Waiting for an Army to Die (8 page)

According to the Department of Defense, US military personnel didn’t enter a sprayed zone until six weeks after it had been saturated with herbicides, but Naples and Sutton hotly dispute this, “Six weeks,” says Naples, “that’s ridiculous. We would be dropped off at an ambush site and spend hours actually lying in the stuff. It would actually be comin’ down on us. Whether they knew we were in there or not I’ll never know. I spent a lot of time on my stomach in Nam, and in and out of water that would have contained the stuff either from direct spray or run-off. You’d bathe in a bomb crater, so you’d be drinkin’ it, you’d be takin’ a bath in it, you’d wash your clothes in it. You’d get the rice and sweet potatoes in the field that had been sprayed with this stuff, but we didn’t know that. I also saw guys pile empty barrels around their bunkers, and if the bunker took a hit, they would get sprayed with whatever was left of the stuff inside those barrels.”

“You see,” Sutton explains, “we know now that they weren’t just defoliating the jungle to destroy the enemy’s ambush sites. They were also trying to destroy his
food
supplies so that he would be forced into the open. Hindsight may be terrible sight, but it’s better than no sight at all. And we also know from Dow Chemical’s own statistics that the year I was there was the year they sprayed the most Agent Orange on Vietnam. But I think, Joe, that we should also be concerned with Agent Blue, because that’s what they were usin’ a lot of in the delta to kill of the rice crop. It’s a carcinogen, and some of the Australian veterans who were in the Mekong area have been suffering the effects of it. Between Blue and Orange they really had us by the short hairs, didn’t they.”

Naples glances about the room as though this were all a disappointing film for which the manager would give him a refund. The
humor of a few moments earlier has left him, and he speaks even more slowly. “My wife and I went up there to Northport to check on the tumor registry. We were looking for a registry number, and they said they had no such thing at that hospital, no such registry. But Bobby had showed me this door, and it stuck in my mind. I could have sworn I seen that sign somewhere before:
TUMOR REGISTRY
. And my wife remembered it too. And sure enough, we’re walkin’ through the halls, and behind the ETA on the first floor there’s a door with a big sign,
TUMOR REGISTRY
. And yet they insist that there’s no such thing.”

Sutton shuffles a stack of papers, closes his photo albums, and says, “Right before you, you have literature on an international level. Now if they know in Amsterdam, Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia, Sweden, as well as the United States, that dioxin makes people sick, kills people, is carcinogenic and teratogenic, then why doesn’t the VA know it? Why doesn’t our government admit it? If I, with a high school education, can find this out, if I can take the data you see here and put it in its proper perspective, then the VA sure as hell can. They know. They know, but they don’t want to admit it because it’s gonna cost them a lot of money.
Money
, that’s what it’s really about. You know, when Joe was in the hospital the nurses wouldn’t even touch his chloracne. They thought it was contagious, so they left him alone. He had to change his own bandages, take care of himself—right there in the hospital. Did you ever hear of anyone in a civilian hospital changing his own dressings?”

Pain and exhaustion fill the room like a fog. We have been talking for nearly three hours, and it appears we can go no further; the interview is over.

Sutton, holding back the tears, breaks the silence. “Listen, I used to be a very patriotic person. Like Joe, I was on my second enlistment. I loved going to sea, loved my rate; I took great pride in it. I had planned on making the service a career. We still hold to a lot of values that our peers have thrown away a long time ago, but how long can we be patient? I’m nobody’s asshole. And I’ve just about fuckin’ had it. Sometimes it seems like you have to do somethin’
bloody and gory to get attention, and by God we’re capable of it. But we’ve seen enough of that. I’ve got a conscience. I don’t want to hurt my fellow Americans. I don’t really want to hurt anybody, but so help me God there may come a day when …

“You know, when I came back I was a union steamfitter. I was strong. I could do as good a day’s work as anyone. But my muscles are just giving out. I can’t do that kind of work no more. I can’t work at all now. The old Archie Bunkers say, ‘It’s a great system, fellas, the price is right, don’t complain, I got this and I got that, and it only took me thirty-five years …’ Well, we’re not gonna be here thirty-five years from now. Some of us ain’t gonna be around three to five years from now. We’re going to succumb to the bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals in our bodies.”

