When Army veteran Steve House tells people he was exposed to
Agent Orange, the toxic defoliant the Department of Defense (DOD)
sprayed on trees, vegetation and rice fields during the Vietnam War, the
first thing he’s typically asked is where he was stationed in that
country. But House has never been to Vietnam. He didn’t join the
military until three years after the last American troops evacuated
Saigon.
In 1978, House, now 56, was an E-4 specialist and bulldozer operator
with D Company 802nd engineers at Camp Carroll, a U.S. Army base in
South Korea, where House said he and four fellow soldiers were ordered
to dig an enormous trench on the base, then bury 250 barrels of Agent
Orange.In separate, exclusive interviews, former soldiers House, Bob Travis and Richard Kramer each told IBTimes how their postwar exposure to the harmful agent has had a profoundly negative effect on their lives and that the DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) continue to call them liars.
"They didn't tell me what we were burying, but on the side of the 55-gallon barrels it said in bright yellow and bright orange letters, 'Province of Vietnam, Compound Orange’,” House said. “We knew that stuff was bad, and I had a lot of guilt about what I’d done to the people in Korea. I also felt really betrayed by my own government and the country that I love. "
Travis, an Army private first class and one of the two truck drivers who dumped the Agent Orange along with House, said he didn’t know much about Agent Orange at the time, “but our sergeant, who’d been in Vietnam, told us this was the stuff he had sprayed on the trees. We just did what we were told. It isn’t right that the government keeps lying about what happened at Camp Carroll.”
READ MORE: http://www.ibtimes.com/dark-legacy-long-after-end-vietnam-war-new-questions-raised-about-agent-orange-exposure-including
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