Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange

391 Pages·2014·2.25 MB·English

by  Peter Sills

TOXIC WAR
TOXIC WAR
The Story of Agent Orange
Peter Sills
Vanderbilt University Press
NASHVILLE
© 2014 by Vanderbilt University Press Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2014
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file LC control number
2013032550
LC classification number DS559.8.C5S55 2014
Dewey class number 959.704'38—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-1962-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8265-1964-1 (ebook)
For my Grandfather, Elias Fife
For Crow
And most of all, for Susan
Contents
Foreword
Introduction: One Statistic
1. Techniques and Gadgets
2. Trail Dust
3. The Single Solution
4. “We Didn’t Have Any Information That It Was Safe”
5. The Chemical Corps and Dioxin, Part 1
6. Ranch Hand
7. Good Citizens
8. The Chemical Corps and Dioxin, Part 2
9. The Rise and Fall of Ranch Hand
10. Medicine from the Sky
11. “There Is No Immediate Cause for Alarm”
12. Activist Science
13. Bionetics
14. The End of Trail Dust
15. Guinea Pigs
16. Two and a Half Million Plaintiffs
17. Politics and Epidemiology
18. The Management Committee
19. “People Lost Track of What Was True”: The Agent Orange Research, Part 1
20. Validation: The Agent Orange Research, Part 2
21. The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Agent Orange Research, Part 3
22. The Ongoing Cost of War
Epilogue: One Story
Glossary
Appendix A
Appendix B
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
This book has been gestating for a long time—since the early 1980s, when
Vietnam veterans and their families brought a class action against the federal
government and the manufacturers of Agent Orange. The court ordered the
defendants to turn over every piece of paper in their possession mentioning
either dioxin or herbicides used in the Vietnam War. The case was settled before
going to trial, and all the protective orders covering these records were removed.
In a former life, I was an attorney tangentially involved in that litigation, so I
had a pretty good idea what was in those documents. I telephoned Joseph
Ditalia, the deputy clerk in charge of the federal court in Uniondale, NY, for
permission to see them. He enjoyed my request more than any good bureaucrat
should, laughing nonstop for about forty-five seconds and then warning me
(while still gasping for breath): “Some reporter came down to check them out
the other day, and lasted about fifteen minutes.”
I didn’t grasp what had amused him so much until I visited the courthouse.
Boxes nearly bursting with paper were piled ceiling high, completely filling two
large basement rooms. I never bothered to count them all, but ten million pages
is a conservative estimate. Mr. Ditalia, Cynthia Mann (the court’s operations
manager), and the rest of the courthouse staff were uniformly friendly, helpful,
and efficient, despite my sometimes odd and difficult demands.
More times than I care to remember, I led a research crew of six Vermonters
down to Uniondale to copy many of these documents. It was a preposterous task,
and I thank the crew—Anne Miller, Lawrence Black, Jeffrey Gilbert, Trish
Nunan, Tim Sestrick, and Spencer Smith—for making it sort of fun (and for
doing an excellent job).
In this book, I’ll refer to the lawsuit as the Class Action and to these records
as the Class Action Documents. These documents will be identified in the same
manner as they were submitted to the court during discovery. A list of these
identification labels and their respective sources is included at the beginning of
the Notes section. All these documents have since been taken from the
courthouse and placed in a government repository. I’ll occasionally focus on the
documents themselves, instead of the information contained in them, especially
when they omit an important part of the story. Sometimes documents that ought
to exist aren’t there. Others fail to mention important events and conversations
that unquestionably took place. It would be unfair to automatically presume an
intent to hide something, but it’s a possibility that needs to be considered. I’ll
also quote from some of the depositions taken during the Class Action. Unless I
specifically state otherwise, any testimony mentioned in this book comes from
those depositions.
My analysis of the government’s Agent Orange health studies is based largely
on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request made by
Congressman Ted Weiss (now deceased). At the time, attorneys for the
American Legion and Vietnam Veterans of America were preparing a lawsuit
against the government for failing to conduct this research properly, and they
invited me to look through these documents. I’d like to thank Bart Stichman and
Mark Venuti of the National Veterans Legal Services Project for giving me that
opportunity, and Congressman Weiss and his committee’s investigator, Mark
Smolonsky, for graciously providing me access to those records. The rest of the
book is based on interviews (all of which I conducted myself), government
documents, scientific journals, newspaper articles, and presentations made at
scientific and other public conferences.
This is an enormous topic that can’t be covered completely in one book. I’ve
focused primarily on the decisions made by industry and government concerning
2,4,5-T and dioxin. I’ve also shied away from matters already well covered by
other writers. This book includes a bibliography for those who want to study
those other areas in more detail.
I’d also like to apologize in advance for using so many abbreviations.
Chemicals, diseases, and government bureaucracies all tend to have lengthy,
complex names. Abbreviations can be awfully bloodless, but they’re less eye-
glazing than repeating long-winded technical jargon over and over.
I could not have written this book without Anne Miller. Anne’s general
brilliance, astute reading of the documents, and capacity to grasp biology,
epidemiology, statistics, and other branches of science well enough to impress
experts in those fields were all indispensable. Thank you so much, Anne.
I would also like to thank Eli Bortz for his inspiration, encouragement, and
support in taking this book to print.