Naples mentions the difficulty he has had in acquiring records to substantiate his argument that he was exposed to herbicides while serving in Vietnam. To secure service-connected disability he needs records that appear to be nonexistent. “They have the records from the time I left Colorado, California, and beginning again when I returned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But the three years in Vietnam are totally gone. And I’m not the only Nam vet who has had this problem. We just can’t get those records.”

Sutton stands beside the dining room table, working to control his anger. “Supposedly, under the Freedom of Information Act we should be allowed to get those records, but they tell you the old familiar theme that the records were destroyed in a fire in St. Louis, Missouri. But even Dow’s attorney, Leonard Rivkin himself, said that was a very minimal fire and the records are not missing. I mean, where else are you going to find a guy in his early thirties dying from not just one, but two, three, four blasts of cancer? And some of these cancers are inoperable. Why did the VA destroy all the cancer registry numbers of all the Vietnam veterans? Why was that? Do they have something to hide? You’re goddamn right they do!”

The tabby cat appears to be deep in thought or perhaps meditating on the vicissitudes and (because he has lived more than a decade) the pleasures of a long life. I have missed the four o’clock
train to Brooklyn and wonder whether or not my car will still be there when I return. The sky is turning subway gray, with patches of blue and pink graffiti here and there.

“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Sutton says flatly. “Yeah, I listened to that bullshit when I was about seventeen years old. Oh, you remember. It sunk in. My father was in World War II, and my father-in-law was a prisoner of war, and Joe’s father fought in World War II also. I guess we wanted to be just like daddy. I think this is more than a disgrace. We didn’t disgrace this nation, and I think it’s disgusting that our policymakers are doing this to a segment of society that did nothing more than answer the call to arms when it was asked.”

Mrs. Naples, who until now has whispered quiet encouragement to her husband, is suddenly angry. “There is constant clicking on our phone, like a tape rewind. And an echo, and Joe here, he’s seen government cars taking pictures of our house with telescopic lenses.”

“I’ve had the hang-ups,” Joe confirms, “got cut off mid-sentence. I won’t say who or why. I know who, and I hope you get it in the book and they get a gander at it. It seems like ever since this thing has started to build and I got involved in it, all this other craziness has started to happen, the tapping of the phone, the pictures from government cars, and all this other nonsense.”

Sutton’s wife returns from work with two bags of cat food and a stack of Xeroxed copies of a recent article about the discovery of a government memorandum that says Agent Blue, used for rice-crop destruction in Vietnam, had been clinically shown to be a human carcinogen.
^*
The memo’s author, the date it was sent, and the person to whom it was written have been masked out, and Leonard Rivkin, attorney for Dow Chemical, is quoted as accusing the government of engaging in a “cover-up” on the Agent Orange issue. Sutton scrutinizes the article for a moment and then, ushering Joe Naples and me to the door, announces: “I got news for
those bastards. It’s just a matter of time. We’re gonna win this thing. We ain’t gonna wait forever. We’re gonna win it either on their terms or on ours, and you can just take that any way you want. We’re sick, we’re dying, and they keep on playing games with our fucking lives. That just can’t go on forever.”

Naples offers me a ride to the station, and on the way he talks about his two sons, one of whom was born with webbed toes and suffers from sleep disturbances, seizures, learning disabilities, hyperactivity, and brain damage. “He’s only seven years old,” Naples says, “and wears coke-bottle glasses, has an abnormal EEG, and wakes in the night screaming. His mom and me, we’ll go in the room and we can’t stop him; he just keeps it up. And when he does wake up if we ask him what was wrong he’ll say, ‘I dunno.’ He’ll be doing something, like writing with his pen, and he’ll put it down, go over to get a drink, and forget what he did with the pen. His concentration just blows. He can’t keep his mind on anything. We took him down for an EEG and the doctor said, ‘This boy’s got many, many problems.’ And yet there’s nothing in my family or my wife’s family about anyone having psychiatric problems or anything like this. Our oldest boy stopped breathin’ when my wife brought him home, and she brought him back with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He was in the hospital in oxygen for a month, then we brought him home and within an hour he stopped breathin’ again, and the second time he had to be in oxygen for three months. You know, we suffered from this stuff they sprayed in Nam, and it’s bad, and now our kids are gonna suffer from it, and God only knows, how far down the line this stuff gonna carry through?

