Clark walks me to my car and we shake hands. Three of his five children are playing on a nearby swing set and we talk for a moment about our children and how much they mean to us. On the drive home I think about what has brought Ray Clark, a former Marine, and me, a former antiwar activist, together. In the sixties we might have met in a bar and argued, perhaps even fought, over the war. But now we have spent a rainy afternoon discussing the aftermath of chemical warfare. Clark’s cancer, in remission for nearly five years, has reappeared, and every three months he must visit the VA hospital where a tube is inserted into his urethra to search for new signs of damage to his bladder.
Not long before our interview, two dead owls were discovered a short distance from the Clarks’ home, and state officials said it was possible they had eaten fish or small animals contaminated with dioxin from Lake Ontario. “Lately,” Mrs. Clark said, unfolding a map of the United States shortly before I left, “we’ve been looking for a safe place to move. But the more we looked, the more we realized there really is no place to hide.”
2. The Doomed Platoon
Growing up in New York City, Ron DeBoer played in an abandoned tenement that was frightening and, he thought, very dark. But years later, hunkered down in the jungle with members of the 17th Air Cavalry, he discovered a shade of darkness so impenetrable that he felt suspended in a void, a black hole into which, unless he was extremely careful, he might vanish. Staring into the dark and praying for sunrise, DeBoer realized that nothing he might experience during the next twelve months would be more terrifying than that first night in the bush.
From April 1968 to April 1969, DeBoer and his unit searched for and engaged in combat with enemy units in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, sometimes walking through areas that appeared to have been bombed with such intensity that the earth was scorched, entire sides of mountains burned away. But the men in his platoon saw no bomb craters, and thought it odd that such devastating air strike would fail to turn the jungle into a crazy quilt of water-filled pockmarks. Filling their canteens with water from pools or streams in the defoliated zone, they would pass on, leaving the mystery behind; in the scheme of things at the time, it really didn’t seem that important.
For months DeBoer suffered from splitting headaches that he attributed to stress. His skin, as well as that of nearly every member of his unit, was massively discolored from what they called the “creeping crud.” Some of the men had chloracne on their necks and shoulders, which DeBoer recalls as being “really hideous”; but they had been told nothing about the nature of the spraying around their base camps, never observed a formation of C-123s saturating the side of a mountain with herbicides, and attributed any skin problems they might have to infrequent bathing or to the ferocious heat.
Ron DeBoer survived his twelve-month tour of duty and returned to New York City, where he spent the next ten years putting the war behind him and pursuing, he says, the “Great American Dream.” He started his own construction company and soon owned a suburban home complete with a two-car garage, patio, and swimming pool. Sometimes he thought about the men he had known who didn’t make it back, but he disdained war stories and made no effort to explain what the war had been like for him; he knew he could not substitute words for experience. The past, he told himself, was the past. Let it be. And even when he first began feeling ill, when the lump in his groin began to swell and he suspected it wouldn’t go away, he dismissed the articles his wife was clipping from the paper about a herbicide that had been sprayed, quite possibly, upon the area of Vietnam where he had served.
But the lump in his scrotom did not go away, and DeBoer’s wife, Linda, persisted in her attempts to get him to take seriously the stories about dioxin and Agent Orange that were appearing with increasing frequency in periodicals and newspapers. One of the articles was about a scientific experiment in which mice given minute doses of dioxin developed testicular cancer, a disease so rare that it affects only six out of every one hundred thousand white males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. DeBoer was only twenty-eight at the time, but doctors told him that the lump in his scrotom was malignant, and that if he wanted to live, they would have to operate. Bewildered, confused, angry, hardly able to believe that he had survived twelve months of guerilla warfare only to succumb to a disease that hardly ever attacked men his age, DeBoer phoned a local attorney to ask if he knew of other Vietnam veterans who were suffering from testicular cancer.
“I had seen Victor Yannacone’s name in the newspaper, and so I called him up. And he told me that he had other Vietnam veterans with testicular cancer and that there definitely tended to be a correlation between our exposure to dioxin and these types of cancers. Yannacone also said that he was going ahead with a lawsuit he had filed on behalf of Vietnam veterans, although at that time I think there were only twenty plaintiffs and I was one of them.”
Yannacone inspired DeBoer to begin his own intensive research into the effects of dioxin on animals and humans, and the more he read the more convinced he became that his illness was symptomatic of dioxin exposure. Why, he wondered, had the men in his platoon not been warned against drinking water and eating food that had been sprayed with herbicides containing this deadly substance? Did the government really know that the defoliants they were spraying contained a carcinogen and teratogen that would remain in the soil and water for years? Had anyone checked the thousands of barrels of Agent Orange that were shipped to Vietnam to determine just how much dioxin they contained? Did Dow Chemical warn the Department of Defense that men and women working in a plant where 2,4,5-T was produced had suffered from chloracne? Why was the government insisting that no problem existed when he was sick and might even be dying from an extremely rare form of cancer? What constituted a problem? Every day he seemed to hear about other veterans who were suffering from serious ailments, and who suspected that their own government might have poisoned them.
DeBoer’s skepticism soon gave way to anger, and his reluctance to revive memories of his combat experiences was swept aside by a passionate desire to discover just what had happened to him and the members of his platoon. Eventually he founded Agent Orange Victims of New York, launching a speaking tour that would take him into American Legion and VFW halls, high schools, and colleges throughout New York State. But he also wanted to talk to all of the members of his unit to see if they, too, were suffering from symptoms of dioxin exposure.
DeBoer soon realized that he couldn’t count on the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration for help in locating members of the unit he would one day dub “The Doomed Platoon.” The DOD maintained that very few veterans had been exposed to herbicides in Vietnam, while informing those who requested their service records that many of the military’s records had been lost in the chaotic evacuation of Saigon, or destroyed in a fire in St. Louis, Missouri. Already skeptical of the VA, DeBoer concluded that asking the government for help, even in what appeared to be a rather simple matter, was an exercise in futility. Instead, he decided to become a sleuth, an amateur Sherlock Holmes trying to track down not the perpetrator of a murder but the possible victims of chemical warfare. If he could find one of the men in his platoon, he felt certain that he might be able to locate all twenty.