Sons and Daughters in Touch Father’s Day Celebration to be a Virtual Event

The SDIT Father's Day celebration at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been cancelled due to the pandemic. However, in collaboration with VVMF, SDIT is holding a virtual Father's Day ceremony on Sunday, June 21. As part of that program, VVMF and SDIT are requesting that Gold Star families and Vietnam veterans submit tribute videos honoring the fallen and their families.

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VA Unprepared to Deal with a Second Wave of COVID-19, Top Officials Say

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is saddled with an antiquated supply chain that is short of personal protective equipment (PPE) -- including N-95 masks and gowns -- swabs and other vital equipment to deal with a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, VA officials said Tuesday.

The VA's health care system currently has about a 30-day supply of protective gear on hand, but would need a supply backstop of at least 60 days or possibly six months to cope with a resurgence of the novel coronavirus in the fall, said Dr. Richard Stone, acting head of the Veterans Health Administration.

At a hearing of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, asked, "So, Dr. Stone, we're not where we need to be?"

Stone replied, "That is correct."

In his testimony, he added, "We recognize that a future pandemic wave may test all of us" in terms of the demand for adequate supplies for health care workers to protect themselves and treat patients.

For decades, the VA has relied on a "just in time" supply chain for deliveries that has been severely strained by the current pandemic, Stone said.

"This system has not delivered the response necessary," he said, but stressed that health care workers are adequately protected despite the shortcomings.

"Just in time for PPE is not the way to go," said Deborah Kramer, the acting under secretary for Health for Support Services at the VHA, who joined Stone at the hearing.

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June Willenz, Champion of Women in the Military, Dies at 95

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She didn’t serve in the military herself. But she saw the armed services denying equal benefits to female veterans, and she crusaded to make a difference.

June A. Willenz, a longtime human rights activist and champion of women in the military, died on May 3 in Bethesda, Md. She was 95.

Her daughter Pam Willenz confirmed the death. She said Ms. Willenz had had a heart attack after emergency hip surgery.

Ms. Willenz was an advocate for women in the armed forces at a time when they were largely ignored. Her 1983 book, “Women Veterans: America’s Forgotten Heroines,” provided one of the first comprehensive examinations of women in the armed services. It exposed inequities between men and women and led to congressional hearings, as well as to improved benefits, services and career opportunities for women.

As devoted as she was to women veterans, Ms. Willenz never served in the military herself. Her focus on

“She had files of causes she wanted to be a part of,” Pam Willenz said in an interview. “If anything crossed her path with a human rights or social justice element, she wanted to dig deeper and see what she could do about it.”

Causes that drew her attention ranged from rape victims in Africa to the mistreatment of pets in the United States.

But her biggest cause was striving to achieve equality and recognition for women and other marginalized people in the armed services. She brought veterans’ voices into the civil rights movement. She was the first woman to lead a presidential subcommittee on disabled veterans; she developed the first Legal Aid project for veterans with discharge problems; and she worked with Congress to create special offices for women and members of minority groups within the Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs. She even wrote one-act plays dramatizing the conflicts confronting women in the military.

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Contamination detected in Riverside Park soil tests

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A Wausau City Council representative is calling for environmental cleanup at a west side park after soil testing performed in April showed multiple exceedances of state Department of Natural Resources soil standards, validating long-held concerns by residents in the area.

For years, residents worried about potential soil contamination in Riverside Park and asserted there may be issues with cancer-causing soil dioxin levels in the that could exceed state standards. Now, that assertion is a reality, after the city’s April 2020 environmental testing revealed concentrations of dioxin and furan that exceed the DNR’s not-to-exceed direct contact limits for a non-industrial setting. Based on the city’s initial analysis, concentrations of one dioxin and one furan were more than double state soil limits for a non-industrial setting.

Multiple exceedances were identified below a culvert that empties into the park and neighbors an area that once housed a cold storage building at the former SNE plant. One area of the cold storage building was used as a “drum accumulation area” for hazardous waste.

Based on initial data and analysis by the city’s consultants, the other eight soil samples taken in the park away from the culvert outfall area also identified low-levels of contaminants, but those concentrations did not exceed state soil standards.

