Waiting for an Army to Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

own troops.”
    Clark explains that he has dropped out of most of the lawsuits in which he had been a plaintiff following his operation for bladder cancer. And since the Veterans Administration has never notified eligible claimants of favorable changes in benefit rules, it is unlikely that he will hear from the VA again, even if he is ruled eligible for disability payments.
    “I don’t need the money,” he says. “Money isn’t going to do me any good. What I really want to see is the money used to create a government agency, or should I say a governing agency, that would stop them from experimenting with radiation and herbicides. I don’t care about winning a million dollars. My health, which is the most important thing a person can have, is gone now. It’s all in mypast. I just don’t want the same thing to happen to my children that has happened to me. I volunteered for the military, and through some quirk of fate I got sent to Vietnam, but once I got there I didn’t have any choice about being subjected to herbicides and other dangerous chemicals. And I resent that. I want the system changed so that we’re not guinea pigs, and so we don’t let the government, or anyone else, do this again. Every time I walk into the Veterans Hospital in Syracuse, I see this quote from President Lincoln: WE SHALL TAKE CARE OF THE WIDOWS AND CHILDREN OF THOSE WHO SERVED . Well, they’re not. They have completely forgotten about us. I think they’re just waiting for all of us to die, and then someone can say, ‘Oh, dear, maybe we did make a mistake with this Agent Orange.’ At the rate things are going they won’t have to wait very long.”
    Clark walks me to my car and we shake hands. Three of his five children are playing on a nearby swing set and we talk for a moment about our children and how much they mean to us. On the drive home I think about what has brought Ray Clark, a former Marine, and me, a former antiwar activist, together. In the sixties we might have met in a bar and argued, perhaps even fought, over the war. But now we have spent a rainy afternoon discussing the aftermath of chemical warfare. Clark’s cancer, in remission for nearly five years, has reappeared, and every three months he must visit the VA hospital where a tube is inserted into his urethra to search for new signs of damage to his bladder.
    Not long before our interview, two dead owls were discovered a short distance from the Clarks’ home, and state officials said it was possible they had eaten fish or small animals contaminated with dioxin from Lake Ontario. “Lately,” Mrs. Clark said, unfolding a map of the United States shortly before I left, “we’ve been looking for a safe place to move. But the more we looked, the more we realized there really is no place to hide.”
    * According to Vietnam Veterans of America, “The General Accounting Office studied Marines in Northern I Corps from 1966 to 1969, and comparing troop placements with the records of where and when Agent Orange was sprayed, found that nearly 6,000 Marines were within one-third of a mile of the spraying of Agent Orange on the day of the spraying missions. Another 10,600 were within nine-tenths of a mile on the day of the spraying. The total equals 8 percent of all Marines in the area during the three years studied. The General Accounting Office study not only verifies that veterans were exposed, but strongly suggests that many more veterans were exposed than anyone had previously been able to prove” (
Vietnam Veterans of America Newsletter
, March/April 1980).

2
The Doomed Platoon
    Growing up in New York City, Ron DeBoer played in an abandoned tenement that was frightening and, he thought, very dark. But years later, hunkered down in the jungle with members of the 17th Air Cavalry, he discovered a shade of darkness so impenetrable that he felt suspended in a void, a black hole into which, unless he was extremely careful, he might vanish. Staring into the dark and