because the feeling, the level of frustration, is pretty high now because of what they are spraying. You know, Dow loves to say, ‘Oh, these people are against anything; they’re just against all sprays.’ And I sometimes would say, ‘That just isn’t true, we really are trying to look at these substances one by one and trying to consider each in what we think is a fair manner.’ And I think that is still true for a lot of us, but I also think that a lot of people who live here are feeling very frustrated that people are just coming in whenever they feel like it and spraying with helicopters—we don’t know what—very close to our homes. I think there is a misconception among our Oregon legislators, and maybe people in general, that this is happening in pretty remote areas, but that just isn’t true. In fact, just three days ago, just a half-mile from Alsea, a helicopter was spraying as people were bringing their children to preschool. There was a helicopter spraying just across the highway, and people were pretty upset about that. We just don’t know when they are going to spray, and we don’t know who is spraying, and we don’t know what they are spraying. And I just think that’s a right that we should have. We have a right to know what’s going on in our own backyard. They’ve continued the use of 2,4-D around here, even though a Canadian study has shown it to be carcinogenic; and some of the other things they’re using could be equally or even more dangerous than T for all we know. The chemical companies just keep on making products, and we continue to be their guinea pigs.

  “Of course, in spite of all the adverse publicity 2,4,5-T has received, there are people who still argue that we—that is, those of us who would like to see it banned for good—are just trying to wreck the economy or some nonsense like that. Right after the EPA’s suspension order was announced, the governor of Oregon released a ludicrous report about how many billions of dollars and thousands of jobs would be lost if 2,4,5-T were removed from the market. But you could ask anyone in Alsea, a community that’s almost 100 percent dependent on the timber industry, about that. I mean, how many jobs are provided by a helicopter coming in and spraying, and how many jobs would be provided by hiring a crew to go out and cut brush. And believe me, people are willing to go out and do that. You know, these professors at OSU [Oregon State University] say, ‘Oh, you’d never get people to do that kind of work,’ but that’s not true, there are a lot of people around here who would be happy to do almost anything right now—they just want to work. The economic justification for using these substances just really isn’t there, and a lot of people think that’s one reason why Dow wanted to terminate the EPA suspension hearings—they really didn’t want to get into the ‘benefit’ section of the hearings because they don’t have any real evidence that this stuff is really beneficial. They just haven’t done the kind of scientific studies they claim to have done to prove that this stuff is really a benefit to our economy.

  “And I just want to say another thing. The old-timers around here are opposed to herbicides. First, because they say the forest used to grow back just fine without them, and second, because they say the wildlife has really been affected by herbicides. The bird population, squirrel population, all the little mammals, have just been decimated. And some fishermen say there used to be a lot more trout in some of the streams. Of course herbicide users claim this is not because of herbicides, but because the natural habitat has been destroyed—but that’s nonsense. There’s lots of natural habitat. And the old-timers will tell you—and of course I couldn’t use this in my EPA testimony because it’s all ‘hearsay’—about all the tumors they’ve found in deer and elk they’ve killed around here. Lots of very strange, abnormal-looking growths. And these are people that have lived here all their lives.

  “It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the observations of people who have lived in an area all their lives are considered nothing more than hearsay by those who look for a scientific explanation for everything. I went down to hear Dr. Tung, the scientist from Vietnam, when he was speaking in Eugene, and he said something that really struck me. He said that the people have lived in the same area for generations, even centuries, and that they know just what it is, and he said that he, as a scientist, just had to trust that the people knew enough about their surroundings to detect even minute changes. It seems to me we ought to be listening to some of the people around here who have lived in this area long, long before herbicides were ever sprayed here.”

  Bonnie Hill and I shake hands and say goodbye, and I walk to the small parking lot where earlier in the day I had spent nearly an hour watching the extraordinary changes in the Oregon weather. For perhaps fifteen minutes the sun would shine, converting the compact car I had rented in Eugene into a mobile solar greenhouse. And then, abruptly, the sky would glower, great dark clouds would swallow the sun, and it would rain. Fifteen minutes later the clouds would vanish behind the mountains, and the rain would stop.

