Waiting for an Army to Die (15 page)

“In December 1968 a hill, a ridge, was sprayed by helicopters. Again, we thought it was nerve gas. And Phantom jets strafed the hill with napalm, causing gas and a lot of smoke. I’m told now—I didn’t understand it then—that this causes more dioxin to be present.

“I sweat all the time, my hands and feet. My joints are always sore. I have chronic diarrhea. In general, I consider myself a physical wreck. And I am thirty-three years old. I feel like I am sixty years old.”
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Had they been willing to listen, VA officials would have heard a former aircraft crew chief announce: “I am compelled to testify because I probably won’t be alive for the next meeting of the Commission.

“I was exposed approximately twenty to thirty times of flying through the mists … There was heavy defoliation in that area for a whole month. We were getting mists practically every day, coming into the compound. I had no health problems prior to my service time, and I was healthy up until six years after I left the army. In 1975 I suddenly became ill, and I went to see doctors. I had $12,000 in medical expenses. I spent all my savings …

“No diagnosis was ever reached. I was forced to go to the VA for help. I stayed in the VA hospital for two and a half months. The doctors told me it was my gall bladder and I should have an operation.

“I went through an exploratory laparotomy, in which they
removed my gall bladder, they removed part of my spleen, and they also removed my appendix.

“They had told me that if I underwent this operation, I would be okay. After the operation I was sicker than before, and the doctor, my surgeon, came and told me after the operation that my liver didn’t look so good. He couldn’t tell me at that time what it was.

“When a biopsy came back, it came back as nonspecific hepatitis. I asked the doctor what that meant. He told me, that means you have a liver disease, that nobody knows what it is.

“Between 1975 and the present time I have been over three and a half years in the VA hospital in Brooklyn. I get terrible pains in my right-hand side. I have lost over fifty pounds. I get nausea, vomiting; I can’t keep anything down.

“In 1978 I also developed chronic idiocrasy and pancreatitis. I am getting worse and worse, and the VA cannot figure out what to do.

“Now they tell me I have priority treatment. Priority treatment doesn’t mean anything to me because medical science doesn’t even know how to deal with my illness, an illness that’s never been seen before. But it’s not so unusual to me because all the years that I spent in the hospital, there have been other Vietnam veterans who have liver diseases that are also undiagnosable. They are unable to come here today because they are too sick to even get out of bed.

“So I think that we need medical help, but I would also like to stress the fact that these poisons that were dealt out in Vietnam, they have created diseases that medical science cannot even deal with today. There is no treatment for me. There is medicine that can only relieve my pain and try to help my symptoms, but there is no treatment that is going to help me get well. I am going to continue to deteriorate until I die.”
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And the Veterans Administration or congressional committees would have heard Vietnam veterans and their wives testify that their treatment at VA hospitals had been anything but dignified and compassionate. They would have heard that following cursory physicals, which veterans had been led to believe were “comprehensive
Agent Orange examinations,” they had waited weeks, even months, for the “results,” only to be informed the problem was “all in their head” and to be given a public relations packet that, said one veteran, “told you Agent Orange had saved your life so don’t worry about it.” VA officials would have heard a veteran testify that, unable to treat a fungus-like growth on his scrotum with over-the-counter remedies, he had visited the VA clinic, where a doctor ordered him to “drop his pants” and, without administering even a local anesthetic and using an unsterilized scalpel, proceeded to remove the fungus “as though he were scaling a fish.” The VA hierarchy would have heard, as I did at New York State’s public hearing on dioxin exposure, seemingly endless stories of abuse, neglect, incompetence, arrogance, faulty diagnosis, altered records, and ordinary stupidity.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing these officials would have heard was that as the number of Vietnam veterans applying for disability increased, regional VA hospitals frequently resorted to a strategy perfected by totalitarian governments to silence dissidents. The dissident, in this case, is a veteran asking to be examined for bladder or liver cancer, who instead is given a psychiatric examination. Dissent is the desire to be seen as a rational human being with a genuine, urgent medical problem, rather than as a traumatized guerrilla fighter whose problem is postwar confusion. Had the VA been willing to listen, its medical staff would have heard veterans expressing their outrage at being treated as children, neurotics, and con artists.

