Waiting for an Army to Die (3 page)

Sometimes the C-123s spray around the perimeters of base camps, where shirtless men carrying tanks of herbicides on their backs now and then playfully spray one another, or Huey helicopters mounted with spray booms work and rework approaches to the base. Some of the troops complain of headaches that last for hours, even days, and skin rashes that cover their arms, necks, and faces. But no one collapses or dies following his exposure to Agent Orange, and the defoliated Maginot Line between base camp and jungle might mean the difference between life and death. The defoliation campaign, though a topic of casual conversation among the troops, is accepted as just one part of the overall effort to defeat the enemy.

“I really didn’t know what they were spraying,” explained John Green, who served as a medic in Vietnam. “Some people thought it was for mosquitoes, but I never really gave it much thought. I do remember walking through defoliated zones. Everything was dead. The trees had literally grown to death, because that’s how Agent Orange works—it accelerates growth in a plant’s cells until finally the plant or tree dies. Did we drink the water? Of course we did. Where we were there was nothing else to drink. If we found a bomb crater full of water we just scooped it out and drank it, no matter how brown or scummy it looked. Some of our food was undoubtedly sprayed with Agent Orange. But how were we to know? The army told us the stuff was harmless. And we were told it was supposed to be saving our lives. The ‘strategists’ had this idea that the enemy moved in neat little patterns, like a highway grid or something. You eliminate the pattern and you shut the man off, he can’t move anymore. But that, unfortunately, was nonsense. If
they shut off one of his trails, he just found another. It was his country, and he really knew how to compensate.”

Because of the frequency with which men and equipment were moved from one location to another, some veterans are not certain where they were at any given time. But they do remember being doused with herbicides or walking through defoliated moonscapes. They remember that even before they left Vietnam, their bodies were covered with rashes; they felt dizzy, nauseous, and suffered from migraine headaches, stomach cramps, and black depressions. The rashes were considered just another variety of “jungle rot” by medical personnel, while other symptoms of dioxin exposure were dismissed as the result of stress brought on by the war. Some soldiers realized that their problems had something to do with the spraying, but there was little they could do to stop it or to protect themselves from further poisoning. They had not been issued protective gear, had no idea when or where a spray mission might occur, and lived in the same clothing for days, even weeks, while in the field. If they survived twelve months they would be home free. They had little reason to believe otherwise.

One of the men who believed he had escaped serious injury in Vietnam now lives near Syracuse, New York, just fifty miles from where the first large-scale tests of herbicides for military use took place. On the walls of the small rented house where Ray Clark lives with his wife and five children, there are no medals framed in glass, no photographs of smiling young men in battle dress, no captured enemy weapons or flags. Unlike veterans of World War II, who are fond of displaying the booty of a victorious army, Vietnam veterans seldom reserve a room—or even one wall—of their home for a shrine to the glories of war. And, though he once walked point as a minesweeper in Vietnam, one of the most dangerous assignments of the war, Ray Clark, with his pipe and sorrowful blue eyes, reminds one more of a history professor than of Hollywood’s gung-ho Marine. While recuperating from battle fatigue Clark learned that his battalion had been nearly wiped out when their newly arrived M16s misfired during a battle. Six years later, at the
age of twenty-eight, he would discover that he was suffering from bladder cancer.

Before our interview, I had phoned to ask directions to the Clarks’ home and, as I passed dilapidated trailers and patchwork houses with smoke curling from crooked little chimneys, I thought about the many veterans I knew who had grown up in impoverished areas like this. It was here that, during the sixties and early seventies, military recruiters scoured the high schools looking for adolescents willing to be turned into Marines, Green Berets, Rangers, and grunts. And it was here that the military, offering young men the chance to become authentic heroes, easily filled their monthly quotas, sending hundreds of thousands to fight in a country about which the majority of Americans knew virtually nothing. Passing through the village near the Clarks’ house, I half expected to see a monument to those who fought, and died, in Vietnam.

