“And I just want to say another thing. The old-timers around here are opposed to herbicides. First, because they say the forest used to grow back just fine without them, and second, because they say the wildlife has really been affected by herbicides. The bird population, squirrel population, all the little mammals, have just been decimated. And some fishermen say there used to be a lot more trout in some of the streams. Of course herbicide users claim this is not because of herbicides, but because the natural habitat has been destroyed—but that’s nonsense. There’s lots of natural habitat. And the old-timers will tell you—and of course I couldn’t use this in my EPA testimony because it’s all ‘hearsay’—about all the tumors they’ve found in deer and elk they’ve killed around here. Lots of very strange, abnormal-looking growths. And these are people that have lived here all their lives.
“It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the observations of people who have lived in an area all their lives are considered nothing more than hearsay by those who look for a scientific explanation for everything. I went down to hear Dr. Tung, the scientist from Vietnam, when he was speaking in Eugene, and he said something that really struck me. He said that the people have lived in the same area for generations, even centuries, and that they know just what it is, and he said that he, as a scientist, just had to trust that the people knew enough about their surroundings to detect even minute changes. It seems to me we ought to be listening to some of the people around here who have lived in this area long, long before herbicides were ever sprayed here.”
Bonnie Hill and I shake hands and say goodbye, and I walk to the small parking lot where earlier in the day I had spent nearly an hour watching the extraordinary changes in the Oregon weather. For perhaps fifteen minutes the sun would shine, converting the compact car I had rented in Eugene into a mobile solar greenhouse. And then, abruptly, the sky would glower, great dark clouds would swallow the sun, and it would rain. Fifteen minutes later the clouds would vanish behind the mountains, and the rain would stop.
I had spent the previous evening just twenty miles away, at the home of a Vietnam veteran who explained that he had gotten involved in the controversy over herbicides when he read some material that purported to rationalize the use of 2,4,5-T.
“We used to play tapes from loudspeakers,” my host told me, “basically saying that the VC are telling the people that herbicides are making them sick, that the spraying is responsible for their miscarriages and illnesses. And the tapes would say that the VC are lying, they just don’t like the sprays because it makes it hard for them to hide, and that the VC are actually poisoning people’s water so they will believe it’s herbicides that are making them sick. I was young and gung-ho at the time; so I just believed the propaganda we were feeding the people. We heard the Vietnamese complain. They talked about depressions, diarrhea, flus, colds, rashes, spontaneous abortions. But it was a war zone, and we just figured there were a lot of diseases that we had never heard of. Thinking back, I recall being struck by the number of children with cleft palates. And I suffered from the same things over and over, screaming pains in my joints, pains in my gut, blood in my urine, my feet going numb. But the hardest thing to deal with was the sudden depressions that came on you. You just wanted to go out into a field and stick a pistol in your mouth and pull the trigger.”
During a lull in our conversation I stepped outside. It was a clear, rather brisk spring night, and as I stood in the darkness I could hear water gushing, gurgling, flowing, churning. And I thought about a comment one American scientist had made about herbicide spraying. “Pinpoint bombing you might be able to do,” he said, “but pinpoint spraying is impossible.”
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.”
11. Vietnam Veterans are America’s Future
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] 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.