Waiting for an Army to Die (6 page)

The commissioners agreed to hold a series of hearings, inviting members of the public to express their concerns about the effect dioxin might be having on their health. The commissioners were instructed not to reach conclusions, pass judgments, or make any specific rulings during the course of these hearings. Their job was simply to listen. Thus began what seemed, at times, a tragedy without end. On occasion, says DeBoer, even the stenographers wept as they listened to a young widow describe her husband’s death from cancer, a Vietnam veteran speak lovingly and with anger about his deformed daughter or son, or a woman explain that in spite of her love for her husband and desire to bear children she was frightened of giving birth to a “thalidomide baby.” While he admits that he was sometimes disappointed that more veterans didn’t appear at the hearings, DeBoer can “understand that nobody wants to come to a hearing and be told that you’ve been exposed to dioxin. Nobody really wants to come to a meeting and see their
contemporaries sick, genuinely suffering, and nobody wants to come out and look at deformed children.”

Ron DeBoer and I are sitting on a park bench near City Hall in lower Manhattan. Across from us an elderly man admonishes the pigeons to be more considerate. He tells them they are not so “smart as they think” and warns them that their “uppity ways” are going to bring them to an unhappy end. Bells chime, taxis jockey for position at a red light, honking like angry geese and hurling down Broadway in ragged formation. Office workers stroll through the park and bask in the sun beside a small reflection pool. The Vietnam War has been over for eight years.
Coming Home, The Deer Hunter
, and
Apocalypse Now
have come and gone. Novels, documentaries, books of poetry, new journalistic accounts of the war have been written, produced, reviewed, awarded prizes, enshrined as classics, or dismissed as failed attempts to portray what some people feel may be unportrayable. But DeBoer, an aspiring film scriptwriter, feels the most devastating film is yet to be made. “When they make a movie out of this Agent Orange thing, and believe me they will make a movie out of it, it’ll make
Apocalypse Now
look like a Walt Disney flick.”

This is said without a trace of bitterness or anger, just the matter-of-fact manner of a man who knows that the government he served has lied to him and his fellow veterans for many years. As a member of the New York State Temporary Commission on Dioxin Exposure he has talked to hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Vietnam veterans throughout the nation. And he has heard time and again that the use of defoliants was not confined to remote areas of Vietnam, that base camp perimeters were routinely sprayed, and C-123s sometimes jettisoned their thousand-gallon loads near or directly on areas occupied by American servicemen. From General Accounting Office reports he discovered that his unit had been deployed in defoliated areas; and from HERBS tapes (which do
not
include information about Navy Seabee, Army Engineer, Marine Corps Engineer, South Vietnamese, Australian, or CIA use of defoliants in Vietnam) he found that the year he spent in Vietnam had been one of the peak years for the military’s use of defoliants.

“There can be no question that the Department of Defense and the Veterans Administration perpetuated a fraud on the American public by insisting for a good solid eighteen months when I first became involved in this issue that we were
not
exposed, we were
not
at risk of exposure, and American ground forces were not in areas that had been sprayed. And then, thanks to Senator Percy’s efforts to get the General Accounting Office to examine the DOD’s records, we find out that not only were we in areas that had been defoliated, but that some of these areas had been sprayed directly on several occasions with herbicides that were hundreds of times more contaminated with TCDD-dioxin than the strongest herbicide used domestically in the US.

“Yet it took us forever to get any information from the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense. We’ve had so little cooperation from the people who were involved in administrating the war. Every step along the way we’ve had to file a Freedom of Information Act claim to get information. It’s been like pulling teeth since day one to get any information out of the Veterans Administration. But why do they behave this way? I still don’t quite understand it. I’ve met with them, and it seems rather obvious to me that the heavy lobbying of Dow, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, and Uniroyal have an influence on the government’s decisions. As an individual, and as a Vietnam veteran, I can only think that when they all get together in the friendly back room or by the poolside and they dip their well-manicured fingers into the caviar jar, the conversation is ‘How are we going to keep these young guys who have in fact been poisoned by dioxin from collecting what’s justly theirs?’ And the way they decide to do that is
through the bureaucracy
: Just keep putting up the barrier of no cause and effect, no correlation, and never do the tests that might prove we’re right. When you do spend over a hundred thousand dollars to design a study, just make sure it’s like the UCLA epidemiological protocol, that it’s doctored up and utterly useless. That way you can stall progress for another two, five, ten years. No, I think it’s dollars,
big
money, and that’s what’s really behind all this. We Vietnam veterans have been given a
price tag, and the tag seems to be too high for the government to afford.”

In Vietnam, DeBoer did not feel that he was fighting for the state of New York, California, or Ohio. He and his fellow soldiers were there “as Americans, not as representatives of our individual states.” Thus he finds it difficult to understand “why the courthouse door is being closed to us now. In eighteen states veterans are time-barred by statute of limitations from arguing for compensation from the war contractors once the class action suit has been heard, and, we assume, won. And this is probably the most terrible, the most tragic thing that has happened to the Vietnam veterans. It’s the ultimate slap in the face to a people who were fighting tyranny and communism, or so they were told, to come home and be informed—and this may well include hundreds of thousands of men—that ‘No, you are not going to have your day in court. Yes, your brother veteran in California will be able to have
his
day in court, but you who live in any of the eighteen states where you are time-barred will not have your day.’ ”

Ron DeBoer was nineteen when he went to Vietnam. Today he is thirty-four. The organization that he founded three years ago no longer exists, and now he wants nothing more than to write about what it felt like to be a nineteen-year-old kid in Vietnam, to spend that first terrifying night in the jungle, to see the dead and the wounded, and to survive. But he has not given up the hope that his “brother veterans will be accorded the dignity and compassion to which they are entitled,” even though he knows that, in spite of cosmetic proclamations, rhetorical flourishes, and public relations scams, very little has changed at VA headquarters. The Agent Orange examination is still a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, useless and humiliating to the eighty thousand veterans who, distressed over their own deteriorating health and concerned that their future children might be born with a myriad of birth defects, have sought help at VA clinics. The anger and shock that followed his discovery that he had testicular cancer and that propelled him to work nonstop for three years on behalf of other Agent Orange victims has been replaced by stoicism.

