Waiting for an Army to Die (13 page)

Wares lights a cigarette and watches the smoke curl lazily around his fingers. “I’m not really a melodramatic person. I don’t see ghosts everywhere, and I’m not paranoid at all, but there’s pieces to this puzzle that are missing and I wonder if we’ll ever find them and put the whole thing together before we all die. Sometimes I really doubt it.”

Bob Gibson and his wife have been advised by a physician that because of Gibson’s exposure to toxic chemicals they should “under no circumstances” consider having children. Thirteen years after his army discharge, Gibson still suffers from skin rashes, insomnia, and stomach problems. But in spite of his many maladies, Gibson feels that he is more fortunate than many veterans. One of the most mysterious aspects of toxic chemical poisoning is that different species of animals are affected to a greater or lesser degree by substances like dioxin; it might very well be the case that human beings exposed to the same quantity of dioxin will react in dissimilar ways. For some the exposure may manifest itself in skin rashes, chronic allergies, migraine headaches, and personality changes, while others die in a matter of months or years from cancer, liver disease, kidney failure, and what has been called “wasting disease.”
^†
Still others—like Jim Wares, whose tentmate in Vietnam suffers
from chronic allergies and has won the first round with a bout of lymphoma—appears to have escaped the more devastating effects of exposure to toxic chemicals. In short, dioxin has crept through the ranks of Australian and American Vietnam veterans, maiming some, destroying others, and leaving the survivors bewildered, angry, afraid. Bob Gibson and Jim Wares are survivors, but they know too many veterans who, while still in their prime of life, have succumbed to the cumulative effects of toxic poisoning.

They knew Collin Simpson, a thirty-five-year-old Vietnam veteran who had been fighting to stay alive for a number of years. Dying of lymphoma, Simpson was absolutely certain that his illness could be traced to his exposure to toxic chemicals, including Agent Orange, during his ten-month tour of duty in Vietnam. He died just a few days before he was to become the subject of the first major Agent Orange case in Australia.

After he returned from Vietnam, Simpson lived in a suburb of Sydney where the trees had been bulldozed and, just as sketched on an architect’s drawing board, houses had been built in symmetrical patterns. The neighborhood was friendly enough. On weekends neighbors would get together for a barbecue, a game of cards, and a bit of gossip while the children swam, raced their bikes, or bickered over a game of sandlot soccer. But inside some of the homes were men who “bashed” their wives during fits of uncontrollable rages, men whose bodies were covered in patches of chloracne, men who were suffering from rheumatic pains, fevers, and constant headaches. One veteran had suffered two suspected heart attacks and partial paralysis, at the age of twenty-three.

The children in the neighborhood also had problems. In one of the homes lived a five-year-old boy who could recite only one nursery rhyme; in another, a girl who was hyperactive and had to take medication to correct a chemical imbalance in her brain; in still another, a baby had died of cancer at the age of twelve months; and in the Simpsons’ home, the father was dying and his son had asthma, a partially collapsed lung, and a permanent rash on his chest and back.

The men on Monrobe Street knew that things were not right,
and they scoffed at the minister of veterans’ affairs, when he claimed that they were suffering from “war neurosis.” Had they been asked to fight again, most of them would have readily returned to the jungles of South Vietnam, even though they could recall walking through defoliated areas, and years later, wondered whether the water they drank or the food they had eaten in Vietnam might be responsible for their present maladies.

Collin Simpson died before his claims that he had been poisoned by toxic herbicides could be proven or disproven. But Simpson’s wife and veterans’ activists requested and received further hearings before the Repatriation Tribunal, a judicial review board with powers to grant dispensation, arguing that Simpson died of “war-related causes” and that his wife and children were entitled to a full was pension. One year after her husband’s death, the tribunal ruled that the claim was valid and granted Mrs. Simpson her pension. In a ruling that Vietnam veterans have called a “worldwide breakthrough,” the tribunal conceded that Simpson’s death might well have been caused by his exposure to toxic chemicals. While unwilling to concede that Simpson’s cancer was definitely caused by his exposure to toxic chemicals, the tribunal emphasized that it had been unable to “disprove the causal relationship.” “This onus,” declared the tribunal, “is not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that there was insufficient grounds for granting the claim.… It is a real possibility that the applicant’s malignant lymphoma resulted from his exposure to phenoxyacetic acid herbicides during his period of special service to South Vietnam.”

“I celebrated that night, the night when this decision came out,” says Wares. “I tell you, I had a party that night. What a breakthrough. What they said was that it was
possible
and highly likely, that his exposure to chemicals caused his cancer. What they didn’t say was that his exposure
definitely
caused the cancer. But what is important is that they mentioned ‘toxic chemicals.’ Because in Australia we have written off the Agent Orange issue because we don’t want to give the government the chance to eliminate any of the substances to which we were exposed and therefore close the
issue. So we’re including in our arguments Agent Blue, White, Pink, and Green. What we would like to know is what happens when you get all of these chemicals together. When you use them indiscriminately like they did in Vietnam, then what the hell can that do to a human being? We know that all of them except Blue contained some form of dioxin, and that Collin Simpson is dead and a lot of others are dying, not to mention the veterans who are screwed up, really in bad shape, and the kids who are still being born with serious problems.”