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VA acknowledges it’s ‘not there yet’ with coronavirus testing for employees

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The Department of Veterans Affairs does not have on-demand coronavirus testing for its employees up and running just yet, despite its best intentions to screen anyone who presented symptoms or believed they had been exposed.

VA has tested about 12% of its health workforce for the virus, Richard Stone, executive-in-charge at the Veterans Health Administration, told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Wednesday afternoon.

His comments contrast with those the department made one week ago before another congressional committee, when Jennifer MacDonald, chief consultant to the deputy VA undersecretary for health, told a House appropriations subcommittee any symptomatic employee or anyone who wanted a test could be screened.

“We’re not hearing that,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), the committee’s ranking member, said. “We’re not hearing that from the folks on the ground. We’re still hearing that they’re not being tested.”

“Senator, you are exactly right, we’re not there yet,” Stone said. “Although we’ve tested over 12% of our employees, and it is our intent to have on-demand testing for all of our employees, we’re not there yet.”

VA’s labs have the capacity to process 60,000 coronavirus tests a week, Stone said, but the department lacked the swabs and cartridges necessary to fully screen employees.

“Simply when we issued the guidance to go to on-demand testing for our employees, we ran out of swabs because of some problems with UPS shipping,” he said. “That was a national problem with the crashing of UPS systems for a weekend. We have now recovered from that. Right now, we have about 60,000 tests available, but we do not have the ability to institute on-demand testing for our employees. It is our intent to get there.”

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June 6, 1944 D-Day

Bill aims to help track veterans’ exposure to toxic burn pits

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U.S. Rep. Brian Mast is pushing legislation aimed at tracking veterans’ exposure to burn pits overseas.

“There’s no doubt that burn pits are the Agent Orange of our generation,” Mast said in a Tuesday statement.

“Service members that were exposed in Iraq and Afghanistan are seeing horrible health effects and are dying as a result.”

These open-air pits are used in some countries to burn garbage and human waste. The pits can emit harmful toxins affecting veterans’ lungs or even causing cancer.

Mast, a Republican, is joined on the bill by former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who represents Hawaii in the U.S. House.

“Millions of our brothers and sisters in uniform have been exposed to the toxic chemicals released from toxic burn pits and are suffering and dying without treatment,” Gabbard said.

“This is an egregious failure of our nation to those who serve. It is too late for some, but more are suffering and more need help. While there has been some progress on this front in the Defense Department and [Department of Veterans Affairs], more must be done.”

Mast and Gabbard were behind similar successful legislation, allowing servicemembers to join a registry tracking those who have been exposed to the pits.

“We’ve made progress, but much more must be done, which is why we need this bill to track exposure to burn pits so exposed veterans can get the care they need,” Mast said.

The new bill would require the VA to track cases and brief Congress on numbers each quarter. Health care providers must also inform veterans of the registry should they complain of exposure.

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Flooding in central Michigan exposes decades of Dow Chemical’s environmental crimes

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A major health crisis threatens residents of central Michigan after last week’s flooding that displaced more than 10,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes. There have been widespread concerns about potential chemical leakage from the flooded containment ponds at the Midland Dow Complex and the spread of dioxin by the flood from a Superfund cleanup site downriver to larger areas.

In response, Dow Chemical announced last Wednesday that there were “no reported product releases,” and the state of Michigan announced on May 27 that it would begin testing soil sediments taken from the Tittabawassee River this Thursday. However, the statement from Dow and the small-scope testing proposed by the state are woefully inadequate and in no way reassuring. The potential environmental and health crisis triggered by this flooding is a long time in the making and rooted in Dow’s decades-long criminal practice of dumping chemicals, failure to ensure safe working conditions, and above all, disregard for the health and well-being of the population.

In Dow’s reporting of its flooded containment ponds, the contents of these ponds were left unmentioned, and their real purpose was glossed over. Dow’s containment ponds collect chemical run-offs from a large cement trench running throughout the Midland Dow complex. As explained to the WSWS by a former Dow employee, the company “had trucks come in that would take the containers [of various chemicals], but they didn’t have a reservoir to collect any residual chemicals” besides the containment ponds, “which would overflow” with ground level chemicals when it rained.

