Right now, there’s a soldier or Marine who deployed to Iraq
as the new year rolled in and tensions escalated between the U.S. and Iran.
That service member was trained to dismount and return fire during convoy
ambushes, take cover during airstrikes, and detect improvised explosives during
patrols. He can confidently engage the enemy at any phase within the continuum
of combat, from indirect fire to a knife fight.
There’s one enemy he faces that he is not trained to fight,
much less defeat. An enemy that respects no battle positions, needs no grid
coordinates to strike, and avoids no confrontation or foe. In fact, this
particular enemy is a byproduct of America’s edge in manpower and technological
superiority. A veritable product of the environment in which fighting occurs.
One that has killed more Americans by the droves than any other enemy since the
dawn of modern-day warfare. That enemy is toxic environmental exposure.
Toxic environmental exposure, within the context of this
commentary, does not refer to every possible hazard or contaminant that a
service member might encounter. Some are unavoidable occupational risks that
are incidental to military service. High intensity noise, inoculations for
certain geographically concentrated diseases such as malaria, natural airborne
particles like sand and dust, and extreme heat and cold, just to name a few. As
if those weren’t bad enough, however, some toxic exposures are of the
self-inflicted variety. Evils with downstream consequences, necessitated by a
perceived, more immediate greater good. In other words, a “win now, pay later”
problem, where the “pay” part often comes with conditions, after the fact, that
beg the questions of who ultimately wins in the end and whether it was worth
the cost.
Case in point, once military generals figured out that
removing foliage in the jungles of Vietnam would make it easier to spot enemy
troop movements and positions from the air, a dioxin called Agent Orange was
widely used to kill the foliage and, in turn, detect and hit a more visible
enemy. But it would also kill an estimated 2.8 million U.S. veterans from
diseases as a result of handling, breathing, and unwittingly consuming the
dioxin. It would take the government decades to finally own up to the problem,
when Congress passed and President George H. W. Bush signed the Agent Orange
Act of 1991. This federal law required the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
to award benefits to veterans who were diagnosed with certain diseases and
served on active duty in the Republic of Vietnam during the recognized war time
period.
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