  I had spent the previous evening just twenty miles away, at the home of a Vietnam veteran who explained that he had gotten
involved in the controversy over herbicides when he read some material that purported to rationalize the use of 2,4,5-T.

  “We used to play tapes from loudspeakers,” my host told me, “basically saying that the VC are telling the people that herbicides are making them sick, that the spraying is responsible for their miscarriages and illnesses. And the tapes would say that the VC are lying, they just don’t like the sprays because it makes it hard for them to hide, and that the VC are actually poisoning people’s water so they will believe it’s herbicides that are making them sick. I was young and gung-ho at the time; so I just believed the propaganda we were feeding the people. We heard the Vietnamese complain. They talked about depressions, diarrhea, flus, colds, rashes, spontaneous abortions. But it was a war zone, and we just figured there were a lot of diseases that we had never heard of. Thinking back, I recall being struck by the number of children with cleft palates. And I suffered from the same things over and over, screaming pains in my joints, pains in my gut, blood in my urine, my feet going numb. But the hardest thing to deal with was the sudden depressions that came on you. You just wanted to go out into a field and stick a pistol in your mouth and pull the trigger.”

  During a lull in our conversation I stepped outside. It was a clear, rather brisk spring night, and as I stood in the darkness I could hear water gushing, gurgling, flowing, churning. And I thought about a comment one American scientist had made about herbicide spraying. “Pinpoint bombing you might be able to do,” he said, “but pinpoint spraying is impossible.”

  In Ashford, Washington, a timber company chemist once told a group of women concerned about miscarriages and stillbirths, which they believed might be related to 2,4,5-T, that “babies are replaceable,” and they should “plan their pregnancies around the spray schedule.” Bonnie Hill was reluctant to talk about the emotional aspects of losing a baby because, she explained, “the media would have loved to see me crying and screaming, but I don’t think that is the way we’re really going to win this thing.” Although they may be unwilling to cater to the media’s more prurient whims, women have begun to express their anger over seeing their children suffer from exposure to herbicides, or over experiencing a miscarriage that might have been avoided.

  Testifying at the New York State Temporary Commission on Dioxin Exposure hearings in Farmingdale, Long Island, one woman said, “I just took it for granted, as the doctors did, when my daughters were born, that these things just happened. Then I put together the neighbor on this side of me and a neighbor on that side of me having miscarriages—they had normal children when they lived in other towns, no problems. I have one friend who had had four miscarriages since she moved into my area. All four of them were exactly the same as those experienced by veterans’ wives, which is, in the third month, up until the third month, the pregnancy is normal. In the third month through the fifth month, the baby starts to disintegrate and dies. There is nothing in the delivery except blood clots. And she had four of these, and she had four normal children when she lived in a different town, not near the railroad tracks.”

  And another woman testified: “Our property abuts that of the Long Island Rail Road. My backyard, where my children played and we grew vegetables—we also ate outside—is within twenty feet of the tracks. I am the mother of three living children. During the sixties and seventies, the Long Island Rail Road has been spraying along the right-of-way without ever notifying any residents when they were going to spray or what they were using.

  “There have been many miscarriages and problems within my area. My two older children were conceived and born elsewhere. I have had two miscarriages since I moved to this address, one of which was considered rare. My daughter was born with multiple birth defects which are similar in nature to the birth defects suffered by Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. Her defects are club feet, dislocation of the left hip, spina bifida, no muscles or ligaments from the knees down, nerve damage in both legs. She has had eleven operations in six years, and must wear braces on both legs…

  “We know about our daughter, but we don’t know about my two older boys, myself or my husband. Will these boys be able to produce children? And if so, what defects will they have? Do we have cancer now, or will we contact it in the future?

  “Both the veterans from Vietnam and the people who live along the right-of-way have been hurt tremendously. We can’t correct what has been done, but we must stop it from happening in the future. Our lives depend upon it.”

