Waiting for an Army to Die (11 page)

Wares also observed backpack spraying and spraying from trucks, but he had been told nothing about herbicides and had no reason to question the purpose of spraying. Until his son was born with missing fingers and only a partial thumb on one hand and he began hearing stories of other Australian veterans whose children were born with deformed feet, cleft palates, missing limbs, holes in their hearts, partial brains, and skin rashes, Wares gave the spraying little thought.

Thirteen years after he returned from Nui Dat, Wares and I are seated in the lounge of a Ramada Inn in New York City. He has arrived from London to see Bob Gibson, an Australian Vietnam veteran who has been touring the United States for eight weeks, talking with American veterans and leaders of the veterans’ movement, and gathering information he hopes will be useful to Australian veterans suffering from the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals.

In 1967 Gibson was an infantryman in Phuo Tuy Province. Returning from three days in the bush he was handed a gas mask and ordered to begin spraying herbicides on the barbed wire surrounding his base camp. Gibson reluctantly complied, wondering why, since he had no training for this kind of work, he had been chosen for such miserable duty. Wearing a gas mask in Vietnam was like burying one’s face in hot wet sand, and Gibson and others assigned to the detail quickly discarded their protective gear. Their clothes stuck to their skin, sweat drained into their eyes, and the spray was often blown directly back into their faces. Within ten days the mucous membranes in Gibson’s nose had deteriorated so much that he suffered from frequent nosebleeds. His skin was covered with a painful rash, and his stomach was constantly upset. But he was nineteen and “very patriotic” at the time, and he believed that if the herbicides reduced the enemy’s cover, then he could easily suffer a bit of discomfort.

Gibson’s commanders “did tell us what we were spraying, and as infantry soldiers we thought it was a good thing. It done the job. We could see what it was doing, and it was making it easier for us. But they didn’t tell us what the outcome would be, the health problems
it could cause. We were told that they were going to defoliate, and we thought this was the best thing that they’d ever come up with. And we used to laugh about it; you know, we thought it would be a good idea if they defoliated the whole of South Vietnam. It would be kind of like fightin’ in the desert.

“They did issue us gas masks that first day, but we couldn’t breathe in them because of the humidity. And I was an infantry soldier just come back from three days of ambushes, and we were just picked out at random to use the stuff. We know now that it was nothing more than experimental. We’ve got documents on the scientist who was controlling the spraying. He was sent there by the Australian Department of Defense to experiment with various chemicals, 2,4,5-T, 2,4-D, and others. But the fellows who were picking us out at the time to do this work were infantry sergeants, and they knew as much about chemicals as I did, and that was damn nothing. So we told the sergeant after that first day that we couldn’t breathe using this stuff, and he said, ‘I’ll check on it tonight for you,’ and the next day he said, ‘Don’t worry, leave the gas masks and everything off So we used to get in back there and spray this stuff through the barbed wire, and it would come back on us. And your nose would start to bleed, your lips would all get blisters on them, your mucous membranes would break down, and he, the scientist in charge, has documented it all.”

Like their American counterparts in Vietnam, Australian soldiers had been told very little, if anything, about the health effects of long-term exposure to herbicides. According to an Australian army handout, “Instructions for Spraying Herbicides,” the spray was not “toxic to humans when dispersed as a spray on vegetation,” but “casualties can be caused by spillage of the chemical concentrates on the skin and clothes by the spray. Therefore protective clothing and equipment is worn, and simple safety precautions are to be followed.” Side effects from weedicides and soil sterilants are:

But Graham Bell, Queensland president of the Vietnam Veterans Action Association recalls that members of his unit were told that they had absolutely nothing to worry about. “In my unit we were told the chemicals were harmless to humans and animals, that they did no permanent damage to the environment, and that the major disadvantage was that when regrowth occurred (a few weeks after spraying) it would be much more vigorous—just like giving the vegetation a burst of fertilizer. Troops of another unit, 5 R.A.R., were drenched with chemicals sprayed by American aircraft; they were told, ‘It won’t even hurt dumb animals.’ ”
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Had Australian military personnel in charge of defoliation efforts consulted the US Army on herbicides on human health, they would have read that Agent Orange was “relatively nontoxic to man and animals. No injuries have been reported to personnel exposed to aircraft spray. Personnel subject to splashes from handling the agent need not be alarmed, but should shower and change clothes at a convenient opportunity.”