“Why,” demanded a veteran at the New York State dioxin hearings, “is every Vietnam veteran given a psychiatric examination first? Or, if you are admitted to the hospital, it is always under a psychiatric guise. Why can no proper diagnosis be made? Men have a history of a multitude of psychological, organic, and/or neurological problems that are not being assessed or documented properly at the Veterans Administration. They are denying men their rights. They are committing a crime. They are violating the Federal Code of Regulations, Title 8, as it is. And doctors are violating their code of ethics.”
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On February 21, 1980, Max Cleland, testifying before the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, US Senate, answered the question about the VA’s penchant for seeing Vietnam veterans’ problems as “psychological.” After telling the committee that Vietnam veterans had a lower unemployment rate than the US population as a whole, were going to school, buying homes, and thanks to the concern and generosity of the Veterans Administration, generally adjusting rather nicely to civilian life, Cleland said: “Vietnam era veterans are utilizing VA outpatient health care facilities at about the same rate as veterans of other wars but have a lower rate of hospitalization due to their younger age when compared to veterans of other wars. As may be expected with younger veterans, those Vietnam era veterans treated have relatively fewer physical medical problems than do older veterans and, conversely, as a result for those treated, their care is more apt to be for psychiatric disorders. Of those VEVs [Vietnam era veterans] discharged from VA hospitals during FY 1979, 46 percent had received care for psychiatric disorders, including alcohol and drug abuse.”
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There can be little doubt that being sent to war as a hero only to be greeted upon one’s return home as a pariah has angered, frustrated, and confused many veterans. Nor would anyone deny that the horrors of guerrilla warfare have taken their toll on veterans of America’s longest and most unpopular war. But in its attempt to invalidate the veterans’ claims for service-connected disability, the VA has resorted all too frequently to labeling the symptoms of dioxin exposure as just one more example of “post-Vietnam syndrome.” A veteran in his early thirties who is told that his ailments are incurable and who is then turned down for disability payments is very likely to experience depression, and sleep disturbances, and other symptoms commonly associated with his tour of duty in Vietnam. By arguing that the sudden weight loss, chronic skin rashes, migraine headaches, gastrointestinal pains that thousands of Vietnam veterans have complained of are symptomatic of a collective neurosis, the VA is attempting to place veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange
in a no-win situation. Ironically, the VA would have veterans believe that whatever ails them can be traced directly to their experience in Asia, just as long as that experience does not include exposure to toxic herbicides.

