Although he can remember little about his combat experiences, Ray Clark’s recollection of his nearly ten-year battle with the Veterans Administration is vivid. As the youngest patient to be treated for bladder cancer at a VA hospital, he has fought bureaucratic stonewalling, indifference, and incompetence. Even when VA doctors finally admitted that Clark had bladder cancer and decided to operate, his family was not told the cancer could be controlled. “They told me,” Clark says, “to get my insurance in order. That’s about all.” It was only after his mother-in-law obtained a booklet from the American Cancer Society that Ray’s family discovered his cancer was not terminal.
Leafing through a stack of letters from the Veterans Administration, congressmen, and the Department of Defense, Clark sips coffee and answers my questions slowly, carefully, and at times with the irritation of having gone over the same painful ground too often. Mrs. Clark joins us at the kitchen table, but her involvement with politics has made her skeptical, even slightly bitter. Recalling a press conference at which Senator Moynihan was to appear with her husband and other Vietnam veterans, she explains that the senator arrived more than an hour late and, placing his hands on Clark’s chest, made an inane comment about Agent Orange. Except for the senator’s entourage, no one laughed. “He was lucky,” Mrs. Clark says, “that one of the veterans standing nearby didn’t hit him.”
In the beginning she believed that her idealism, indeed her fervor, would inspire local and national leaders to take action on behalf of Vietnam veterans and their families. But she has discovered that promises are not always kept, headlines do not necessarily mean progress, and unless it can be quantified by a government agency or verified by a panel of experts, human suffering does not inspire bureaucracies to action. Vietnam veterans, she now believes, might be one more commodity in a throwaway society. “They were used over there, and now they’re being used here,” Mrs. Clark says. Her husband nods, but declines to elaborate.
“I served in Vietnam from 1966 through 1967,” Clarks explains, glancing at his wife for what I first mistook to be confirmation, but later realized was simply an open display of trust and love for the woman who, like so many wives of Vietnam veterans, had seen him through the long, difficult, post-Vietnam adjustment period. “And in 1972 I developed cancer of the bladder. I also have a heart problem, which is a common problem among Nam veterans. When I first went into the VA hospital for a checkup, the doctors kept asking me if I had ever worked in a chemical plant, or if I had been exposed to radiation. And I had to say no to these questions because I worked in an appliance store before I went in the service, and as far as I know I was never exposed to any chemicals. And of course doctors were surprised at my age, because this type of cancer usually affects men between sixty and eighty years of age. We also discovered, going back through my records, that VA doctors had kept my heart murmur a secret from my family and myself. Suddenly I found myself in the hospital, with monitors all over me, and they announce: ‘Ray, you’ve got a heart problem.’ I was in intensive care for a week. Before that they had told me nothing about it.”
Describing his frustration with the Veterans Administration, Clark reveals a familiar pattern that has both angered and embittered Vietnam veterans. “Their attitude,” one veteran told me, “is ‘Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.’ In other words, what they don’t know can’t hurt us!” Even before a veteran enters the hospital he may be aware of what his symptoms mean, only to be informed by staff doctors that “It’s all in your head.” So many veterans have heard this from the VA that it would take a massive outreach and publicity campaign to change the negative attitudes many veterans have toward the bureaucracy in Washington and the majority of regional VA hospitals.
“In the beginning, when I first started urinating blood,” Clark continues, “they insisted I was putting ketchup and water in the specimen jars. They said I was doing something to myself so I could receive disability, and that the problem was all in my mind. They also scheduled me for an appointment with the staff psychiatrist because they said my illness was self-inflicted. I would get really upset with them and say, ‘Look, when I start urinating blood I’ll just fill a test tube and bring it in so you can see for yourself I’m not lying.’ So I brought it in and the doctor looked at it and said, ‘Oh sure, Ray, that’s ketchup and water.’ Or, ’C’mon, Ray, that’s just ketchup and urine and you know it.
“They tested me for everything but bladder cancer. They gave me a brain scan, shot dye into my kidneys, announced that I was suffering from a nervous breakdown, and even tested me for epilepsy. They did every test you could possibly do, except the one that would determine if I had bladder cancer. After a month and a half of testing they finally said, ‘Okay, we’re going to look inside your bladder.’ So they looked inside, and of course they saw the cancer. They told me to go home and get my affairs in order and to come in for the operation, which I did. I’ve been going in every three months for treatment since then.”
At the Veterans Administration hospital in Syracuse, New York, veterans who went in for what had been advertised as an “Agent Orange examination” were given a routine physical by a physician’s assistant.
“The funny thing is that they were always asking me if I had been in Vietnam,” Clark says, pouring another cup of coffee and shaking his head as though he cannot quite believe what he is saying. “And they kept wanting to know if I had been exposed to chemicals. But they never mentioned Agent Orange or dioxin. I never even heard of Agent Orange until I discovered Agent Orange Victims International. After I read an article about a veteran who was dying of a rare form of cancer, I wrote to my congressman asking if he knew anything about this issue. A few days later my wife answered the phone, and it was the congressman, or one of his aides, wanting to know just how much we knew about this ’Agent Orange. They actually thought we knew an espionage agent by that name, and they wanted to find out just who this fellow was, and what we knew about him. Rather than an herbicide that is killing Vietnam veterans, they thought we were talking about a spy. The Veterans Administration was little help, because either they knew nothing about Agent Orange, or what they did know they were not about to tell Vietnam veterans.
“After my operation I filed a claim for service-connected disability. I went to the Veterans Administration counselor and told him what I wanted to do, but he didn’t know anything about Agent Orange—absolutely nothing. I actually had to bring in the paperwork and show him how to fill it out. About a month after I filed my claim I received a form letter from the VA stating that ‘there is no evidence supporting a connection between Agent Orange exposure and any disease, except for chloracne.’ They didn’t send any documents or articles about Agent Orange, just their statement that ‘these are the facts.’ And when I did write asking for documentation on Agent Orange, they said their information had all been consumed in a fire. Then of course we received the next good laugh in the mail when they wrote that they had lost all of my service records while I was overseas. How could they just lose all our records? I did receive some information, some records, but they still don’t have any of my records from Vietnam, or my first two years in the military. But I’ve corresponded with enough veterans who were in the area I was in and who were exposed to Agent Orange, and they can verify that we were exposed.”[1]
1
According to Vietnam Veterans of America, “The General Accounting Office studied Marines in Northern I Corps from 1966 to 1969, and comparing troop placements with the records of where and when Agent Orange was sprayed, found that nearly 6,000 Marines were within one-third of a mile of the spraying of Agent Orange on the day of the spraying missions. Another 10,600 were within nine-tenths of a mile on the day of the spraying. The total equals 8 percent of all Marines in the area during the three years studied. The General Accounting Office study not only verifies that veterans were exposed, but strongly suggests that many more veterans were exposed than anyone had previously been able to prove” (