When Clark returned home there were no parades, no crowds, no politicians handing out keys to “grateful cities.” If they survived their tour of duty, Vietnam veterans boarded “freedom birds” at Tan Son Nhut Airport and were whisked through the twilight zone to San Francisco, where they were often met by antiwar demonstrators. Then they flew home to cities that were bitterly divided over the war, or took a bus that deposited them at 3:00 AM on the deserted streets of their hometown. Others hitchhiked home and, when a car stopped to offer them a lift, wondered whether they should keep quiet, or perhaps even lie, about where they had spent the past twelve months. While still in Vietnam they had heard that many Americans were angry about the war—angry, strangely enough, at them. They would discover that their arrival in California was a portent of things to come. “I got sick of the stereotypes,” Clark explains. “The movies, books, radio, newspapers had us typed as baby killers, psychos, drug addicts. I just didn’t want to walk down the street and have someone say, ‘Hey, there goes Ray Clark. He takes drugs, kill babies, rapes women. He’s really weird, man.” ’

Ray married, found a job, and started school. He didn’t want to
talk about the war, and most of all he just wanted to be left alone to raise his children and live a “normal” life. “I joined the American Legion once,” Clark says. “And all they wanted to do was parade around saying, ‘We fought a good war. We fought a good old war, didn’t we.’ Well, we didn’t fight a good war. We lost. We lost fifty-four thousand men for absolutely nothing.” Then he found that before he would celebrate his thirtieth birthday, he might die of a form of cancer that rarely kills anyone under fifty. The fighting hadn’t killed him, but something with which he had come into contact in the jungles of Vietnam just might.

In his aversion to war stories and his desire to put the war behind him, Ray Clark is typical of most Vietnam veterans. But unlike many veterans, he does not have to work at forgetting his combat experiences. Because, except for arriving in and returning from Vietnam, Clark has little conscious recollection of his experiences there. With his wife’s help, and by talking to other veterans, he has managed to piece together fragments of the period he spent in Vietnam, but there are still gaps, the picture remains incomplete. “He would talk in his sleep,” Mrs. Clark explains, “or not really talk, but mutter, and he wouldn’t sleep. He would go into a kind of agitated state or trance, talking all night and, in the morning, remembering little, if anything, he said.” Like all of the veterans with whom I’ve talked, Clark has never received a letter from the Department of Defense or Veterans Administration advising him that he might have spent time in a region sprayed with Agent Orange. But by talking with Vietnam veterans who served in the same region as he did, and who remember being sprayed with Agent Orange, walking through defoliated areas, and drinking water contaminated with herbicides, Ray has verified his suspicion that he was exposed to deadly chemicals. Only after becoming involved with Agent Orange Victims International, however, did Clark learn about the many symptoms of dioxin exposure, one of which is
loss of memory
.

Although he can remember little about his combat experiences, Ray Clark’s recollection of his nearly ten-year battle with the Veterans Administration is vivid. As the youngest patient to be treated
for bladder cancer at a VA hospital, he has fought bureaucratic stonewalling, indifference, and incompetence. Even when VA doctors finally admitted that Clark had bladder cancer and decided to operate, his family was not told the cancer could be controlled. “They told me,” Clark says, “to get my insurance in order. That’s about all.” It was only after his mother-in-law obtained a booklet from the American Cancer Society that Ray’s family discovered his cancer was not terminal.

Leafing through a stack of letters from the Veterans Administration, congressmen, and the Department of Defense, Clark sips coffee and answers my questions slowly, carefully, and at times with the irritation of having gone over the same painful ground too often. Mrs. Clark joins us at the kitchen table, but her involvement with politics has made her skeptical, even slightly bitter. Recalling a press conference at which Senator Moynihan was to appear with her husband and other Vietnam veterans, she explains that the senator arrived more than an hour late and, placing his hands on Clark’s chest, made an inane comment about Agent Orange. Except for the senator’s entourage, no one laughed. “He was lucky,” Mrs. Clark says, “that one of the veterans standing nearby didn’t hit him.”