It would be unfair, of course, to deny that there are dedicated doctors, nurses, administrators, and bureaucrats within the VA; but the agency’s failure to conduct an outreach program or to provide genetic counseling and family support services, and its refusal to begin an epidemiological study until ordered by Congress to do so (Public Law 96–151), have tarnished the VA’s reputation and posed serious questions about the protection Americans can expect from government agencies. Speaking of the VA’s denial of all disability claims based on Agent Orange, Senator Alan Cranston, chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and floor manager of the bill signed into law by President Carter mandating the VA to conduct an epidemiological study, said: “The denial of almost all Agent Orange claims by the VA is viewed by some Vietnam veterans as suggestive that a deliberate cover-up or irresponsible action by the federal government is being carried out in much the same way as information about the adverse health effects from radiation was withheld from nuclear weapons test participants in the 1950s and 1960s.”
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Yet even after Congress ordered the VA to begin an epidemiological study of Vietnam Veterans, the agency continued to exclude veterans and independent scientists from participating in the planning of the study. Before the actual study could begin, the VA needed to develop a design or protocol that would assure the study’s scientific objectivity and accuracy. (Although it did not have an epidemiologist on its staff, the VA planned to “contract out” only for the study design and to use its own personnel to conduct the study.) To secure a study design the VA developed a “request for proposals,” which it intended to send out to scientists who might be interested in participating. But at this stage the National Veterans Law Center confronted the VA once again, arguing that its “request for proposals” lacked scientific validity. “Examples of defects in to solicitation are legion,” said
NVLC attorneys. “The proposal omitted important … data that would be necessary to develop a scientifically valid epidemiological study design, such as the facilities of the agency, the personnel to be used, the type of study population available for the study, the nature of access to the study population, or the funds available to gain access to the study population. The absence of this essential data is not typical of other government research proposals. Indeed, scientists who reviewed this proposal for the law center concluded that only a scientist with inside information about the study design could likely submit an acceptable proposed deisgn.”
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Moreover, the “request for proposals” also stated that “anyone associated with a prior position regarding the effects of phenoxy herbicides and/or their constituents on human health” would be disqualified from bidding for the study design. This, said the VA, would assure that the study would be free of bias. By excluding anyone who may have published a paper or written an article on phenoxy herbicides, the VA was denying virtually all of the leading scientists in the field of dioxin research the chance to bid for the study. And while the exclusionary clause would keep highly qualified scientists from bidding for the study design, it did not prevent industry scientists or consultants from making a bid for the study. Consistent with its obstructionist position, the VA had devised just one more Catch-22 that hindered progress.

When the VA finally did award the contract for the epidemiological master plan, it was to a UCLA epidemiologist who would be quoted by the
New York Times
as telling a California assembly committee: “ ‘Agent Orange was used primarily in areas where few or no troops were located,’ and therefore, ‘the likelihood of substantial exposure to ground troops in Vietnam’ was not great.

“Dr. Spivey also told the panel that ‘there is to date little evidence’ of any specific human health effects’ as a result of the powerful herbicide. ‘The fear which is generated by current publicity is very likely to be the most serious consequences of the use of Agent Orange,’ he said.”
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Two years after Congress ordered the VA to begin an epidemiological study of Vietnam veterans, Dr. Spivey submitted his protocol to the American scientific community and Congress’s Office of Technology Assessment. But the protocol was rejected by scientists and members of the OTA. After reviewing the protocol, John Sommers, deputy director of the American legion’s National Veterans’ Affairs and Rehabilitation Commission, said, “The design is incomplete and unacceptable as presently written. The authors are so obsessed with secrecy that information pertaining to diseases or symptoms if interest to the study and details relating to veterans they consider to be in a high or low exposure groups have been withheld.”
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Sommers also told a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee that even the protocol’s authors admitted that their work was incomplete because, said Sommers, “the investigators were denied access to certain classified military records because
the VA failed to obtain a security clearance for the contractor or his assistants
.”
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Vernon Houk of the Center for Disease Control was also critical of the protocol. In fact, said Houk, the proposal “had such insufficient information that we did not indeed even classify this as a protocol.”
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Following the scientific review and comments from the OTA officials, the protocol was returned to UCLA for modifications. After twenty-four months, the epidemiological study was still mired in the planning stages.

The revised protocol was returned to the National Academy of Sciences for review, but even if the NAS had found the design acceptable it would have been years before the VA reached any conclusions on the health effects of Agent Orange. Although the agency said it was planning several new studies, including one of identical twins, one of whom served in Vietnam, officials continued to insist that the epidemiological study could not be finished until 1987. And while VA officials were searching for ways to improve the agency’s credulity among veterans, Illinois State
Senator Karl Berning told a VA panel that he sensed “a lack of commitment, a lack of concern, a lack of interest on the part of the national government” regarding this issue.
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While conceding that studies may be necessary, Berning told the panel: “However, I remind you that while you and I are talking, men and women, our fellow citizens, are suffering and dying now—and, from what we have had in the way of testimony, with little or no help from their government.”
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