Waiting for an Army to Die (5 page)

“I had seen Victor Yannacone’s name in the newspaper, and so I called him up. And he told me that he had other Vietnam veterans with testicular cancer and that there definitely tended to be a correlation between our exposure to dioxin and these types of cancers. Yannacone also said that he was going ahead with a lawsuit he had filed on behalf of Vietnam veterans, although at that time I think there were only twenty plaintiffs and I was one of them.”

Yannacone inspired DeBoer to begin his own intensive research into the effects of dioxin on animals and humans, and the more he read the more convinced he became that his illness was symptomatic of dioxin exposure. Why, he wondered, had the men in his platoon not been warned against drinking water and eating food that had been sprayed with herbicides containing this deadly substance? Did the government really know that the defoliants they were spraying contained a carcinogen and teratogen that would remain in the soil and water for years? Had anyone checked the thousands of barrels of Agent Orange that were shipped to Vietnam to determine just how much dioxin they contained? Did Dow Chemical warn the Department of Defense that men and women working in a plant where 2,4,5-T was produced had suffered from chloracne? Why was the government insisting that no problem existed when he was sick and might even be dying from an extremely rare form of cancer? What constituted a problem? Every day he seemed to hear about other veterans who were suffering from serious ailments, and who suspected that their own government might have poisoned them.

DeBoer’s skepticism soon gave way to anger, and his reluctance to revive memories of his combat experiences was swept aside by a passionate desire to discover just what had happened to him and the members of his platoon. Eventually he founded Agent Orange Victims of New York, launching a speaking tour that would take him into American Legion and VFW halls, high schools, and colleges throughout New York State. But he also wanted to talk to all of the members of his unit to see if they, too, were suffering from symptoms of dioxin exposure.

DeBoer soon realized that he couldn’t count on the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration for help in locating members of the unit he would one day dub “The Doomed Platoon.” The DOD maintained that very few veterans had been exposed to herbicides in Vietnam, while informing those who requested their service records that many of the military’s records had been lost in the chaotic evacuation of Saigon, or destroyed in a fire in St. Louis, Missouri. Already skeptical of the VA, DeBoer concluded that asking the government for help, even in what appeared to be a rather simple matter, was an exercise in futility. Instead, he decided to become a sleuth, an amateur Sherlock Holmes trying to track down not the perpetrator of a murder but the possible victims of chemical warfare. If he could find one of the men in his platoon, he felt certain that he might be able to locate all twenty.

Recalling a conversation with a member of his unit who had said he intended to become a police officer in civilian life, DeBoer tried to remember if the man whom he had spent a year of his life dodging ambushes, cursing the heat, going on R&R, bragging about sexual conquests both knew were more fiction than fact, counting first the months then the days and finally the hours until they left “the Nam” for good—if the man with whom he had spent that first terrifying night in the jungle had ever really told him where he planned to settle down after the war. But since he was playing Holmes and knew that quite often this distinguished investigator would break a case with a hunch that seemed foolhardy to his associates, DeBoer decided to gamble. He went to Number One Police Plaza in Manhattan, where he inquired after an officer named Kevin———.
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To his amazement he was told that Kevin did work for the New York City police department, but because he was a narcotics agent the department was not at liberty to give his number or address to anyone. They did agree to leave a message for Kevin, asking him to call Ron DeBoer.

DeBoer waited near the telephone that night, excited but not at all certain this break would lead much further. It had been more than ten years since he and Kevin boarded their “Freedom Bird” to the states, and they had not kept in touch. In the intervening years many veterans, wanting only to forget their combat experiences and bitter over the way they had been treated since returning from Asia, had gone more or less underground, and DeBoer knew that it would not be easy to ferret them out. But the phone rang and “Lo and behold it was Kevin. And he was really excited to hear from me, and just couldn’t believe that I would go to all that trouble to find him. We talked for some time and I asked him how he was feeling, and whether or not he was having any problems. He said that his health was fine, although something about the way he said it made me suspect that he might not be telling me the whole truth. But what he did say was that his first child was born dead, and his son was born with a deformed penis. So I had cancer and Kevin had this tragedy strike in his life. But at the time I just thought, Well, this is a coincidence. Still, I really wanted to talk to more of the guys in my platoon. By this time I had read too much about dioxin and its effects, talked to Victor Yannacone at length, and gone through my own turmoil over my testicular cancer. I felt that I just couldn’t be satisfied until I had talked with every one of the men I had served with.”

