Waiting for an Army to Die Read Online Free PDF

prove that, then they don’t really have to help us. And they claim we’re just looking for pity or a fast buck.”
    “But even if the VA hospitals were really interested in helpingveterans of what they insist on calling the ‘Vietnam era’—they refuse to call it a war—they couldn’t do it because they don’t have the facilities or the staff,” Clark says, tossing the rejection letters into a folder. “They couldn’t do it because last year the Syracuse VA Hospital lost half of its staff and millions of dollars in funding, and it’s just one part of a rapidly deteriorating system. They don’t have any facilities for testing you for exposure to toxic chemicals, and even if Congress orders them to treat us with respect, to give so-called Agent Orange examinations, the VA hospitals will continue to attract incompetent staff, and it would take a monumental effort for them to get veterans to trust the VA again. But assuming they make that effort and manage to get the veterans whom they’ve alienated to return for tests, they would have to do 2.9 million fat biopsies at a cost of billions of dollars. Given our rank on the ‘fiscal priority list’ it is unlikely that the tests will ever be run.”
    Like nearly all of the men and women who served in Vietnam, Ray Clark was in top physical condition when he entered the service; and like every veteran with whom I’ve spoken or heard testify at state-sponsored hearings into dioxin exposure, he can recall little if any illness before he went to Vietnam. Before the war, veterans say, they never suffered from skin rashes, weakness of limbs, nervous disorders, liver disease, heart murmurs, cancer, loss of libido. Ten years after their return from Asia, they are aging with frightening rapidity, afraid for themselves, their children, and their childrens’ children. And in their attempts to find answers, to explain the tragedy that has befallen them and their children, they research through their family trees to discern if there might be a pattern of cancer or birth defects in their lineage. Quite often they discover, as Ray Clark and his wife discovered, that no pattern exists.
    “When I got out of high school I was in perfect health, and there is no history of cancer in my family. And what amazes me is that out of the millions of men who went to Vietnam, a sizable percentage now have health problems. Most of these men are in the thirty-five-year-old age bracket, the prime of life, and yet theirproblems are severe, and quite often rare from a medical point of view. Ed Juteau, vice president of Agent Orange Victims International, died of lymphatic cancer, and after his death the VA cut off payments to his wife and son because the VA claims he died of ‘kidney failure.’ In the past few years I’ve met veterans with cancer of the colon, testicular cancer, liver dysfunctions, heart ailments, veterans whose children were born with as many as sixteen birth defects. And yet for so long no one was willing to do studies to determine just what is causing all these problems. They’ve studied rats, mice, rabbits, chickens, and monkeys, and found that dioxin gives them cancer, causes their death, deforms and kills their offspring. But all this doesn’t apply to us. Well, no one has ever shown that dioxin
didn’t
poison us. And we know that shortly after they began spraying Agent Orange in Vietnam the chemical companies sent a letter to the government advising them that there could be health problems from the herbicide. But of course the government doesn’t want to admit that the stuff they were spraying on people was 2,000 percent—almost twenty times—more contaminated by dioxin than the domestic 2,4,5-T that was banned in 1979 by the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the stuff sprayed on Nam was 47,000 percent more contaminated. And they sprayed it over and over on the same areas. What the government doesn’t want to admit is that it is responsible for killing its