Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange

Foreword

Foreword This book has been gestating for a long time—since the early 1980s, when Vietnam veterans and their families brought a class action against the federal government and the manufacturers of Agent Orange. The court ordered the defendants to turn over every piece of paper in their possession mentioning either dioxin or herbicides used in the Vietnam War. The case was settled before going to trial, and all the protective orders covering these records were removed. In a former life, I was an attorney tangentially involved in that litigation, so I had a pretty good idea what was in those documents. I telephoned Joseph Ditalia, the deputy clerk in charge of the federal court in Uniondale, NY, for permission to see them. He enjoyed my request more than any good bureaucrat should, laughing nonstop for about forty-five seconds and then warning me (while still gasping for breath): “Some reporter came down to check them out the other day, and lasted about fifteen minutes.” I didn’t grasp what had amused him so much until I visited the courthouse. Boxes nearly bursting with paper were piled ceiling high, completely filling two large basement rooms. I never bothered to count them all, but ten million pages is a conservative estimate. Mr. Ditalia, Cynthia Mann (the court’s operations manager), and the rest of the courthouse staff were uniformly friendly, helpful, and efficient, despite my sometimes odd and difficult demands. More times than I care to remember, I led a research crew of six Vermonters down to Uniondale to copy many of these documents. It was a preposterous task, and I thank the crew—Anne Miller, Lawrence Black, Jeffrey Gilbert, Trish Nunan, Tim Sestrick, and Spencer Smith—for making it sort of fun (and for doing an excellent job). In this book, I’ll refer to the lawsuit as the Class Action and to these records as the Class Action Documents. These documents will be identified in the same manner as they were submitted to the court during discovery. A list of these identification labels and their respective sources is included at the beginning of the Notes section. All these documents have since been taken from the courthouse and placed in a government repository. I’ll occasionally focus on the documents themselves, instead of the information contained in them, especially when they omit an important part of the story. Sometimes documents that ought to exist aren’t there. Others fail to mention important events and conversations that unquestionably took place. It would be unfair to automatically presume an intent to hide something, but it’s a possibility that needs to be considered. I’ll also quote from some of the depositions taken during ix the Class Action. Unless I specifically state otherwise, any testimony mentioned in this book comes from those depositions. My analysis of the government’s Agent Orange health studies is based largely on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request made by Congressman Ted Weiss (now deceased). At the time, attorneys for the American Legion and Vietnam Veterans of America were preparing a lawsuit against the government for failing to conduct this research properly, and they invited me to look through these documents. I’d like to thank Bart Stichman and Mark Venuti of the National Veterans Legal Services Project for giving me that opportunity, and Congressman Weiss and his committee’s investigator, Mark Smolonsky, for graciously providing me access to those records. The rest of the book is based on interviews (all of which I conducted myself), government documents, scientific journals, newspaper articles, and presentations made at scientific and other public conferences. This is an enormous topic that can’t be covered completely in one book. I’ve focused primarily on the decisions made by industry and government concerning 2,4,5-T and dioxin. I’ve also shied away from matters already well covered by other writers. This book includes a bibliography for those who want to study those other areas in more detail. I’d also like to apologize in advance for using so many abbreviations. Chemicals, diseases, and government bureaucracies all tend to have lengthy, complex names. Abbreviations can be awfully bloodless, but they’re less eye-glazing than repeating long-winded technical jargon over and over. I could not have written this book without Anne Miller. Anne’s general brilliance, astute reading of the documents, and capacity to grasp biology, epidemiology, statistics , and other branches of science well enough to impress...