Agent Orange

Every so often I find myself wondering how I ended up with cancer. I know it's in the family, but it is probably in most families. And there was no lymphoma, to my knowledge, in my family. I've mentioned before that I don't believe you can control a lot of the risk factors for cancer, but then again I have always eaten a pretty healthy diet and stayed very active, and, I think, handled stress pretty well (when I couldn't avoid it altogether, always my first choice). So the question has hung unanswered in my mind, a puzzle occasionally popping to the surface. Well, a week or so ago Nancy was on the phone with her sister Susan and afterward told me I had likely gotten lymphoma due to exposure to Agent Orange, a herbicide we dropped in Vietnam to try to deny the cover of jungle foliage to our enemies the Viet Cong. I was very skeptical. However, the ladies were persistent. Susan, like Nancy, is not a medical professional but is drawn to medical and health topics and, like her sister, is expert and persistent at internet search. Did I mention they're related? So yesterday Susan called and we had a long conversation. She pointed me to several web sites that discuss evidence of the high rate of lymphoma, and other serious diseases, in what are referred to as blue water navy veterans who served in waters off Vietnam during the conflict. The basic facts are laid out in an article in The Salem-News, an Oregon news outlet. Here are a few quotes from the article:

Vietnam War veterans are a fine lot: they suffered through the War; they suffered the abuse of an ungrateful nation upon their return; they continue to suffer the indignity of an incompetent and antagonistic Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA); and they are the fastest dying group of veterans of any war we've fought. By the end of 2009, only about 30% of all Vietnam War veterans were still alive. At that rate, the last of the Vietnam War veterans will be buried by the surviving soldiers of WWII.

One group of Vietnam War veterans that have had more than their share of hard knocks are those Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine personnel who served offshore Vietnam. We refer to this group as the Blue Water Navy (BWN). The VA currently refers to them as Vietnam Era veterans, to clearly separate them from those who served in the Vietnam War, which requires having had one's "boots on ground." That is now the definition of a Vietnam War veteran. 

I am a blue water navy veteran of the Vietnam conflict, having served in the Navy from 1964 to 1969, but not, as they say, as boots on the ground. I did spend frequent short periods in the country, though. From about March 1965 to mid-1967 I was an aerial navigator on C-130 transport planes, flying for VR-7 and VR-22, Navy transport squadrons based at Moffett Field near San Fransisco. We flew regularly to Vietnam, transporting men and equipment to the war zone and usually returning, sadly, with dead and injured soldiers. But we never spent more than several hours on the ground. Refuel, file flight plans and get out as quickly as possible. So, the Agent Orange idea didn't seem to apply to me, and I discounted it. But I read further. Some excerpts (highlighting is mine):

Why Distance From Shore is Totally Irrelevant

In 1989, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) conducted the "Selected Cancers Study" as a comprehensive medical study of the effects of Agent Orange/dioxin exposure to our troops who fought in the war in Vietnam. The outcry from veterans of the US and Australia wanting answers to their growing list of fatal and disabling diseases was growing quite loud. The conclusion of this and some later Australian studies resulted in a number of interesting findings: 

- Of the three service branches studied for all cancers in the "Selected Cancers Study", Navy veterans had the highest overall mortality;

- Veterans of the naval services, who didn't spend time on land, had a higher incidence of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (NHL) than the land-based troops, by a factor of about 20%; 

- Navy veterans had a higher than expected mortality from lung cancer (39%) and melanoma (56%);

The basic thrust of the evidence is that the higher rate of cancers among blue water navy vets than soldiers on the ground  is due to the fact that a lot of Agent Orange ended up in the water, washing off the land or disbursing from the planes as they returned to their carriers in the Gulf of Tonkin. On board the navy ships in the gulf, "potable" water used for showering, drinking and cooking was distilled from sea water. This process concentrated the deadly compounds from the herbicide in this so called potable water. Here is more from the article:

Following the "Selective Cancers Study," U.S. Government funded investigation by active research into the medical and scientific effects of dioxin on American veterans of the Vietnam War simply stopped. The Ranch Hand Study, now recognized as a fraudulent debacle at the highest levels, is the only large scale study that was conducted. In contrast, the Australian Government, with findings of the same anomalies regarding their Navy veterans, ordered their medical research facilities to come to some conclusion as to why those anomalies involving service offshore Vietnam existed. In a series of further studies, capped off by the RAN study published in 2002, medical evidence showed that Royal Australian Navy (RAN) sailors were highly dioxin-contaminated. It also showed that the conversion of sea water containing dioxin used in the flash distillation technique identical on all U.S. and Australian naval vessels, increased the toxicity of dioxin taken onboard with water by a factor of almost 4 and tainted the potable water used for cooking, drinking and bathing. No one knows how long the dioxin molecules or the contaminated water remained in the fresh water tanks of these ships, but they both left residuals in the tanks and pipes well after the ship left the vicinity of Vietnam. We believe that the reason for the unusual level of diseases suffered by the naval services vs. the land services was a matter of ingestion and dosage level: land troops experienced a few exposures with large amounts of dioxin primarily through skin absorption but with some ingestion and inhalation, while naval personnel experienced a long and continuous duration of ingested low dose exposure, on a daily basis, often for six months to a year. No one knows if and for how long that exposure continued after the ship left the vicinity of Vietnam and took on new, unsuspecting crew.

So what's this got to do with me? Well, I served as ship's company on board the USS Coral Sea (CVA-43), an attack carrier, for a year after our navy transport squadrons were disbanded in 1967. My time on the carrier included a combat cruise off Vietnam from July 1967 to April 1968. During this time our air wing flew nearly round the clock combat missions over Vietnam. I drank the water contaminated with dioxins from Agent Orange, showered in it and ate food cooked in it, as did all my shipmates.

So my apologies to the ladies for my initial disdain. Who knows exactly why I ended up with lymphoma - no doubt other environmental factors may be in involved, as well as hereditary factors - but I'm now convinced that exposure to Agent Orange is a distinct possibility. I am fortunate that I have always had good health insurance through my job, and now through Medicare, so I have never had to depend on the VA. But for many veterans of the blue water navy and the air force who are sick due to Agent Orange and do not have decent health insurance, or any at all, the government and the VA have basically abandoned them. Absolutely shameful. Some final quotes from the article:

Previous generations of soldiers were promised the treatment so eloquently stated in Abraham Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address: "...to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan..." Such care was offered up through WWII, began to wane with the Korean War, and completely disappeared for the Vietnam War veteran (which from hereon includes the BWN.)

 In February, 2002, the Department of Veteran Affairs, on their own volition, and by their own admission having no scientific or medical evidence to justify the move, stopped providing medical care and compensation for service-connected herbicide disabilities to Navy veterans of the Vietnam War, as well as Air Force veterans of that conflict.