Although the tribunal’s decision has been hailed as a major precedent by American and Australian Vietnam veterans, Wares and Gibson realize that it is only one step down the long road toward winning compensation for those who are so seriously ill that they cannot work, and for the survivors of those who have died. Responding to the tribunal’s decision, Senator Messner remarked that it should be regarded only as a single case. He had “always encouraged veterans to take their claims before the Repatriation Commission and would continue to do so.” But veterans’ advocates, having spent $250,000 on legal fees for the Simpson case, argue that this approach could take years and require millions of dollars, and that what is needed is a judicial inquiry into the government’s handling of the toxic chemical issue, and inquiry that Senator Messner has steadfastly opposed.

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, mate,” Wares announces. “You could fill up this bloody room with gold bars and it wouldn’t compensate for Cameron’s birth defect. Nothing will ever compensate for what’s happened to the guys who went to Vietnam, and to their families. Nothing. We don’t want money. That’s just a bunch of bullshit. No one really cares about the fucking money. What we want people to know is just what has gone on, the bullshit we’ve put up with, the cover-ups, the …”—Ware’s voice fades and slides, then regains composure, clarity—“Someday people will look at this thing, the whole thing, and they’ll be amazed, they’ll just be amazed and, I would think, damn frightened when they realize what’s happened to us could very well happen to them. I hope to Christ it never does, mate. I just really hope it never, never happens to anyone else.”

With an annual budget of approximately $24 billion, a staff of nearly a quarter million, and an empire that includes 172 regional hospitals and fifty-eight regional and local offices, the Veterans Administration is the US government’s second largest bureaucracy. But in spite of the enormous sums of money it spends to maintain its programs and hospitals, pay its bureaucrats, and at least appear to take seriously the mandate given it by Congress to work on behalf of America’s veterans, the VA’s record on the Agent Orange issue is abysmal.

Just two years after the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, the VA began receiving calls and letters from Vietnam veterans who believed they had been exposed to Agent Orange. The veterans complained of chronic skin rashes,
fatigue, cancer, respiratory problems, impaired hearing or vision, depression, and loss of libido. Their wives, veterans told the VA, were giving birth to stillborn and deformed children and had suffered numerous miscarriages.

In 1977, Maude DeVictor was working in the Benefits Division of the VA’s regional office in Chicago when she received a call from the wife of a Vietnam veteran named Charles Owen. Her husband was dying, Mrs. Owen said, and he believed his terminal cancer was the result of exposure to Agent Orange. DeVictor had never heard of Agent Orange, but when she received another call from Mrs. Owen telling her that Charles had died and that the VA had refused her claim for survivor’s benefits, she decided to learn something about this obscure-sounding chemical.

She began by asking the widows of Vietnam veterans whether their husbands had been exposed to Agent Orange. She asked each veteran who visited or called her office a series of questions, including: “Were any of your children born with birth defects? How many miscarriages has your wife had? Do you suffer from skin rashes?” Astonished, many veterans replied: “How did you know?” When her supervisor demanded she stop gathering statistics and get back to business as usual, DeVictor refused. Instead, she contacted Bill Kurtis, a local television news correspondent whose skepticism gave way when he examined DeVictor’s findings. In March 1978, WBBM, a CBS affiliate in Chicago, aired an hour-long documentary entitled
Agent Orange, the Deadly Fog
. In the following weeks DeVictor received hundreds of calls from veterans who were sick or dying from symptoms remarkably similar to those of laboratory animals exposed to TCDD-dioxin.

By 1978, articles about Agent Orange were appearing in local and national publications, and officials at the VA decided it was time to begin mapping a strategy for dealing with the veterans’ complaints. First, the VA held a series of meetings from which veterans, independent scientists, and members of the public were excluded. Meeting behind closed doors with representatives of the chemical industry, the VA established its “no health effects” position
on Agent Orange, thus commencing what the National Veterans Law Center (NVLC) calls “a two-year history of closed and secretive decision making.”
¹

Approximately one year after its first closed Agent Orange meeting, the Veterans Administration, faced with a lawsuit for violating the open-meeting provision of the Federal Advisory Act, agreed to invite scientists who were not employed by the chemical industry. The VA also established an Advisory Committee on the Health-Related Effects of Herbicides, but according to the NVLC, “the pattern of unlawful action had begun.”
²
Although the advisory committee was a good idea in principle, it was clear from the beginning that the VA intended to ask for its advice only after crucial decisions had been made, placing the committee in the position of a surgeon who is called in for consultation a few hours
after
an operation has been performed. “As a practical matter,” reports the law center, “the advisory committee has been ineffective as a device to obtain scientific advice on Agent Orange matters. This is a result which is the agency’s by design, not the fault of committee members.”
³

Following the formation of the advisory committee in December 1978, the NVLC wrote the VA on behalf of the National Association of Concerned Veterans, suggesting that the agency conduct a comprehensive outreach program to locate veterans who might be experiencing “unusual” health problems and to encourage those veterans to visit regional VA hospitals for a complete medical examination. The NVLC also suggested that the VA conduct an epidemiological study “to determine whether an increased incidence of health problems was occurring among Vietnam veterans.” The letter questioned the VA’s policy of denying all Agent Orange disability claims when the agency had already stated that “it did not have adequate information on exposure or causation to decide intelligently the merits of those claims.”