“The VA continues to hang its hat on its Ranch Hand study,” says DeBoer “but I think that it’s because many of the men who are involved in that study are still on active duty.[3] They’re pilots, career Air Force personnel, and these individuals are not going to step forward with an array of health problems because they’ll get kicked right out of the military, or be grounded and lose their flight pay. So there are many reasons why the Ranch Hand study will fail to provide the kind of information we need. You’ve got to remember that the men being examined, the pilots who flew the C-123s for example, did not drink water or eat food contaminated with dioxin, like the grunts did week after week. When those pilots returned to base they showered every night, instead of living in the same clothes for days or even weeks. So instead of insisting on examining members of the Ranch Hand units, why doesn’t the government take a look at A Troop, Seventh Squadron 17th Air Cavalry, and compare us to another infantry platoon that was stationed in Germany? What is the VA afraid of? One has to wonder.
“I mean, look, I found six of the men in my unit on my own, and I attempted to get the other fourteen names. But I couldn’t get them, because they said that I would have to file a Freedom of Information Act to get the names of the guys that I fought with in Vietnam. I could hardly believe it. The VA wouldn’t give me any help. Then I talked with my congressman and he said that there are many guys trying to locate the men they served with. It’s just like everything else where Vietnam veterans are concerned. The VA and the DOD just aren’t going to give us any help. But I plan on doing it on my own. I’m going to keep on investigating until I know what happened to every one of the men in that unit.”
Because he was fully covered by medical insurance, DeBoer did not have to go through what he calls the “VA atrocity,” and in spite of the fact that the private doctors who first examined him knew nothing about dioxin and little if anything about Agent Orange, he received “superb medical care.” As the years passed and he returned for postoperative checkups, some of the physicians became interested in the issue and would ask DeBoer what he knew about the symptomology of dioxin exposure. They were amazed, he says, when he told them that among the plaintiffs in the class action suit were at least one hundred cases of testicular cancer. “They just couldn’t believe it. It really seemed almost beyond their comprehension that we could have that many testicular cancers in our population of Vietnam veterans.”
By 1982 the number would grow into the hundreds, a figure that, given the average age of Vietnam veterans and their health records before they were sent to Vietnam, clearly demonstrates the disastrous effects that exposure to dioxin can have on human health. Given the rate at which testicular cancers have been discovered among Vietnam veterans it seems highly likely that even more cases will be added to the class action suit before Yannacone and his consortium of attorneys face the war contractors in a court of law.
Despite the physical, emotional, and financial problems DeBoer’s illness caused him and his family, he decided that he must do whatever he could to educate the American public to the hazards of dioxin, and to convince people that the ailments of Vietnam veterans are both real and devastating. Soon he was deluged with offers to speak, and he accepted nearly all of them, becoming, he soon realized, a full-time Agent Orange activist. Invited to attend hearings in Albany on the hazards of toxic substances in the workplace, DeBoer went because “I pretty much considered myself to be Exhibit A as to what can happen to people who are exposed to toxic substances, and I wanted to say something about the men in my platoon who had told me about the problems they were experiencing from their exposure to dioxin.” Although the state assembly committee that was sponsoring the hearings realized that the problem of dioxin exposure was national in scope, with its roots in Washington rather than Albany, the committee concluded that a state commission on dioxin exposure should be established to examine the possibility that large numbers of Vietnam veterans (of which New York has six hundred thousand) and nonveteran residents of the state may have been exposed to dioxin. The majority of the New York State Temporary Commission of Dioxin Exposure’s members would be combat veterans and, because of his work on behalf of veterans and research into the effects of dioxin on laboratory animals and human beings, DeBoer was asked to become a member.
The commissioners agreed to hold a series of hearings, inviting members of the public to express their concerns about the effect dioxin might be having on their health. The commissioners were instructed not to reach conclusions, pass judgments, or make any specific rulings during the course of these hearings. Their job was simply to listen. Thus began what seemed, at times, a tragedy without end. On occasion, says DeBoer, even the stenographers wept as they listened to a young widow describe her husband’s death from cancer, a Vietnam veteran speak lovingly and with anger about his deformed daughter or son, or a woman explain that in spite of her love for her husband and desire to bear children she was frightened of giving birth to a “thalidomide baby.” While he admits that he was sometimes disappointed that more veterans didn’t appear at the hearings, DeBoer can “understand that nobody wants to come to a hearing and be told that you’ve been exposed to dioxin. Nobody really wants to come to a meeting and see their contemporaries sick, genuinely suffering, and nobody wants to come out and look at deformed children.”
Ron DeBoer and I are sitting on a park bench near City Hall in lower Manhattan. Across from us an elderly man admonishes the pigeons to be more considerate. He tells them they are not so “smart as they think” and warns them that their “uppity ways” are going to bring them to an unhappy end. Bells chime, taxis jockey for position at a red light, honking like angry geese and hurling down Broadway in ragged formation. Office workers stroll through the park and bask in the sun beside a small reflection pool. The Vietnam War has been over for eight years. Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now have come and gone. Novels, documentaries, books of poetry, new journalistic accounts of the war have been written, produced, reviewed, awarded prizes, enshrined as classics, or dismissed as failed attempts to portray what some people feel may be unportrayable. But DeBoer, an aspiring film scriptwriter, feels the most devastating film is yet to be made. “When they make a movie out of this Agent Orange thing, and believe me they will make a movie out of it, it’ll make Apocalypse Now look like a Walt Disney flick.”
This is said without a trace of bitterness or anger, just the matter-of-fact manner of a man who knows that the government he served has lied to him and his fellow veterans for many years. As a member of the New York State Temporary Commission on Dioxin Exposure he has talked to hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Vietnam veterans throughout the nation. And he has heard time and again that the use of defoliants was not confined to remote areas of Vietnam, that base camp perimeters were routinely sprayed, and C-123s sometimes jettisoned their thousand-gallon loads near or directly on areas occupied by American servicemen. From General Accounting Office reports he discovered that his unit had been deployed in defoliated areas; and from HERBS tapes (which do not include information about Navy Seabee, Army Engineer, Marine Corps Engineer, South Vietnamese, Australian, or CIA use of defoliants in Vietnam) he found that the year he spent in Vietnam had been one of the peak years for the military’s use of defoliants.
3
Between 1962 and 1970 approximately twelve hundred men served as pilots and grounds crew members with the US Air Force’s Operation Ranch Hand. Because many of these men were exposed to herbicides, either by handling barrels in which they were stored or from mists that blew into the cockpit and fuselage of the C-123s, the Air Force has commenced a study to determine if their health has been affected. According to Lieutenant Colonel Philip Brown (USAF) the study will continue through the year 2002 and will involve three phases. In the first phase the Air Force will examine the records of deceased Ranch Hand personnel to determine the cause of death. This, says Brown, will continue for the next twenty years. The second or “questionnaire phase” involves sending a representative from Lou Harris and Associates into each Ranch Hander’s home with a questionnaire in hand. “We’re interested in knowing what happened to them since Vietnam, what kind of offspring they’ve fathered, and we also ask the spouse about her experience so we can address the fertility or reproductive history of these people.” The third phase of the study involves asking former Ranch Handers to undergo a physical examination at the ’Kelsey-Seybold Clinic where, Brown says, they will undergo a thorough physical and neuropsychiatric examination.