The author of this article was scheduled to be a keynote speaker at our 2021 Co. A, 1/501st Vietnam Vet reunion, but due to new circumstances, he is unable to attend. Gus Kappler, MD, was a trauma surgeon at the 85th Evac in Phu Bai during 1970 and 1971. During the war, 54,300 gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed over Phu Bai, Vietnam. Six months ago, he was diagnosed with Chronic B-Cell Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL). The VA admits it was caused by Agent Orange exposure. Gus alleges that he served honorably but is now being punished. This is a copy of the speech Gus was planning to give…
NOTE: This post includes several links to outside articles and reports to substantiate statements made herein.
I understand that the causation of my CLL was beyond my control. I’m not referring to God, predestination, or family history.
Fifty years after arriving in wartime Vietnam, I am now a victim of Agent Orange. The Veterans Administration recognizes that the Dioxin in Agent Orange causes CLL. This herbicide was manufactured by Monsanto and Dow Chemical, who deceivingly guaranteed its safety when in contact with humans. There was suspicion of a former CEO of Dow falsified research reports proclaiming the herbicide’s safety. See: https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Paul_F_Oreffice
See: http://cybersarges.tripod.com/AOphotos.html
So what?
Well, the 85th Evacuation Hospital, where I served as a trauma surgeon for a year, ’70-’71, was located there. We drank, made ice cubes, and showered with the contaminated water and inhaled Dioxin in the dust.
How did this tragedy evolve?
Early on, our military leaders in Vietnam realized that fighting a guerrilla war against an indigenous enemy was a whole new ballgame. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were determined to bring Ho Chi Minh’s life-long dream to fruition by uniting North and South Vietnam. They also wished to repulse the ill-conceived invasion of their sovereign country by the United States.
The jungle canopy obscured enemy movements. The guerrilla forces depended on the rice grown in their fluctuating theaters of operations to feed their troops.
Killing more than two birds with one stone, i.e., our soldiers, the military brass decided to irradicate the jungle canopy and crops by spraying herbicides. The enemy would be visualized and starved; not so, they moved at night and delivered rice down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The US government and military agreed, including presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, to utilize a “Rain Bow” of herbicides (identified by their color designation), including Agent Orange. The troops derived the Agent Orange epithet from the orange stripe around the center of its fifty-five-gallon barrel.
Operation Ranch Hand sprayed at least 20,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange directly over our troops and the landscape of South Vietnam. War planners increased the concentration of the sprayed solution to two parts per million. Five parts per trillion (100,000 times less) causes cancer in laboratory rats. Napalm was added to complete the devastation. It most likely aerosolized the Dioxin to more easily be inhaled.
As Reported by Special Assistant Admiral E.R. Zumwalt, Jr., May 5, 1990 reveals an apathetic approach from the Department of Veteran Affairs. See: http://gulfwarvets.com/ao.html
The definition of naiveté.
Yes, all the US government and military leaders did agree, including presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, to utilize multiple herbicides, including Agent Orange. Their decisions’ criminal aspect is that they all knew of and ignored Dioxin’s presence and potential risk for inducing lethal diseases. The first sinful act.
Our leaders disregarded the 1925 Geneva Protocol that prohibited the use of chemical and biological weapons. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol
“Kennedy examined ‘tricks and gadgets’ that might give the South an edge in the jungle, and in November 1961 sanctioned the use of defoliants in a covert operation code-named Ranch Hand, every mission flown signed off by the president himself and managed in Saigon by the secret Committee 202…”
See: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/29/usa.adrianlevy
“After Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency, he ordered an increase in the use of herbicides. In 1968, Dr. Lee DuBridge warned President-elect Nixon about a National Institutes of Health study that showed a connection between the herbicides sprayed across Vietnam and ‘stillbirths and malformations in mice.’ Yet by 1970, 200,000 gallons a month of Agent Orange were being used. “Defense Secretary Melvin Laird considered curtailing the use of such herbicides,” says historian C.B. Currey, “but General Creighton Abrams, commander in Vietnam, and his boss, Admiral John S. McCain, Jr., Commander-in-Chief, Pacific, as well as Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reaffirmed the necessity for its use.”
And!
“During the war, many people understood some of the dangers and protested the use of Agent Orange. Congressman Robert W. Kastenmeier urged discontinuing the use of herbicides in Vietnam, a demand echoed by an editorial in the Washington Post. In 1967, Dr. Arthur W. Galston, often referred to as the man who discovered Dioxin in 1943, joined with other scientists to plead with Washington not to use Agent Orange in Vietnam. The Federation of American Scientists, members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 Nobel laureates, the Rand Corporation and others urged terminating this form of chemical warfare. In fact, in 1969, United Nations Resolution No. 2603-A declared that the use of chemical agents in a manner used by the US in Vietnam was a violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, a war crime. The UN General Assembly passed this resolution by a vote of 80 to 3.” See: http://politicalaffairs.net/killing-me-softly-how-agent-orange-murders-vietnam-s-children/.
See: http://gulfwarvets.com/ao.html
The Vietnam War officially ended in 1975. Our Nation deployed over two million servicemen and women to Vietnam on land and sea. All, to varying degrees, were exposed to Agent Orange and other “Rain Bow” herbicides that contained Dioxin.
