During the twelve months he spent in Vietnam, Gibson had gone on numerous ambushes and had fought in a fierce two-day battle with North Vietnamese regulars in which the Australians were outnumbered and nearly destroyed. His unit’s motor positions wiped out, ammunition running low, and the NVA preparing for a final assault, Gibson had given up all hope of surviving the battle when American helicopter gunships arrived. Before the “Puffs”[7] appeared, says Gibson, he had concluded that “we were all dead men.” In its initial rejection of his request for disability, the commission informed Gibson that he had spent very little time in combat; therefore, wrote the commission’s psychiatrist, “Vietnam could not really have been as traumatic as he now tells.” But later the commission reversed itself, acknowledging that Gibson was indeed a combat veteran while continuing to argue that his experiences in Vietnam were not responsible for his “anxiety condition.”
In retrospect Gibson says that he and the nineteen-year-olds with whom he served may have placed too much trust in people who either did not know or did not care what the effects of toxic chemicals might be on Australian soldiers. “As infantry soldiers we thought we knew what the hell we were doing, but really we were so naïve. We never thought that our government or our own military commanders would allow the use of anything that might have adverse effects on us as troops. And we used to walk through plantations of rotten banana trees that were just burstin’ at the bottom, you know, rottin’, stinkin’, with these tiny dwarf bananas on them. So we’d just walk through and pick them. They were sweet as hell, and we used to eat them all the time. No one ever told us not to. And the water, we used to get it out of streams and drink it. And one time I can really recall quite well. We went through this thick foliage, and it had all this sticky shiny stuff on it, and it stunk, I mean it really stunk. And we were going through this stuff and there was no two ways about it, it had been defoliated. And yet no one ever gave it one second thought that we were there, touching the stuff, getting it on our arms and face. No one thought.”
Gibson’s observations are substantiated by Australian authors John Dux and P. J. Young, who through careful examination of US General Accounting Office reports, including “grid coordinates and details of all missions flown by C-123s from 1965 to 1968,” found that Phuoc Tuy Province had been heavily sprayed with Agent Orange. Matching the GAO reports with Australian Defense Department maps, the authors concluded: “One can prove conclusively that Australian troops operated in defoliated areas, sometimes within a day of missions.”2 Dux and Young also point out that although the US Ranch Hand operations may have been responsible for the destruction of 12 to 21 percent of the total land in South Vietnam (an area approximately the size of Massachusetts), C-123s spraying was only one source of the toxic herbicides to which Australian and American veterans were exposed. Helicopter pilots, for example, needed only the approval of their unit commander before leaving on a defoliation mission, and it is quite possible that some areas of the province—particularly around base camps—were unofficially sprayed on numerous occasions. Spraying from trucks, riverboats, and by backpack also required only the approval of the unit commander.
Another possible source of contamination was from tanks that were used to spray both pesticides and herbicides directly upon or near base camps. Australian pilots have stated that following herbicide missions, empty spray tanks were refilled with pesticides that were then sprayed directly upon the base camp. Commenting on the possibility that residues from herbicides might have been dispersed in this way, one pilot said: “An interesting thing is that after the spraying missions, which occurred about every month with these aircraft, the rubber trees with which the Task Force area was covered shed their leaves rather alarmingly. After spraying for anti-malarial purposes there would be a sudden increase in skin infections for no particular attributable cause, apart from the fact that it followed the spraying.”3
When one considers the amount of semi-authorized, unauthorized, and clandestine spraying in Vietnam, as well as wind drift and the fact that an estimated 14 percent of the Agent Orange sent to Vietnam is unaccounted for, it is apparent that the full extent of the defoliation campaign may never be known. What is clear is that Vietnam veterans whose units are not listed by the Department of Defense or General Accounting Office as having been in spray zones could very well have been exposed to toxic chemicals either in and around their base camps or on ambushes and search-and-destroy missions in the surrounding jungle.
When his son Cameron was born with a “noncorrectable” birth defect, Jim Wares wanted to know why. But doctors were unable to give him a satisfactory explanation, and he decided not to dwell on the boy’s misfortune. After all, Wares told himself, he had survived Vietnam, was married to a fine woman, had a good job, and the boy, except for missing fingers, was beautifully formed, an optimistic and intelligent child whom Wares says is fond of making up stories and playing practical jokes with his hand. One evening, for example, Wares and his wife left their son with a babysitter who, summoned to the bathroom by the boy’s cries, discovered him standing near the toilet bowl. Feigning distress and holding out his hand with the missing fingers, the boy announced that he had accidentally “flushed the fingers away.” The babysitter, says Wares, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Wares had heard stories about Agent Orange and wondered if it might have something to do to with Cameron’s deformity, but the government’s official position was that Orange had not been used in Nui Dat. Besides, argued government officials, scientists had found “no link” between exposure to herbicides and human health problems. But the Australian news media were becoming increasingly interested in the veterans’ problems, and after reading an interview with a veteran whose eyesight was failing and who was suffering from constant trembling, diarrhea, fatigue, and vomiting, Wares decided to begin his own research into the matter. Calling people whose names had appeared in news articles, Wares was amazed to discover that each person he contacted knew other veterans who were sick, whose wives had suffered miscarriages, or whose children were deformed. Wares soon realized that something was seriously, perhaps disastrously, wrong with his fellow Vietnam veterans.
Wares began listing on filing cards the symptoms of veterans with whom he had spoken or corresponded by mail. Sorting through a stack of fifty cards one afternoon, he discovered that nearly one in four of the men he had contacted had fathered a deformed child. Four of the cards actually listed children born with deformed hands, and three out of the four were born with four fingers and half the thumb missing from one hand. On other cards Wares had listed cases of deformed legs, clubfeet, deafness, and missing ears. With each passing day Wares found himself increasingly involved in trying to sort out the truth about his own and his fellow veterans’ exposure to toxic chemicals. With each rebuff from the government his anger—and the veterans’ movement in Australia—grew. The country’s enormous size and the scarcity of money sometimes made logistics rather difficult; but like their counterparts in the States, Australian Vietnam veterans drew support from the realization that they had at least three things in common: they had served in an area of Southeast Asia that had been heavily sprayed with defoliants; many of them were sick, dying, or had fathered children with birth defects; government officials, while expressing concern, were doing little to resolve the issues in a fair and compassionate manner.
7
Puff the Magic Dragon: C-47 cargo plane equipped with three electric-powered Gatling machine guns.