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C H A P T ER 15 Guinea Pigs Even victors are by victories undone. —John Dryden (1631–1700), “Epistle to John Driden of Chesterton” What loneliness is more lonely than distrust? —George Eliot (1819–80), Middlemarch I still feel like the system raped me in Vietnam. —Dick Champagne, a Vietnam veteran As the war dragged on, thousands of American soldiers began to develop odd and unexpected symptoms. Many were strikingly similar to those suffered by 2,4,5-T workers: rashes, joint pain, numbness and/or tingling in the hands and feet, severe headaches, exhaustion, mental lapses, depression, and sudden fits of temper. Some symptoms persisted long after the men came home; others didn’t show up until later. Worst of all, many of the veterans’ children suffered from birth defects and disabilities. Steve Littell (see Chapter 11) returned home in good health. Ten years later, he felt a lump under his right armpit. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), a potentially fatal cancer. Research has since shown that Vietnam veterans have a higher than average risk of developing NHL. Littell underwent heavy doses of chemotherapy for about ten months. “It was rough, very rough. After the treatments, I was constantly throwing up, unable to move, totally out. I didn’t want my last treatment. They were all ready to start injecting , and I just flipped out and totally lost it and left. They had to put me on tranquilizers the next day to get me to come back. Even though I knew it was the last one, and it would all be over, I just couldn’t get myself to go through that last one.” The chemo worked for a while, but the cancer eventually returned.1 Frank Cook did two tours of duty in Vietnam, first as a telephone lineman, where he worked in freshly sprayed areas, then as an infantryman in heavy combat (see 129 Chapter 11). Over the years, Cook suffered from chloracne, PTSD, fevers, urinary tract infections, vomiting, swollen lymph nodes, and polyrhinitis (heavy swelling of the nasal passages), causing him to hemorrhage from his ears, nose, and mouth. “It was like drowning in my own blood.” The VA doctors told him he had internal lesions, but they couldn’t locate them. “They accused me of self-inflicting my wounds.” It took four visits before he was admitted for surgery. The VA granted Cook 10 percent disability, finally acknowledging that at least some of his symptoms were service connected, but never mentioning Agent Orange. The veterans’ health problems didn’t generate much sympathy at first. Their service in Vietnam had made them pariahs to most of the political spectrum. Antiwar activists saw them as baby killers; veterans of World War II and Korea dismissed them as losers and whiners. Maude de Victor changed everything. She wasn’t a doctor, just a VA caseworker in the agency’s Chicago office. One day, a client convinced her that his fatal cancer had been caused by “those chemicals in Vietnam.”2 Armed with a new hypothesis, de Victor could see a bizarre pattern of symptoms in the veterans coming into her office. She began asking them, “Have you been in Vietnam? Got any kind of rash? Have any children with deformities?” In just a few months, de Victor identified twenty-seven veterans who suffered from this broad, still nameless disability. She found thirty more in the local VA hospital—fifty-seven cases, identified by one bureaucrat in one city.3 On October 12, 1977, de Victor called Alvin Young, the Air Force’s herbicide expert. Young immediately hung up and then telephoned the agency’s Chicago office, to confirm that de Victor really was a VA employee. De Victor memorialized their conversation in a memo to herself. It’s obvious that she was neither a doctor nor a scientist and didn’t fully comprehend what Young was telling her, but she did get many of the specifics right. What stands out most clearly from this memo is that the Air Force’s herbicide expert was willing to acknowledge the toxicity of these compounds: “There were two basic types of defoliants used in Vietnam—Agent Orange and Agent Blue. Both Agents contained Chemical 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. [Actually, Blue didn’t contain either D or T.] They are mutagens and Teratogenics [sic].” The memo then describes, incorrectly, how these compounds cause birth defects. The components 2,4-D and 2,4...

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