Because of navigational difficulties, and the possibility of losing crew members when a plane is shot down, night flights have been ruled out. The slow-moving planes, skimming in broad daylight just 150 feet about the trees, make tempting targets to enemy gunners. The planes move in patterns similar to those one makes when mowing the lawn, forward and back until a predetermined area has been fully covered. Although a mission can be completed in three to five minutes, the Ranch Handers take many hits, making them among the most decorated veterans of the Vietnam War.
Sometimes the C-123s spray around the perimeters of base camps, where shirtless men carrying tanks of herbicides on their backs now and then playfully spray one another, or Huey helicopters mounted with spray booms work and rework approaches to the base. Some of the troops complain of headaches that last for hours, even days, and skin rashes that cover their arms, necks, and faces. But no one collapses or dies following his exposure to Agent Orange, and the defoliated Maginot Line between base camp and jungle might mean the difference between life and death. The defoliation campaign, though a topic of casual conversation among the troops, is accepted as just one part of the overall effort to defeat the enemy.
“I really didn’t know what they were spraying,” explained John Green, who served as a medic in Vietnam. “Some people thought it was for mosquitoes, but I never really gave it much thought. I do remember walking through defoliated zones. Everything was dead. The trees had literally grown to death, because that’s how Agent Orange works—it accelerates growth in a plant’s cells until finally the plant or tree dies. Did we drink the water? Of course we did. Where we were there was nothing else to drink. If we found a bomb crater full of water we just scooped it out and drank it, no matter how brown or scummy it looked. Some of our food was undoubtedly sprayed with Agent Orange. But how were we to know? The army told us the stuff was harmless. And we were told it was supposed to be saving our lives. The ‘strategists’ had this idea that the enemy moved in neat little patterns, like a highway grid or something. You eliminate the pattern and you shut the man off, he can’t move anymore. But that, unfortunately, was nonsense. If they shut off one of his trails, he just found another. It was his country, and he really knew how to compensate.”
Because of the frequency with which men and equipment were moved from one location to another, some veterans are not certain where they were at any given time. But they do remember being doused with herbicides or walking through defoliated moonscapes. They remember that even before they left Vietnam, their bodies were covered with rashes; they felt dizzy, nauseous, and suffered from migraine headaches, stomach cramps, and black depressions. The rashes were considered just another variety of “jungle rot” by medical personnel, while other symptoms of dioxin exposure were dismissed as the result of stress brought on by the war. Some soldiers realized that their problems had something to do with the spraying, but there was little they could do to stop it or to protect themselves from further poisoning. They had not been issued protective gear, had no idea when or where a spray mission might occur, and lived in the same clothing for days, even weeks, while in the field. If they survived twelve months they would be home free. They had little reason to believe otherwise.
One of the men who believed he had escaped serious injury in Vietnam now lives near Syracuse, New York, just fifty miles from where the first large-scale tests of herbicides for military use took place. On the walls of the small rented house where Ray Clark lives with his wife and five children, there are no medals framed in glass, no photographs of smiling young men in battle dress, no captured enemy weapons or flags. Unlike veterans of World War II, who are fond of displaying the booty of a victorious army, Vietnam veterans seldom reserve a room—or even one wall—of their home for a shrine to the glories of war. And, though he once walked point as a minesweeper in Vietnam, one of the most dangerous assignments of the war, Ray Clark, with his pipe and sorrowful blue eyes, reminds one more of a history professor than of Hollywood’s gung-ho Marine. While recuperating from battle fatigue Clark learned that his battalion had been nearly wiped out when their newly arrived M16s misfired during a battle. Six years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he would discover that he was suffering from bladder cancer.
Before our interview, I had phoned to ask directions to the Clarks’ home and, as I passed dilapidated trailers and patchwork houses with smoke curling from crooked little chimneys, I thought about the many veterans I knew who had grown up in impoverished areas like this. It was here that, during the sixties and early seventies, military recruiters scoured the high schools looking for adolescents willing to be turned into Marines, Green Berets, Rangers, and grunts. And it was here that the military, offering young men the chance to become authentic heroes, easily filled their monthly quotas, sending hundreds of thousands to fight in a country about which the majority of Americans knew virtually nothing. Passing through the village near the Clarks’ house, I half expected to see a monument to those who fought, and died, in Vietnam.
When Clark returned home there were no parades, no crowds, no politicians handing out keys to “grateful cities.” If they survived their tour of duty, Vietnam veterans boarded “freedom birds” at Tan Son Nhut Airport and were whisked through the twilight zone to San Francisco, where they were often met by antiwar demonstrators. Then they flew home to cities that were bitterly divided over the war, or took a bus that deposited them at 3:00 AM on the deserted streets of their hometown. Others hitchhiked home and, when a car stopped to offer them a lift, wondered whether they should keep quiet, or perhaps even lie, about where they had spent the past twelve months. While still in Vietnam they had heard that many Americans were angry about the war—angry, strangely enough, at them. They would discover that their arrival in California was a portent of things to come. “I got sick of the stereotypes,” Clark explains. “The movies, books, radio, newspapers had us typed as baby killers, psychos, drug addicts. I just didn’t want to walk down the street and have someone say, ‘Hey, there goes Ray Clark. He takes drugs, kill babies, rapes women. He’s really weird, man.” ’
Ray married, found a job, and started school. He didn’t want to talk about the war, and most of all he just wanted to be left alone to raise his children and live a “normal” life. “I joined the American Legion once,” Clark says. “And all they wanted to do was parade around saying, ‘We fought a good war. We fought a good old war, didn’t we.’ Well, we didn’t fight a good war. We lost. We lost fifty-four thousand men for absolutely nothing.” Then he found that before he would celebrate his thirtieth birthday, he might die of a form of cancer that rarely kills anyone under fifty. The fighting hadn’t killed him, but something with which he had come into contact in the jungles of Vietnam just might.
In his aversion to war stories and his desire to put the war behind him, Ray Clark is typical of most Vietnam veterans. But unlike many veterans, he does not have to work at forgetting his combat experiences. Because, except for arriving in and returning from Vietnam, Clark has little conscious recollection of his experiences there. With his wife’s help, and by talking to other veterans, he has managed to piece together fragments of the period he spent in Vietnam, but there are still gaps, the picture remains incomplete. “He would talk in his sleep,” Mrs. Clark explains, “or not really talk, but mutter, and he wouldn’t sleep. He would go into a kind of agitated state or trance, talking all night and, in the morning, remembering little, if anything, he said.” Like all of the veterans with whom I’ve talked, Clark has never received a letter from the Department of Defense or Veterans Administration advising him that he might have spent time in a region sprayed with Agent Orange. But by talking with Vietnam veterans who served in the same region as he did, and who remember being sprayed with Agent Orange, walking through defoliated areas, and drinking water contaminated with herbicides, Ray has verified his suspicion that he was exposed to deadly chemicals. Only after becoming involved with Agent Orange Victims International, however, did Clark learn about the many symptoms of dioxin exposure, one of which is loss of memory.