According to the American manual Agent Blue was also “relatively” harmless. “Normal sanitary conditions should be followed when handling Blue. Although it contains a form of arsenic, Blue is relatively nontoxic. It should not be taken internally, however. Any material that gets on the hands, face, or other parts of the body should be washed off at the first opportunity. Clothes that become wet with a solution of Blue should be washed afterwards …”

Neither the American nor the Australian military explain how grunts in the field might be able to shower or change their clothes immediately after exposure to toxic chemicals, or avoid eating food or drinking water contaminated with arsenic
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or dioxin.

Shortly after he was assigned to spray herbicides, Gibson, his face covered with a burning rash, entered Nui Dat hospital complaining of severe gastroenteritis (an inflammation of the stomach and intestines) and suffering from high temperatures. The doctors who examined him were bewildered, concluding, just as American doctors examining personnel with similar symptoms in other regions of Vietnam did, that their patient was suffering from overexposure to the heat. Entering the hospital for a second time, Gibson was transferred to Vung Tau, where he was examined by nine doctors, all of whom seemed mystified by his symptoms.

“I was really concerned because I just couldn’t walk. The whole of my body, all over my groin and everywhere, was covered with a rash. But it was weeping and everything was just short of falling off. And I said to these guys, ‘What the bloody hell have I got?’ And they said, ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, we think we know what it is. We think we can …’ But I says, ‘Yeah, you think you can what?’ And they said, ‘Oh, just take it easy, mate, we can fix you up.’ But hell, when you’ve got nine doctors looking at you and they don’t know, and when they come back with some younger doctors and start pointin’ and lookin’, it makes you a little bit worried. And still to this day the VA isn’t able to tell me what is was, or is.”

Draining his glass, Wares grimaces and with mincing sarcasm announces, “Why, it was the
heat
, mate, don’t you know that? The heat of course. We accepted that explanation at the time because that was all they ever told us, all we ever heard. It’s the tropics, boys, that’s what it is. And that, we now know, is just so much
bullshit
. Because people here in Queensland live in the tropics, and do they all run around with bloody skin diseases? We accepted the explanation at the time that our rashes were due to the heat, but we don’t believe a bloody word of it anymore. And I can tell you this. Never, never did they tell us anything about herbicide spraying, or about putting on any extra clothing or taking precautions against the spray. In fact at the time I wouldn’t have known what the word ‘defoliant’ meant, and that’s a fact, mate. I just wouldn’t have known. Bob Gibson of course knew something more because he
actually sprayed, but the average serviceman, the average Australian, wouldn’t have had a clue.”

Gibson nods his head in sad agreement. Since his return from Phuoc Tuy Province he has suffered from skin rashes, insomnia, violent rages, and other problems symptomatic of dioxin exposure. His ability to work impaired by physical and emotional conditions for which he could find no cure, Gibson applied to the Australian Repatriation Commission for disability payments. But the commission, using language that might easily have been excerpted from an American VA form letter, rejected his request. About Gibson the commission’s psychiatrist wrote: “In this particular case, the patient is a thirty-two-year-old man who has a mild anxiety state. He sets himself up as a martyr and has suffered basically at his own hand by not allowing the memories of Vietnam and their associated emotions to fade with time. His present condition is due to his basic inherited personality pattern and his wish for martyrdom.”

During the twelve months he spent in Vietnam, Gibson had gone on numerous ambushes and had fought in a fierce two-day battle with North Vietnamese regulars in which the Australians were outnumbered and nearly destroyed. His unit’s motor positions wiped out, ammunition running low, and the NVA preparing for a final assault, Gibson had given up all hope of surviving the battle when American helicopter gunships arrived. Before the “Puffs”
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appeared, says Gibson, he had concluded that “we were all dead men.” In its initial rejection of his request for disability, the commission informed Gibson that he had spent very little time in combat; therefore, wrote the commission’s psychiatrist, “Vietnam could not really have been as traumatic as he now tells.” But later the commission reversed itself, acknowledging that Gibson was indeed a combat veteran while continuing to argue that his experiences in Vietnam were not responsible for his “anxiety condition.”