Kevin gave DeBoer the address of a member of their platoon who was working as a postman in a small Pennsylvania town, and DeBoer soon tracked him down. “Just like Kevin he couldn’t believe that I would be looking him up after all these years. And he tells me he’s doing fine, that he has no problems; but when I asked him how his children were, he said that his daughter had been born with a deformed leg and his son was born with PKU, which is a form of mental retardation. But what interested me the most was that neither one of these veterans have any family history of birth defects. They don’t know what caused these things. But I knew, and I still know, what it was—they had been exposed to dioxin.

“So here I was now and it was just around Christmas time, and I had cancer, Kevin had a child born dead and another with a birth defect, and Hoffman had two children with birth defects, so it was just like batting a thousand. I couldn’t stop now. I wanted to talk to every member of my platoon just as soon as I could, because I had already gone beyond the coincidence stage in my investigation. The case wasn’t ironclad yet, but it was getting tighter.”

Hoffman gave DeBoer the telephone number of Al Boyd, a platoon member living in California who also worked for the post office. Boyd was married, but he and his wife had decided not to have children. However, when DeBoer asked him about his health, Boyd answered that “he had all kinds of health problems. All kinds. At thirty-three he is suffering from hypertension, severe hypertension. He has to be on medication for it. He has a constant nervous upset stomach and they don’t know what the hell his problem is. He’s been hospitalized with hepatitis. He has liver problems. Just about anything you can name. And the guy told me, he says, ‘Ron, I’m thirty-three years old and I feel like I’m sixty.’ ”

From California the trail doubled back to Denver, Colorado, to a veteran who told DeBoer he was divorced, had not been feeling well for the past few years, and that something had happened that he simply could not understand. Before he went to Vietnam, he told DeBoer, he had enjoyed the taste of beer and had actually prided himself on the amount he was able to consume during a night out with his drinking buddies. But now, he lamented, he could not drink even one can of beer without getting violent headaches, feeling dizzy, and even passing out. His intolerance for alcohol had become “total,” and he wondered what had happened to his body, whether he had picked up some exotic disease in Vietnam. That his liver might have contained traces of dioxin had not occurred to him. Neither the VA nor the Department of Defense had sent him a letter advising him that he and members of the 17th Air Cavalry had been exposed to the most toxic man-made substance in the world, and that it might be beneficial to him if he submitted to a complete physical examination. Like DeBoer just a year or two before, the man knew little about the defoliation
campaign in Southeast Asia and could not understand why, when just a few years before he had felt ready to compete in the Olympics, his body seemed now to betray him.

One of the most peculiar responses to DeBoer’s inquiries, yet one that he would come to understand during his work with the New York State Temporary Commission on Dioxin Exposure, came during a conversation he had with the sixth member of his platoon. The man and his wife were on the phone, and, says DeBoer, the veteran’s wife seemed very interested in his questions and seemed to want more information about how exposure to Agent Orange might have affected her husband. But the man became extremely defensive, even angry, and dismissed DeBoer by announcing that there “is nothin’ wrong with me and nothin’ wrong with my family. Goodbye. I hope you guys make out all right, but don’t call me, I’ll call you.” DeBoer never heard from him again, and he was unable to uncover any other leads.

“So I was able to locate only six men out of the twenty that were in the platoon, and what I found was that five of the six had hard-core Agent Orange problems: dead children, deformed children, cancer, gastritis, hypertension, liver problems, and other serious health problems. From then on I knew that there was something that made us different from the rest of the country. I was totally convinced of that then, and I’m totally convinced of it now. And the fact that the Veterans Administration has gone out of its way to drag its feet in coming to terms with conducting a true epidemiological study of the 2.5 million men and women who served in Vietnam, comparing them to 2.5 million people who did not go to Vietnam but were in the service, is indicative of just how serious the problem may be. Why haven’t we been compared to noncombat veterans to see if in fact we are sicker, our children are born with more birth defects, we suffer from a higher rate of cancer? We know that there are people who can do this study, that it wouldn’t even be all that difficult to do. But instead the VA prefers to insult us by dragging its feet and then finally coming up with a prototype for a study that is perforated with inconsistencies, just a waste of taxpayers’ money. So once
again we have found the Vietnam combat veterans just can’t trust the VA.

