“When we first got involved with the movement in Australia,” Wares explains, “I went to the Royal Alexandria Hospital for Children in Sydney, saw the chief pediatrician, and asked some questions. I said, ‘My son has been born with no fingers on one hand.’ And I asked if he had any statistics on that kind of deformity. Now, in Australia most of the hospitals don’t keep that kind of statistics. There’s no national statistics on birth deformities. Some hospitals keep them, some don’t; it’s very ad hoc. So I told this guy that my son was born with no fingers, ‘but his arm isn’t withered, it’s not short, there’s just no fingers. It’s only affected one limb, which in itself I understand is rather unusual.’ And I said, ‘What are the chances of this happening?’ And he said, ‘Well, I would say that using statistics, one in fifty thousand is way over the odds.’
“So I told him, ‘What would you say if I told you that I know another two kids with exactly this same deformity? Exactly the same.’ And he said, ‘My God, that’s incredible.’ And I said, ‘Well, if I told you that both their fathers were Vietnam veterans, and there were only forty-five thousand men from this country who went to Vietnam, and of the three children I know with this deformity all of their fathers are veterans, how would that affect you?’ He was absolutely staggered. To such an extent that he said, ‘What we will do is we’ll test all of the veterans’ children who are deformed free of charge at this hospital.’ And that was in the Sydney press, and in the Australian national press. But one week later that decision was reversed. Politics. The hospital board decided it wouldn’t be done!”
Wares, Holt McMinn, and John Harper eventually formed the Vietnam Veterans Action Association. McMinn had served in Vietnam with an elite commando unit, the Special Air Service Regiment; but after several months in the bush he began coughing blood, his hands were covered with rashes, and, diagnosing his condition as bronchial asthma, Army doctors sent him back to Australia. McMinn attempted to return to Vietnam in 1968, but after examining his health records the Army refused to grant his request. His health continued to deteriorate and he was forced to enter a repatriation hospital where, after three months of tests, doctors told him they could find no reason for his hemorrhaging. His problem, they said, was obviously psychological. Discharged from the military and given a 20 percent disability pension, McMinn was accused by an examining doctor of being a “malingerer” who was trying to “rip off the government.”
Although Wares and Harper had each fathered a deformed child—Harper’s daughter was born with two clubfeet and had already undergone five corrective operations when the two veterans met—they were not suffering from the kind of catastrophic health problems that seemed to be endemic among other Vietnam veterans. “I wasn’t angry for myself,” says Wares, “because even though I had suffered from a rash in Vietnam and had experienced this strange tingling sensation in my limbs since my return home, I was fairly healthy compared to Bob Gibson, Holt McMinn, and too many others I could name. But I wanted to know whether my son could ever have children. I really didn’t think the government owed me a damn thing, but for christsake they do owe it to these kids to try and find out what caused their deformity, and whether or not they can ever have normal children. Because that is the bit that I just can’t handle, I mean the kids and their kids, the generations that are not yet born that might end up with two noses or one ear missing or no arms, no bones, no brains—that is the bit that is just so hard to take.”
Wares knew that establishing a correlation between his exposure to toxic chemicals and Cameron’s birth defects would not be an easy task. By 1969 public opinion in Australia had already turned sour on the war, and a decade later most people simply did not want to be reminded of Vietnam. To those who would rather practice selective amnesia than disentomb a bitterness that had once swept the nation like a virus, Wares, Gibson, McMinn, and other veterans’ advocates were considered “gadflies,” distraught over the fact that they had not been given a hero’s welcome when they returned home and intent on making someone suffer for their neglect. The premier of Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, incensed by the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Action Association, suggested that the veterans’ physical and emotional problems were the result of their having been exposed to a particularly virulent strain of venereal disease. Damaged livers, cancer, and deformed children were apparently just a few of the wages of sin. “And do you know what the man does for a living?” Gibson laughs. “He grows peanuts, and he’s got his own crop-spraying company. That’s right. His own spraying company.”
“They call us communists, radical environmentalists, hippies, you name it,” says Wares, who immigrated to Australia as a boy and is fiercely patriotic, “but that is just so much bullshit. I’ll admit that I was a bit surprised at the animosity toward me and my mates when we returned home, but I didn’t go to Vietnam to save Australia from the screaming communist hordes. I went because my country wanted me to go, and because at the time I just never, never believed that my own country would lie to me.”
Concerned over the growing number of complaints about the domestic use of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, the Australian government commissioned its National Health and Medical Research Council to review the current scientific literature on these herbicides. NHMRC’s research found no link between herbicide use and an increase in the number of birth defects and spontaneous abortions; lauding the council’s work, the Australian government cheerfully concluded that it had found a scientific cornerstone for its refusal to take the Agent Orange issue seriously. Some scientists, however, were not willing to accept the council’s report with such alacrity, arguing, as did Dr. Donald MacPhee, a geneticist at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, that the council “might just as honestly have said that neither is there any scientific basis to disprove a link.”4The council’s conclusions were also criticized by Dr. Barbara Field, a pediatrician with an extensive background in the study of birth defects, and Dr. Charles Kerr of the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. In the course of their research, Drs. Field and Kerr discovered a “linear correlation” between the use of 2,4,5-T and the frequency of birth defects.
But perhaps the most serious criticism of NHMRC’s review came from Vietnam veterans, who pointed out that the study had been based on the domestic use of 2,4,5-T in bush control, thus failing to take into account the fact that the T used in Vietnam was five hundred times more potent than that used for domestic purposes. Samples of 2,4,5-T used in Vietnam contained up to fifty parts per million TCCD dioxin, while that used in Australia was limited by law to .1 part per million. Veterans’ advocates also argued that the government’s “cornerstone” was rather shaky because undiluted herbicides were used in Vietnam and the same areas were sprayed again and again—making it quite possible that dioxin, which can remain in the soil for up to thirty years, would accumulate and enter the food chain.
While chairman of the New South Wales branch of Vietnam Veterans Action Association, Wares became increasingly aware of what he calls the “uncanny similarities” between the Australian and American governments’ approaches to the toxic chemical issue. After much lobbying by Vietnam veterans and veterans’ advocates, officials of both nations had agreed that something had to be done to “test the validity” of the veterans’ complaints. The “acid test,” officials decided, would take the form of an epidemiological study, which, though it might take as long as a decade to complete, would answer “some if not all of the many perplexing questions surrounding this complicated issue.” Ordered by the US Congress to commence such a study, the Veterans Administration, after a game of bureaucratic cat-and-mouse, invested $125,000 in a study design that took eighteen months to complete and was rejected by reviewers from the Office of Technology Assessment and scientists at the Center for Disease Control. In Australia, a proposed study of 41,000 Vietnam veterans, 100,000 of their children, and a 20,000-person control group had cost the government $1.2 million and gone absolutely nowhere after twelve months.