Waiting for an Army to Die Read Free Page A

with thirty-eight years in the army, Gen. Shinseki promised to transform the Department by streamlining access to health care for veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), and for veterans who are seriously ill due to their exposure to Agent Orange. According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, one hundred thousand Vietnam veterans will apply for disability compensation over the next two years. Veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars also need help coping with wounds, PTSD, and illnesses related to exposure to depleted uranium (DU), and other toxins.
    Money cannot ameliorate the pain of veterans who are dying of cancer and other Agent Orange related diseases. It won’t bring back soldiers who expired knowing their government had stonewalled, deceived, and abandoned them. Money pays for bills, hospital stays, hospice care and funeral expenses. It will never compensate an army poisoned on the field of battle and left to die when it returned home.
    More than three million Vietnamese are suffering from exposure to Agent Orange/dioxin, including at least five hundred thousand to one million children. I have spent time with these children in Hanoi’s Friendship Village, family homes outside ofDanang, and in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tu Du Hospital. Some are missing arms and legs and eyes; some have enormous heads or strange burned bark skin. My son took photographs of these children, and I wrote
Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical Warfare in Vietnam
. Agent Orange families welcomed us into their homes, they answered our questions, and asked us to share what we’d seen and heard in Vietnam with the world.
    I wanted to write this new introduction to
Waiting for an Army to Die
, while keeping the original content of the book, as a kind of segue into the legacies of chemical warfare on the Vietnamese people.
    It is my hope that the tragedy of Agent Orange will convince, perhaps shock, the American people and others throughout the world into demanding that corporations and governments stop turning Mother Earth into a toxic sewer. All human beings have the right to live long, productive, healthy lives without having to worry about the threat of cancer. The United Nations and other international bodies should create a World Environmental Bill of Rights, making it a crime against humanity to poison the word’s rivers, lakes, oceans and land. If we fail to do that, we are condemning future generations to suffer unnecessary pain and premature death.
    Cleaning up the environment is not the cure for cancer, but it will slow down and in time dramatically reduce the rate of illness and death from this disease.
    Paul Rhetershan wanted the world to know that toxic chemicals like dioxin kill human beings. Were he alive today, I’m sure he would be pleased to see how many people are working, in so many ways, to spread this message, even if government officials refuse to act and corporations still refuse to listen.

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Ketchup and Water
    (BIEN HOA, SOUTH VIETNAM, 1966)
The twin-engine C-123 Provider transports are loaded, the booms on their wings checked. There is no real damage to any of the craft from the hits they took the day before, and the crews are checking the coordinates, air speed, and other details of the day’s mission. They will be airborne before daybreak, flying south, then east, and after circling at high altitudes they will descend in tight formation to spread thousands of gallons of Agent Orange over a target approximately 8.5 miles long, with each plane covering a swath about 250 feet wide. Within the dense mangrove forests are colonies of Viet Cong who have struck at the surrounding countryside for years, only to vanish into an impenetrable stronghold. But the men who participate in Operation Ranch Hand are not always told what lies beneath the foliage, or what they are spraying. Their assignment is to strip away the enemy’s cover, flushing him into the open where, tacticians believe, he will be