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COVID-19 Hits Veterans Homes, VA Says New Home-Care Program Still Months Off.

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Macabre news of bodies stacked in a makeshift morgue. Federal emergency teams swooping in to take control of state veterans homes where the coronavirus has killed scores. For veterans, getting care in their own homes has gone from a preference to a matter of survival.

“It’s definitely scary,” says Rob Grier.

His father, Robert Grier Sr., served in Korea and Vietnam, and Rob says if he weren’t taking care of him, his dad would probably need to be in a nursing home. The VA has been good to them over the years, Rob says, especially when his father got lung cancer.

“We were just blessed to have a great team at the VA during his care for that, “he says, “but still, a pre-existing condition, that’s not good for COVID.”

Grier wants to keep taking care of his dad, but he’s not sure he can without help from the VA caregiver program, which is not yet open to older veterans.

Since 2011 the VA has helped caregivers with a stipend, but only for Iraq and Afghanistan vets. In 2018 the VA MISSION Act promised to expand to veterans of Korea and Vietnam, and eventually all veterans who need it.

But who needs it? The VA finally announced its highly technical answer to that question in March after a two-year wait. Anyone with at least a 70% disability rating from the VA can apply. It’s now available to veterans disabled by illness, not just injury. That’s particularly important to Vietnam vets suffering from cancer and other diseases linked to the defoliant Agent Orange.

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Vietnam co-chairs debate on protecting environment in armed conflicts

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Protecting the environment in conflicts is a crucial need and a shared responsibility of the international community, Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy, head of the Vietnamese Mission to the United Nations, has affirmed.

New York (VNA) – Protecting the environment in conflicts is a crucial need and a shared responsibility of the international community, Ambassador Dang Dinh Quy, head of the Vietnamese Mission to the United Nations, has affirmed.

Quy made the statement at an online discussion jointly held by the Vietnamese Mission to the UN, the Swiss Mission to the UN, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the peace organisation PAX on May 29 in response to the UN Protection of Civilians Week.

He stressed the need for States to pay attention to restore the environment after conflicts to help civilians soon stabilise their life and maintain sustainable peace.

He told participants that Agent Orange/dioxin has caused serious impact on Vietnam’s population and the environment, as over 3 million Vietnamese people are dioxin victims and hundreds of thousands of hectares of land are contaminated by the chemical.

Meanwhile, addressing dioxin consequences needs huge resources and time, he added.

The diplomat took the occasion to thank UN member states, organisations and the international community for supporting Vietnam in dioxin detoxification and helping dioxin victims.

Delegates at the event emphasised the need for more discussions at UN and UN Security Council mechanisms on environmental protection in armed conflicts as there is a close connection between protection of the environment, protection of civilians, and development goals.

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Born with agent orange, Hanoi teacher escapes fate

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Whenever Lan Anh wants to give up, she remembers her family and reaches back out to life.

In a room in Xuan Mai Town of Hanoi's Chuong My District, Le Thi Lan Anh shows her students some photos taken on a recent trip to central Vietnam. At only 1.3 meters in height, there seems to be little difference between the beaming teacher and her pupils.

Forty-four years prior, Do Thi Lan had struggled to hide her tears when first holding the 1-kilogram, convulsing Lan Anh. Her father Le Huy Toan, a veteran of the war in central Vietnam, immediately knew the cause of his newborn daughter’s agony.

"Take her home and care for here. If she lives, that is good. If she does not, we can do nothing," the couple were told after visiting several hospitals in search of answers.

Lan Anh’s mother was unable to properly feed her daughter due to constant bouts of crying.

"The baby cried, then I cried," said Lan, who had to send her daughter to her mother-in-law after eight months of maternal leave.

All of their neighbors were skeptical, thinking Anh would not survive.

"This is my granddaughter, I’ll take care of her," maintained her grandmother, who used wet towels to daily wipe Lan Anh's fingers and toes in the hope her joints would stretch and heal.

Whenever Lan Anh fell sick as a child, her father would drop everything and take her to hospital. When she finally started walking, her grandmother gave her a heavy pair of sandals to ease the pressure of spinal deformity.

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