In retrospect Gibson says that he and the nineteen-year-olds with whom he served may have placed too much trust in people who either did not know or did not care what the effects of toxic chemicals might be on Australian soldiers. “As infantry soldiers we thought we knew what the hell we were doing, but really we were so naïve. We never thought that our government or our own military commanders would allow the use of anything that might have adverse effects on us as troops. And we used to walk through plantations of rotten banana trees that were just burstin’ at the bottom, you know, rottin’, stinkin’, with these tiny dwarf bananas on them. So we’d just walk through and pick them. They were sweet as hell, and we used to eat them all the time. No one ever told us not to. And the water, we used to get it out of streams and drink it. And one time I can really recall quite well. We went through this thick foliage, and it had all this sticky shiny stuff on it, and it stunk, I mean it really stunk. And we were going through this stuff and there was no two ways about it, it had been defoliated. And yet no one ever gave it one second thought that we were there, touching the stuff, getting it on our arms and face. No one thought.”

Gibson’s observations are substantiated by Australian authors John Dux and P. J. Young, who through careful examination of US General Accounting Office reports, including “grid coordinates and details of all missions flown by C-123s from 1965 to 1968,” found that Phuoc Tuy Province had been heavily sprayed with Agent Orange. Matching the GAO reports with Australian Defense Department maps, the authors concluded: “One can prove conclusively that Australian troops operated in defoliated areas, sometimes within a day of missions.”
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Dux and Young also point out that although the US Ranch Hand operations may have been responsible for the destruction of 12 to 21 percent of the total land in South Vietnam (an area approximately the size of Massachusetts), C-123s spraying was only one source of the toxic herbicides to which Australian and American veterans were exposed. Helicopter pilots, for example, needed only the approval of their unit commander before leaving on a defoliation
mission, and it is quite possible that some areas of the province—particularly around base camps—were unofficially sprayed on numerous occasions. Spraying from trucks, riverboats, and by backpack also required only the approval of the unit commander.

Another possible source of contamination was from tanks that were used to spray both pesticides and herbicides directly upon or near base camps. Australian pilots have stated that following herbicide missions, empty spray tanks were refilled with pesticides that were then sprayed directly upon the base camp. Commenting on the possibility that residues from herbicides might have been dispersed in this way, one pilot said: “An interesting thing is that after the spraying missions, which occurred about every month with these aircraft, the rubber trees with which the Task Force area was covered shed their leaves rather alarmingly. After spraying for anti-malarial purposes there would be a sudden increase in skin infections for no particular attributable cause, apart from the fact that it followed the spraying.”
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When one considers the amount of semi-authorized, unauthorized, and clandestine spraying in Vietnam, as well as wind drift and the fact that an estimated 14 percent of the Agent Orange sent to Vietnam is unaccounted for, it is apparent that the full extent of the defoliation campaign may never be known. What is clear is that Vietnam veterans whose units are not listed by the Department of Defense or General Accounting Office as having been in spray zones could very well have been exposed to toxic chemicals either in and around their base camps or on ambushes and search-and-destroy missions in the surrounding jungle.

When his son Cameron was born with a “noncorrectable” birth defect, Jim Wares wanted to know why. But doctors were unable to give him a satisfactory explanation, and he decided not to dwell on the boy’s misfortune. After all, Wares told himself, he had survived Vietnam, was married to a fine woman, had a good job, and the boy, except for missing fingers, was beautifully formed, an optimistic and intelligent child whom Wares says is fond of making up stories and playing practical jokes with his
hand. One evening, for example, Wares and his wife left their son with a babysitter who, summoned to the bathroom by the boy’s cries, discovered him standing near the toilet bowl. Feigning distress and holding out his hand with the missing fingers, the boy announced that he had accidentally “flushed the fingers away.” The babysitter, says Wares, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.