“There’s nothing left anymore that these people can do that will affect me on an individual basis—you know, get me upset. They are beyond scruples. They are beyond decency. They will do anything. They will sit there and cover up, and they will tell you that there was absolutely no spraying in Laos, no spraying in Cambodia. And just as soon as we file a Freedom of Information Act they will admit that ‘Yes, we sprayed there. Yes, we lied all along.’ All the war contractors present this façade of true patriotism, but I’ve been saying ‘Profit before Patriotism’ for three years. They knew, or they damn well should have known, that their herbicide was contaminated with dioxin. As a matter of fact,
their
scientists knew years before anyone else just how toxic this substance was. And I really wouldn’t be that concerned with Dow’s credibility or sincerity if we had only dumped a couple hundred thousand gallons of Agent Orange on Vietnam, but when you consider
eleven million gallons
there is no one who can tell me that at some time Dow’s scientists didn’t sit down and ask, ‘Now wait a minute, just what the hell are they doing with all this stuff?’ We’re talking about
three hundred and sixty-eight pounds of dioxin!
A substance that kills laboratory animals in
parts per billion
, which is really only a microscopic dose.

“I’m familiar with all their arguments. We all are. That dioxin breaks down in sunlight. Well, sure it does if you place it on a petri dish in a laboratory, but in Vietnam it got into the muck, the water, and in the jungle where there was no sunlight. And Matthew Meselson [Harvard University] found it in fish that had been caught several kilometers from where we had sprayed, so it was dispersed into the food chain, and into
our
bodies.”

DeBoer believes that eventually “justice will be done to the Vietnam veterans and their families who have suffered because of their exposure to dioxin,” but he admits that he is not altogether certain what he means when he uses the word “justice.”

“I’ve asked myself that question so many times, and I know that there will be no victory in a traditional sense. This thing will never end with a victory party or people waving some sort of banners or something like that. But I think there will be an accounting for
corporate irresponsibility, for chemical warfare, for the cover-ups. People are going to be exposed for what they were, and for what they are, because what do you say to a thirty-year-old widow? What do you say to a kid born with a missing arm or leg, a cleft palate, or duplicate sex organs? What are you going to say to that kid? That I won, that Ron DeBoer and all the other people, the Ryans and the McCarthys and the Mullers and everybody else involved won? What did we really do for you? We didn’t really do anything except get involved in something which we believed in, and something which, when you’ve had cancer and you think you might be dying and you look at all your brother veterans and see their problems, there really isn’t much choice but to get into it.

“But I can tell you this: without a doubt the number of people who have come forward with problems this far, as astronomical as it may seem, is only the tip of the iceberg. There are so many more out there. So many guys who were superficially wounded in Nam but who refused medical treatment, those guys who saw death and dying and considered themselves lucky and now they look back on it all and if they are sick they just say, ‘What’s a little pain, or numbness in the legs, or violent headaches? I’m alive, aren’t I? So I’ll just hang in there and live with it.’ But most of all they just want to leave the whole Vietnam experience in the closet where they feel it belongs. They just don’t want to be stereotyped any further. They want to believe that they survived the war, and I ask you, can you really blame them? We may be the first army in history that has had to keep fighting for our lives
after
the war is over.”

The wind is from the south, but bitter, sweeping across the deserted platform in great bone-chilling gusts. Opposite the Long Island Rail Road station is a tavern that once might have been a warehouse—squat, battered, uninviting.

The voice over the phone says, “Just stand by the escalator and face the direction you came from. Look for a blue ’66 Chevrolet.” I pace between the station and the escalator to the elevated platform. The man who arrives a few moments later wears a black beret, and introduces himself as a former “river rat.”

When he was still in high school, Bobby Sutton joined the Naval Reserve, was later assigned to a precommissioning detail in Newport, Rhode Island, and eventually spent a year on the USS
Wainwright
off the coast of Haiphong.

“We were a kind of ‘radar picket’—that is,
positive identification radar
air zone,” Sutton explains. “We controlled all the aircraft in the Gulf of Tonkin. They had to come up on our air frequency or they’d get blown out of the sky. Fortunately we didn’t have any combat, just long hours.” Sutton finished his tour of duty and, after only fifty-six days as a civilian, reenlisted. “I was then on the USS
Newell
, and I would see these little green boats being tested off one of the main piers at Pearl Harbor. And believe me I felt safe on the fantail of that ship. ‘Damn!’ I said, ‘I know where they’re goin’. I’m
glad I’m on this ship.’ And lo and behold, just three weeks later I had my orders for training at Mare Island and Coronado, California, at the naval inshore operations training center and was assigned to Rivron 9.”