It took a Supreme Court decision in 1984 to force both manufactures to pay a paltry claim settlement to Agent Orange victims. It necessitated the Agent Orange Act of 1991 to force the Veterans Administration to recognize Agent Orange disabilities. Until that time, veterans suffered and died from various diseases directly caused by Dioxin. Their children were born with grotesque birth defects. They did not receive the compensation they certainly deserved from an agency representing the country they willingly and honorably served. This evasion of responsibility was a callous decision by our government and its politicians to discard and not help our warriors. Was it done for the nebulous rationalization of the “greater good?”
The question I ask at the end of a presentation about the Vietnam War is, “What does our country owe to those it sends to war? To rehabilitate or discard?”
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/us/politics/veterans-burn-pits-congress.html.
Also, see https://youtu.be/Q-FDupMy8J8.
When engaging these twenty-first-century warriors, the Veterans Administration appears to be reincarnating the old playbook they applied to Agent Orange disability. But that is beyond the scope of my message.
Yes, I feel violated, deceived, victimized, cheated, and scared.
I do feel better having ventilated.
I love my country, would not wish to live elsewhere, and would, as most Vietnam Veterans, again serve in Vietnam.
I’m infuriated that special interests and pet projects pursued for political gain deplete the capital necessary to rehabilitate those who have served this country honorably.
Our great Nation should not discard its veterans! Never!
I was wounded at Phi Bai in July/August 1970.
Army Dr.s & personnel took great care of me.
THANK YOU. !!!
Art. Edgette, Former MSgt. USMC
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ido it again ,but now just hanging on,what a ride ,i took with the 199th c-3 -7 ,eat up with the same symptoms,no energy cant breath,plus a pearasight that eat your lungs,twice,
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I didn’t know who all the players were in making the decision to use AO, but it doesn’t surprise me. I was in the Mekong Delta area in 1968 when we were getting sprayed. I do feel ignored, betrayed, and demoralized by our government and the policy makers. What I want to say, and need to say about this article and all the stonewalling that was done, would not be printable. Thank you
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I agree whole heartedly with Jamie Thompsons comments as well as the doctor.
I too have Ischemic heart disease along with other combat injuries. Only took me 50 years to get Compensation!!
the VA is NOT your friend.
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Like many others, exposure to Agent Orange during my Vietnam service (1st Cav ’70-’71) eventually led to serious health problems. In my case, primarily Ischemic Heart Disease… so far. I’ve never read a better, more concise description of the Agent Orange issue than this one by Dr. Kappler.
Thank you for your service Doctor, then and now!
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My Vietnam veteran husband has tremors. He served in 1970-71, when things were winding down. He was a medic, but not a trauma medic. He was attached to a land-clearing company, which, after reading this, I’m assuming had used chemicals before using bulldozers to flatten the land. I’m at a loss for words right now. (John will tell you that isn’t like me. At all.) We have never asked for anything from the VA once he got his discharge papers, we were done.
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It took me seven years to even get recognized by the VA. Upon from RVN in 67, my teeth began falling out. I enden up with dentures. Which the VA did not pay for. Now at 75 I have developed “essential tremors” which the VA has said is not related to my tour in RVN. I am at a lost as to what to do. I have no disibility rating therefore have little or no influenced with the VA.
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A Vietnam soldier told me that they had been told that the agent was safe enough for them to rub all over their skin. Adding injury to injury.
Kids being kids thought nothing about making themselves look orange.
Us country kids know that crop dusters spray poisons on crops. The difference was the agents were far more deadly.
The US government has refused to pay the promised care for fighting for this country. The pharmaceuticals companies knew they lied, knew they were poisoning our men and the Vietnam people. They did not just strip the foliage. They did not care that were destroying healthy people; all so they could make billions.
Dwight Eisenhower warned us in his final address about the corrupt Military Industrial Complex.
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The article tells a story that has been told before. I really do not have near the problem with the decision to use Agent Orange as I do with the attempts to cover up and deceive its malicious effects. Particularly regarding convoys, Agent Orange and Rome Plow operations saved lives by pushing the jungle back. Now it costs lives, but the original intent was honorable. On the other hand, the decision to deceive and the repeated attempts to avoid responsibility cannot say that. They were the squalid acts of little men trying to save, money?, face? reputation?, what? And the sad fact is they still continue.
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As with so many stories told about Vietnam, this one affects so many Veterans and their health… I served 2 tours as an infantry Platoon Sargent with the 4th & 25th Infantry Divisions… The VA has not served the veterans very well, that is from the top down… From the bottom up those delivering health and well being services to veterans are compassionate and well meaning people.. I too have a number of health anomalies, some diagnosis’d and some unknown but life altering… It took me over 40 years to finally get into the VA system for health care & benefits, at 75 I doubt I will get these benefits for long…. Its been frustrating dealing with the VA
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From Mar 65 to Jan 70, I served in Vietnam. I did 13 months at Camp Holloway in Pleiku.
Thirty years later, in 1995, I had my first heart attack. I had three heart attacks in less than 90 days, which ended my job as a Corporate Controller.
I had been a runner until my knees gave out and had turned to walk 4-5 times a week with a seven-mile walk on Sundays. I was fit, not over-weight, never had high blood pressure, spent a few hours a week in the dojo. In 2001, I had a stroke mild with no physical impact. In 2014, I had another, more serious, stroke, and ended up in a VA hospital.
The VA told me I’d never walk again. After a couple of weeks, a doctor asked me if I had made an Agent Orange claim. I knew what it was, had walked in it, even rode in a Ranch Hand mission, and remember being told that Agent Orange was safe. It only killed plants.
So Agent Orange took 30 years to cook my heart and another 19 years for me to find that out.
The VA Doc said, “They asked you to go and fight, but they didn’t tell you they were going to poison you.”
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