Fred Wilcox - Waiting for an Army to Die

In Ashford, Washington, a timber company chemist once told a group of women concerned about miscarriages and stillbirths, which they believed might be related to 2,4,5-T, that “babies are replaceable,” and they should “plan their pregnancies around the spray schedule.” Bonnie Hill was reluctant to talk about the emotional aspects of losing a baby because, she explained, “the media would have loved to see me crying and screaming, but I don’t think that is the way we’re really going to win this thing.” Although they may be unwilling to cater to the media’s more prurient whims, women have begun to express their anger over seeing their children suffer from exposure to herbicides, or over experiencing a miscarriage that might have been avoided.

Testifying at the New York State Temporary Commission on Dioxin Exposure hearings in Farmingdale, Long Island, one woman said, “I just took it for granted, as the doctors did, when my daughters were born, that these things just happened. Then I put together the neighbor on this side of me and a neighbor on that side of me having miscarriages—they had normal children when they lived in other towns, no problems. I have one friend who had had four miscarriages since she moved into my area. All four of them were exactly the same as those experienced by veterans’ wives, which is, in the third month, up until the third month, the pregnancy is normal. In the third month through the fifth month, the baby starts to disintegrate and dies. There is nothing in the delivery except blood clots. And she had four of these, and she had four normal children when she lived in a different town, not near the railroad tracks.”

And another woman testified: “Our property abuts that of the Long Island Rail Road. My backyard, where my children played and we grew vegetables—we also ate outside—is within twenty feet of the tracks. I am the mother of three living children. During the sixties and seventies, the Long Island Rail Road has been spraying along the right-of-way without ever notifying any residents when they were going to spray or what they were using.

“There have been many miscarriages and problems within my area. My two older children were conceived and born elsewhere. I have had two miscarriages since I moved to this address, one of which was considered rare. My daughter was born with multiple birth defects which are similar in nature to the birth defects suffered by Agent Orange victims in Vietnam. Her defects are club feet, dislocation of the left hip, spina bifida, no muscles or ligaments from the knees down, nerve damage in both legs. She has had eleven operations in six years, and must wear braces on both legs…

“We know about our daughter, but we don’t know about my two older boys, myself or my husband. Will these boys be able to produce children? And if so, what defects will they have? Do we have cancer now, or will we contact it in the future?

“Both the veterans from Vietnam and the people who live along the right-of-way have been hurt tremendously. We can’t correct what has been done, but we must stop it from happening in the future. Our lives depend upon it.”

A visitor to Ronald Anderson’s home might find some of his habits rather odd. Passing a small oval mirror in the living room he seems to avert his face. In the dining room he stands with his back to a rectangular mirror, set, it appears, to reflect a child’s drawing on the opposite wall. But it soon becomes clear that he is no more peculiar than anyone else would be in his situation. Anderson [26] Ronald Anderson is a composite portrait. refuses to look in the mirror because he doesn’t wish to see that his thick curly black hair (he had been nicknamed “the bear”) has fallen out, reappearing in patches that protrude from his skull like tiny white brooms. Nor does he wish to see that his once-handsome face is covered with a rash, or that, during periods of sudden weight loss, his cheeks are sunken and his eyes look like those of a dying cat. At thirty-six Anderson simply doesn’t want to see the reflection of an old man.

Avoiding mirrors, of course, does nothing to make his chest pains go away, restore his coordination, stop the recurrent bouts of dizziness, or explain the chronic nausea from which he suffers. At times Anderson’s muscles are so weak that he is unable to open a jar of peanut butter for his children; and there are days when he sits for hours, sometimes until long after the sun has set, waiting for a suicidal depression to pass, struggling to remember that things were not always like this, that once he could walk miles in a full field-pack without tiring, do hours of calisthenics without complaining. He passed through basic training, he wrote friends back home, “with a smile.” Once he could easily manipulate the straps of his parachute as he glided toward the ground during training exercises with the 101 Airborne.

Sometimes when he thinks about these things he removes a scrapbook and leafs through the photographic proof that he was not always old before his time; and he sees, squeezed between a snapshot of a Vietnamese bar girl and a fading picture of a buddy who did not survive the war, a photograph that he clearly recalls taking. It is a picture of a C-123 spraying not more than half a mile from where he was standing. While staring at the photograph Anderson slowly becomes aware that he is afraid. But it is not, he realizes, simply because it reminds him of the twelve months he spent in the bush. That was a different kind of fear, one that for the most part he has been able to leave behind. The nightmares come less frequently now, and his limbs tremble not because he has flashed to a particularly horrible ambush or firefight. He is afraid because, after three years of tests, consultations, prescriptions, X-rays and hospitalization, doctors are still unable to tell him why he is a physical wreck or what, if anything, can be done to stop the progress of this mysterious disease.

There are times, Anderson admits, when he almost wishes he had cancer. Because then it might be possible to remove the malignant portion of his body and arrest the spread of disease. Or perhaps he would be given chemotherapy and eventually his health would return. Much of the time he feels, Anderson tells visitors, like a house infested with termites. The porch is collapsing, the foundation crumbling, the walls so deteriorated a child could push them over, but the parasites remain hidden and no one can explain why the house is tumbling down. He is afraid, he has discovered, not of dying, but of the unknown.

Looking at a photograph of himself at the age of eighteen, Anderson feels a sense of pride. His boots glisten in the sun and his girlfriend and mother stand on each side of him, staring proudly at the set of jump wings that have just been pinned to his uniform. Vietnam had not been a difficult decision for him. His grandfather had fought in the Argonne Forest, his father had landed on Normandy, an uncle had won a bronze star in Korea, and by 1969, when he arrived at Tan Son Nhut, he had already lost one member of his high school football team to the Tet Offensive.

As he stares at the thirteen-year-old photograph, the former paratrooper feels torn by conflicting emotions. He has not lost his love for America, but the tears in his eyes are those of rage rather than pride. “Ask not what your country can do for you…” The words reverberate through the room. He remembers a Pakistani doctor (it seemed to him at the time that most of the physicians at the VA were from foreign countries) explaining in halting English that he could not understand Anderson’s questions about Agent Orange, then signing papers ordering that he be held for observation in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. He recalls the first check he received from the VA. It amounted to forty-eight dollars and would be sent each month, said the VA, not because they believed he was suffering from exposure to Agent Orange, but to help him cope with his “war-related” neurosis. Anderson smiles. He had taken the check into his backyard and, tearing the “insult” into tiny pieces, scattered it, as he once had his father’s ashes, to the winds.