Veterans and their families are not asking for government handouts, and—contrary to the media coverage of this case, which is the largest product liability lawsuit in American history—they are not hoping to win large sums of money. What they really want is to show the world what happens to human beings who are exposed to deadly chemicals like dioxin. Veterans want people to know that as soldiers in Vietnam they drank water and ate food contaminated with Agent Orange/dioxin. They crawled through, bathed in, and even slept in water that had been sprayed with Agent Orange. They were doused with it when aircraft returning to base after defoliation missions jettisoned their loads.
Doctors at Veterans Administration hospitals call these veterans crazy and accuse them of being alcoholics, drug addicts, and malingerers, filing false claims in order to secure disability payments. The US government denies that veterans who fought in the rice paddies, mangrove forests, and jungles of Vietnam were significantly exposed to toxic chemicals. It remains a great mystery how officials at the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense are so certain that veterans were not exposed to Agent Orange—or that even if they were, that their exposure was insignificant and that their illnesses are unrelated to herbicides. Veterans, in turn, accuse the government of stonewalling and lying. They are angry, sad, confused, and bitter. Why, they ask, has the nation they served abandoned them? Many will ask this on their deathbeds.
In order to tell their story and to warn people about the dangers of toxic chemicals, Vietnam veterans are willing to appear in courtrooms, on television, or at local and national forums as literal public exhibits. While their lawsuit is on behalf of men, women, and children who are suffering from the effects of Agent Orange, the plaintiffs want their government, and governments throughout the world, to take action to protect future generations from the scourge of toxic chemicals.
But with the settlement, Vietnam veterans and their families never get their day in court.
JUNE 1985
The Brooklyn federal courtroom is packed with reporters, Vietnam veterans and their supporters, lawyers representing the chemical companies, and, oddly enough, beautifully dressed women who seem to be models. Jack Weinstein, the presiding judge, reminds the courtroom that these “fairness hearings” are to ascertain the plaintiffs’ reactions to the out-of-court settlement.
Veterans take the stand, some wearing suits, others in combat fatigues or bright orange “Sprayed and Betrayed” tee shirts. They talk about their wives, their deformed children, their friends who are sick and dying, and their fear that Agent Orange will continue to take a heavy toll on their fellow soldiers and their families. Speaker after speaker denounces the settlement as a joke, a fraud, an insult, and yet another example of the government’s contempt for its veterans. Some speakers cry. Others break down, unable to complete their testimony.
Squeezed between beautiful women, men with dark suits and fat briefcases actually laugh as veterans testify.
I am sitting with a group of 9th Marines, “the walking dead,” who’ve formed an organization they call the Vietnam Combat Veterans Coalition. The logo on their stationery reads VCVC. Once, I helped them fill a bright orange coffin with copies of Waiting for an Army to Die (the coalition calls it their Bible) and other materials on Agent Orange. We wheeled the coffin down the main street in Trenton, New Jersey, and lugged it into the State House. An elderly security guard with a six-shooter hanging on his hip confronted the group, and after a brief discussion he agreed to watch the coffin while we addressed the legislature. We gave extemporaneous speeches to the astonished but friendly representatives and, returning to our coffin, opened the lid and handed out information about Agent Orange to government workers, the press, and to the security guard who allowed us to pass inside.
As laughter continues to fill the courtroom, a VCVC veteran sitting next to me leans over and taps a chuckling man on the shoulder.
“Yes, what is it?” the man demands.
“I want to ask you a question,” whispers the marine.
“Question?”
“That’s right, a question.”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever killed anybody?”
“What are you talking about? What kind of question is that anyway?”
“I said, have you killed anybody?” asks the veteran, leaning until the men’s noses are almost touching.
“No, of course not.”
“Well, I have,” says the marine. “Now shut the fuck up.”
Victor Yannacone, the flamboyant, hot tempered, brilliant lawyer who had filed the Agent Orange class action lawsuit on January 8, 1978, and the only lawyer veterans have ever really trusted, walks to the microphone and begins speaking, but Judge Weinstein cuts him off mid-sentence. Next, it’s my turn to speak. But when I start to question the out-of-court settlement, he interrupts me to say that I should go home and run for Congress. That way, he says, I might actually make a real difference.
I wanted to tell him about the morning, May 7, when veterans first heard about the settlement. I answered a call from the wife of a Vietnam veteran living in the midwest. She was pleading with me to talk to her husband. “He’s locked and loaded,” she said. “And he’s on his way to New York City.”
“To New York?” I asked. “What is he coming here for?”
“To kill the judge,” she said.
She was begging me to talk to a man who’d fought in some of the war’s fiercest battles, who said he’d go back to Southeast Asia and fight again if he were asked, a veteran who passionately loved the soldiers with whom he’d served.
I knew this ex-soldier well. His arms and legs were covered with chloracne and his daughter had been born with a serious birth defect.
“Listen, Tommy,” I said. “You’ve suffered enough. You need to think of your kids, your wife, and your fellow veterans. No one wants to see you spend the rest of your life in prison.”
A long silence, and I thought he might have hung up or left the house. Then his wife, sobbing with relief, picked up the phone. Her husband, she said, had agreed to put his M-16 back in the closet.
Yale law professor Peter Schuck will one day hail Weinstein as a “genius” for his adroit maneuvering on the Agent Orange class action lawsuit, but in a room packed with ex-soldiers, the presiding judge demonstrates a remarkable naiveté about how the US military and Veterans Administration actually function. When one former paratrooper complains that the VA has treated him with contempt, refusing to acknowledge his illness or treat his symptoms at a local clinic, the judge appears bewildered and shocked.
“But,” he replies, shaking his head in disbelief, “the government assures me that they are spending $70 million a year to treat people with Agent Orange problems.”
The courtroom bursts into laughter. “With all due respect,” says the veteran, “I think you’ve been lied to.”1
“Your honor,” says the wife of a Vietnam veteran, “I have helped bury lifelong friends who were ripped from their families at twenty-eight years old by an old age cancer. I have watched people I care about in excruciating pain caused by a combination of disorders not to be believed. I have watched good, strong men stripped of their youth, health, jobs, pensions, wives, children, and finally, their identities. I have watched good friends turn their anger on the people who care about them the most. I have held deformed and deathly ill children… I found out last week that the wives and children were taken out of this settlement…. Is this another strange and mysterious twist in this case?”2
Another veteran’s wife strides to the front of the courtroom and, shaking with rage, tells Weinstein that she thinks the fairness hearings are nothing but a circus, a sleight of hand designed to trick veterans and their supporters into believing that the judge might reconsider the settlement, perhaps even reject it altogether. The settlement, she says, will be approved; the chemical companies will continue to make lots of money; lawyers will collect large fees and strut their hour of fame. Meanwhile, Vietnam veterans will continue to bury their brothers in arms. The fairness hearings, says this enraged woman, are a big fraud, an attempt to appease Vietnam veterans and their families, a very bad joke played on victims of Agent Orange.