Last week, when Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) Chief
Policy Officer, Army vet Melissa Bryant, spoke before the Senate and
House Committee on Veterans Affairs, one of the items she addressed was
the exposure of vets to toxic exposure to chemicals, metals and other
hazardous materials through burn pits. During her testimony, she
told them she believes these exposures could be "the Agent Orange of our
era."
This statement came from both her fear of what lies
ahead and her experience with the past as Bryant was exposed to burn
pits in Baghdad, and her father's exposure to Agent Orange during his
tour in Vietnam.
"I was helping him look through his VA
disability claims and he was speaking to all the issues of Agent Orange
which you can trace back to when he was in Vietnam in 1968," Bryant
says. "So, 50 years later he is still suffering from the effects of
walking through defoliated areas with Agent Orange. So that's something
that from my deployment experience a decade ago, I have to question,
where am I going to be 40 years from now?"
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