One of my first beats as
a reporter for an alternative newspaper in Boston was to cover the
various issues of concern to the Vietnam veterans community in the late
1970s and early 1980s. This was when the federal government—and the
traditional vets groups, damn them—were stonewalling the Vietnam guys
and calling them losers and claiming that PTSD was a coward's dodge to
get on the federal dole. (I heard all of these arguments. It is largely
lost to history that the people who took the Vietnam veterans and their
issues seriously were elements of what had been the antiwar movement—the
people who ran the GI coffeehouses, the alternative press.)
One
of the most frustrating problems was the staggering panoply of physical
ailments that arose from proximity to Agent Orange, a Dioxin-laden
defoliant that some geniuses decided to ladle onto the landscape of
southeast Asia to deprive the enemy of cover. People who got this poison
sprayed on them got sick. People who handled it got sick. The
government dealt with this crisis the way it dealt with all these crises
at the time. It pretended it didn't exist. (Around this time, President
Ronald Reagan closed all the VA's psychiatric outreach clinics. Noble
cause!) One of my best friends in sportswriting served there in the Air
Force, and his job was to load the Agent Orange onto airplanes. He died
of liver cancer in 1991.
Consequently,
any reference to Agent Orange sets the blog's Spidey-sense tingling.
This week there were two of them. The first is a story about how our
military efforts in Vietnam are still devastating the Vietnamese. The
other is a story about how our government is still stumbling around in
the dark.
Dioxin,
the primary poison in Agent Orange, lingers in the food chain and in the
water supply practically forever. Its effects continue long after
initial exposure to it, as the people of Vietnam continue to learn to their horror.
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