“Not long ago my oldest boy was askin’ about the war. He wants to hear about it. But there’s only so much I can tell him. And one time he said, ‘If I get called, I’m not goin’!’ So I says, ‘If you get called, you’ll go, I’ll see to it.’ But just recently he asked again and we got talkin’ and I said, if they don’t settle this thing I’ll be the first to take you to Canada. I’ll lock and load it if I have to. But I’m not gonna let what happened to me happen to my son.”

Driving home from the hospital, Sandy and Jerry Strait are exceptionally happy. The sky is blue and cloudless, and the grass sparkles from an early morning rain. Adjusting the tiny bundle on her lap so that she can see her daughter’s sleeping face, Sandy taps her foot in time with the song on the radio. Just five more minutes and they will be home, so they have to make a decision. Before they can turn off the car’s engine, their four-year-old will be tugging at the door, demanding to hold her new “sissy.” She will want to carry her seven-pound, six-ounce sibling across the living room to her rocking chair and rock “our baby” to sleep. After a brief discussion the Straits agree that no harm can result from allowing Heather to play mother. After all, just seventy-two hours earlier an obstetrician had called their new daughter “a perfect, beautiful baby.”

Glancing at her husband, Sandy notices that he has regained the twenty pounds he lost shortly before she learned she was pregnant. How much better things are now than four years ago when Heather was born. Jerry had been back from Vietnam only a year; they were living in a cramped house and had little money and no hospital insurance. When their daughter was only nine weeks old, Sandy had been forced to return to work, but this time, she tells friends and relatives, things will be different. She will be there when her baby utters her first words or takes her first wobbly steps.
Having decided that this will be their last child, Sandy just wants to coddle, pamper, even spoil her baby for as long as she can. Pulling into the drive the Straits laugh. Clad in a pink sunsuit Heather races across the yard, her arms held high and her hands spread-eagled.

July and August pass quickly, giving way to a luxurious Indian summer that ends, as Midwestern falls often do, in a sudden, vicious blizzard. Heather can hardly wait for Christmas, demanding to know if her little sister will be talking or walking by then, and if she will want to see Santa Claus or watch the elves making toys in the window of a downtown department store. On Christmas day Sandy’s mother arrives with presents and, while her daughter prepares dinner, she goes into the living room to tend to her new grandchild. But as she watches her granddaughter exercise, Sandy’s mother notices something peculiar. Reaching into the crib she lifts first Lori’s right foot, then her left. The left heel of her pajamas is frayed, nearly worn through, while the right is perfectly intact. “Have you noticed,” she asks her daughter later that evening, “that Lori favors her left leg and hardly moves her right?”

Irritated by her mother’s remarks, Sandy responds that the child is just naturally quiet and cannot be expected to develop at the same speed as her older sister. Yes, she admits, Lori is not yet able to sit up, rolling sideways when propped on the couch and crying until someone picks her up again. But why rush things the way they had with Heather?

Shortly after Christmas Sandy tells the doctor about her mother’s observation, but he shows little concern. Lori, he explains, is simply experiencing a “delay in her development.” Demonstrating an eight-week series of exercises the Straits can use to strengthen their daughter’s limbs, the physician says they should see some improvement shortly thereafter. For the next month Sandy and Jerry exercise their daughter’s limbs several times each day, but without results. By seven months Lori still can not roll over or sit up, and they are worried. Sandy calls the doctor’s office and demands an appointment for the next day. Something is
wrong with her baby, she says, and she wants to know exactly what it is.

Wrapping Lori in several layers of blankets, Sandy drives through a snowstorm and watches with a mixture of optimism and dread as the pediatrician taps Lori’s limbs with a small rubber hammer. Circling the table on which Lori lies smiling and gurgling, the doctor shakes his head sadly, pats his tiny patient on the head once or twice, and tells Sandy he has some bad news. Her daughter, he says, is suffering from cerebral palsy. It will not shorten her life; however, it will pose special …