  11. Vietnam Veterans are America’s Future

  A visitor to Ronald Anderson’s home might find some of his habits rather odd. Passing a small oval mirror in the living room he seems to avert his face. In the dining room he stands with his back to a rectangular mirror, set, it appears, to reflect a child’s drawing on the opposite wall. But it soon becomes clear that he is no more peculiar than anyone else would be in his situation. Anderson[26] refuses to look in the mirror because he doesn’t wish to see that his thick curly black hair (he had been nicknamed “the bear”) has fallen out, reappearing in patches that protrude from his skull like tiny white brooms. Nor does he wish to see that his once-handsome face is covered with a rash, or that, during periods of sudden weight loss, his cheeks are sunken and his eyes look like those of a dying cat. At thirty-six Anderson simply doesn’t want to see the reflection of an old man.

  Avoiding mirrors, of course, does nothing to make his chest pains go away, restore his coordination, stop the recurrent bouts of dizziness, or explain the chronic nausea from which he suffers. At times Anderson’s muscles are so weak that he is unable to open a jar of peanut butter for his children; and there are days when he sits for hours, sometimes until long after the sun has set, waiting for a suicidal depression to pass, struggling to remember that things were not always like this, that once he could walk miles in a full field-pack without tiring, do hours of calisthenics without complaining. He passed through basic training, he wrote friends back home, “with a smile.” Once he could easily manipulate the straps of his parachute as he glided toward the ground during training exercises with the 101 Airborne.

  Sometimes when he thinks about these things he removes a scrapbook and leafs through the photographic proof that he was not always old before his time; and he sees, squeezed between a snapshot of a Vietnamese bar girl and a fading picture of a buddy who did not survive the war, a photograph that he clearly recalls taking. It is a picture of a C-123 spraying not more than half a mile from where he was standing. While staring at the photograph Anderson slowly becomes aware that he is afraid. But it is not, he realizes, simply because it reminds him of the twelve months he spent in the bush. That was a different kind of fear, one that for the most part he has been able to leave behind. The nightmares come less frequently now, and his limbs tremble not because he has flashed to a particularly horrible ambush or firefight. He is afraid because, after three years of tests, consultations, prescriptions, X-rays and hospitalization, doctors are still unable to tell him why he is a physical wreck or what, if anything, can be done to stop the progress of this mysterious disease.

  There are times, Anderson admits, when he almost wishes he had cancer. Because then it might be possible to remove the malignant portion of his body and arrest the spread of disease. Or perhaps he would be given chemotherapy and eventually his health would return. Much of the time he feels, Anderson tells visitors, like a house infested with termites. The porch is collapsing, the foundation crumbling, the walls so deteriorated a child could push them over, but the parasites remain hidden and no one can explain why the house is tumbling down. He is afraid, he has discovered, not of dying, but of the unknown.

  Looking at a photograph of himself at the age of eighteen, Anderson feels a sense of pride. His boots glisten in the sun and his girlfriend and mother stand on each side of him, staring proudly at the set of jump wings that have just been pinned to his uniform. Vietnam had not been a difficult decision for him. His grandfather had fought in the Argonne Forest, his father had landed o
n Normandy, an uncle had won a bronze star in Korea, and by 1969, when he arrived at Tan Son Nhut, he had already lost one member of his high school football team to the Tet Offensive.

  As he stares at the thirteen-year-old photograph, the former paratrooper feels torn by conflicting emotions. He has not lost his love for America, but the tears in his eyes are those of rage rather than pride. “Ask not what your country can do for you…” The words reverberate through the room. He remembers a Pakistani doctor (it seemed to him at the time that most of the physicians at the VA were from foreign countries) explaining in halting English that he could not understand Anderson’s questions about Agent Orange, then signing papers ordering that he be held for observation in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. He recalls the first check he received from the VA. It amounted to forty-eight dollars and would be sent each month, said the VA, not because they believed he was suffering from exposure to Agent Orange, but to help him cope with his “war-related” neurosis. Anderson smiles. He had taken the check into his backyard and, tearing the “insult” into tiny pieces, scattered it, as he once had his father’s ashes, to the winds.