“The VA continues to hang its hat on its Ranch Hand study,” says DeBoer “but I think that it’s because many of the men who are involved in that study are still on active duty.
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They’re pilots, career Air Force personnel, and these individuals are not going to step forward with an array of health problems because they’ll get kicked right out of the military, or be grounded and lose their flight pay. So there are many reasons why the Ranch Hand study will fail to provide the kind of information we need. You’ve got to remember that the men being examined, the pilots who flew the C-123s for example, did not drink water or eat food contaminated with dioxin, like the grunts did week after week. When those pilots returned to base they showered every night, instead of living in the same clothes for days or even weeks. So instead of insisting on examining members of the Ranch Hand units, why doesn’t the government take a look at A Troop, Seventh Squadron 17th Air Cavalry, and compare us to another infantry platoon that was stationed in Germany? What is the VA afraid of? One has to wonder.

“I mean, look, I found six of the men in my unit on my own, and I attempted to get the other fourteen names. But I couldn’t get
them, because they said that I would have to file a Freedom of Information Act to get the names of the guys that I fought with in Vietnam. I could hardly believe it. The VA wouldn’t give me any help. Then I talked with my congressman and he said that there are many guys trying to locate the men they served with. It’s just like everything else where Vietnam veterans are concerned. The VA and the DOD just aren’t going to give us any help. But I plan on doing it on my own. I’m going to keep on investigating until I know what happened to every one of the men in that unit.”

Because he was fully covered by medical insurance, DeBoer did not have to go through what he calls the “VA atrocity,” and in spite of the fact that the private doctors who first examined him knew nothing about dioxin and little if anything about Agent Orange, he received “superb medical care.” As the years passed and he returned for postoperative checkups, some of the physicians became interested in the issue and would ask DeBoer what he knew about the symptomology of dioxin exposure. They were amazed, he says, when he told them that among the plaintiffs in the class action suit were at least
one hundred cases
of testicular cancer. “They just couldn’t believe it. It really seemed almost beyond their comprehension that we could have that many testicular cancers in our population of Vietnam veterans.”

By 1982 the number would grow into the hundreds, a figure that, given the average age of Vietnam veterans and their health records before they were sent to Vietnam, clearly demonstrates the disastrous effects that exposure to dioxin can have on human health. Given the rate at which testicular cancers have been discovered among Vietnam veterans it seems highly likely that even more cases will be added to the class action suit before Yannacone and his consortium of attorneys face the war contractors in a court of law.

Despite the physical, emotional, and financial problems DeBoer’s illness caused him and his family, he decided that he must do whatever he could to educate the American public to the hazards of dioxin, and to convince people that the ailments of Vietnam veterans are both real and devastating. Soon he was deluged
with offers to speak, and he accepted nearly all of them, becoming, he soon realized, a full-time Agent Orange activist. Invited to attend hearings in Albany on the hazards of toxic substances in the workplace, DeBoer went because “I pretty much considered myself to be Exhibit A as to what can happen to people who are exposed to toxic substances, and I wanted to say something about the men in my platoon who had told me about the problems they were experiencing from their exposure to dioxin.” Although the state assembly committee that was sponsoring the hearings realized that the problem of dioxin exposure was national in scope, with its roots in Washington rather than Albany, the committee concluded that a state commission on dioxin exposure should be established to examine the possibility that large numbers of Vietnam veterans (of which New York has six hundred thousand) and nonveteran residents of the state may have been exposed to dioxin. The majority of the New York State Temporary Commission of Dioxin Exposure’s members would be combat veterans and, because of his work on behalf of veterans and research into the effects of dioxin on laboratory animals and human beings, DeBoer was asked to become a member.