In the beginning she believed that her idealism, indeed her fervor, would inspire local and national leaders to take action on behalf of Vietnam veterans and their families. But she has discovered that promises are not always kept, headlines do not necessarily mean progress, and unless it can be quantified by a government agency or verified by a panel of experts, human suffering does not inspire bureaucracies to action. Vietnam veterans, she now believes, might be one more commodity in a throwaway society. “They were used over there, and now they’re being used here,” Mrs. Clark says. Her husband nods, but declines to elaborate.

“I served in Vietnam from 1966 through 1967,” Clarks explains, glancing at his wife for what I first mistook to be confirmation, but later realized was simply an open display of trust and love for the woman who, like so many wives of Vietnam veterans, had seen him through the long, difficult, post-Vietnam adjustment period. “And
in 1972 I developed cancer of the bladder. I also have a heart problem, which is a common problem among Nam veterans. When I first went into the VA hospital for a checkup, the doctors kept asking me if I had ever worked in a chemical plant, or if I had been exposed to radiation. And I had to say no to these questions because I worked in an appliance store before I went in the service, and as far as I know I was never exposed to any chemicals. And of course doctors were surprised at my age, because this type of cancer usually affects men between sixty and eighty years of age. We also discovered, going back through my records, that VA doctors had kept my heart murmur a secret from my family and myself. Suddenly I found myself in the hospital, with monitors all over me, and they announce: ‘Ray, you’ve got a heart problem.’ I was in intensive care for a week. Before that they had told me nothing about it.”

Describing his frustration with the Veterans Administration, Clark reveals a familiar pattern that has both angered and embittered Vietnam veterans. “Their attitude,” one veteran told me, “is ‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.’ In other words, what
they
don’t know can’t hurt
us!
” Even before a veteran enters the hospital he may be aware of what his symptoms mean, only to be informed by staff doctors that “It’s all in your head.” So many veterans have heard this from the VA that it would take a massive outreach and publicity campaign to change the negative attitudes many veterans have toward the bureaucracy in Washington and the majority of regional VA hospitals.

“In the beginning, when I first started urinating blood,” Clark continues, “they insisted I was putting ketchup and water in the specimen jars. They said I was doing something to myself so I could receive disability, and that the problem was all in my mind. They also scheduled me for an appointment with the staff psychiatrist because they said my illness was self-inflicted. I would get really upset with them and say, ‘Look, when I start urinating blood I’ll just fill a test tube and bring it in so you can see for yourself I’m not lying.’ So I brought it in and the doctor looked at it and said, ‘Oh sure, Ray, that’s ketchup and water.’ Or, ’C’mon, Ray, that’s just ketchup and urine and you know it.

“They tested me for everything
but
bladder cancer. They gave me a brain scan, shot dye into my kidneys, announced that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown, and even tested me for epilepsy. They did every test you could possibly do, except the one that would determine if I had bladder cancer. After a month and a half of testing they finally said, ‘Okay, we’re going to look inside your bladder.’ So they looked inside, and of course they saw the cancer. They told me to go home and get my affairs in order and to come in for the operation, which I did. I’ve been going in every three months for treatment since then.”

At the Veterans Administration hospital in Syracuse, New York, veterans who went in for what had been advertised as an “Agent Orange examination” were given a routine physical by a physician’s assistant.

“The funny thing is that they were always asking me if I had been in Vietnam,” Clark says, pouring another cup of coffee and shaking his head as though he cannot quite believe what he is saying. “And they kept wanting to know if I had been exposed to chemicals. But they never mentioned Agent Orange or dioxin. I never even heard of Agent Orange until I discovered Agent Orange Victims International. After I read an article about a veteran who was dying of a rare form of cancer, I wrote to my congressman asking if he knew anything about this issue. A few days later my wife answered the phone, and it was the congressman, or one of his aides, wanting to know just how much we knew about this ’Agent Orange. They actually thought we knew an espionage agent by that name, and they wanted to find out just who this fellow was, and what we knew about him. Rather than an herbicide that is killing Vietnam veterans, they thought we were talking about a spy. The Veterans Administration was little help, because either they knew nothing about Agent Orange, or what they did know they were not about to tell Vietnam veterans.