Saving The Survivors
There Is Nothing Patriotic About The Way The Government Is Treating America's Sick War Veterans
By ANTOINETTE BOSCO
May 25 2003
Since we have been drenched in yet another war, the cry in the country has been that we must honor our troops, more than 100 of whom have lost their lives in Iraq. People who opposed this confusing war have been unjustly blasted as being unpatriotic. But nothing dishonors the troops more than the disgracefully crass treatment they get from the government that sends them to risk their lives in battle once they are out of uniform and then called "veterans."
Recently, the flag-waving House of Representatives slashed veterans' benefits again. At almost every Veterans Administration care center in the nation, veterans are put on a waiting list when they need services; veterans' claims for disability compensation and pensions get routinely rejected. The Supreme Court in February flatly rejected an appeal by Persian Gulf War veterans who claimed they were made ill by biological agents supplied to Iraq by a U.S. research company.
If this disgraceful treatment of veterans is not unpatriotic, what is?
For more than three decades, I have been following the unbelievable treatment of veterans made ill because of their service experiences but shunted aside by the U.S. government. That's because my younger brother, Joe Oppedisano, an Army man from 1954 to 1962, was one of the victims of the U.S. Army's experimentation with chemicals when he was on active duty in Panama. When you sit at the bedside of a once dynamic, now dying loved one, you ask a lot of questions.
Joe had told us how he and some of his buddies became deathly sick after a 1958 spraying by the U.S. Army. They were taken to the hospital and told they had food poisoning. He never could forget the next scene, the double exposure of more spraying, and then the sight and smell of once beautiful Flamenco Island, which had become "a slick, brown island, with the banana trees all dead, and 10 million fish dead on the beach, a stench to make you die."
Battling illness ever after, diagnosed later as hairy cell leukemia, my brother went back to the VA to seek financial assistance. They rejected his claim and those similarly afflicted buddies, saying they had no proof because their Army records had been lost in a fire. He had no recourse for 13 years.
Then, by a strange coincidence, Joe found a box of items he had brought back from Panama, still wrapped in the Army newspaper The Buccaneer, containing stories and photos of the spraying and devastation. The article mentioned some of the toxic materials by name. With this proof, he got the help of a Veterans Service administrator. Joe won his case in 1994, after 22 years of severe illness, with the VA admitting it had made "clear and unmistakable errors" in his case.
Ever since, Joe has helped open legal doors for other veterans who live with serious service-based medical illnesses.
The files I have kept in these three-plus decades tell a sad story, indeed, of how our government has first given rah-rah praise to people in uniform and then thrown them aside when they became veterans in civilian clothes.
Listen to these:
On May 8, the National Academies, an organization of scientists, engineers and doctors, unveiled a report saying that government often underestimated the radiation doses for veterans who participated in aboveground nuclear-weapons tests from 1945 to 1962. We learned a year ago from The New York Times that sailors were sprayed with nerve gas in a Cold War test. From 1964 to 1968, hundreds of them were exposed to "sarin gas and the VX nerve agent, which are both highly lethal, and other agents that are known carcinogens," said U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson, a Democrat from California. He had pressured the Pentagon to identify the 4,300 participants in Project SHAD.
There are so many more sad headlines, including "Agent Orange and Cancer Are Linked in New Study" (The New York Times, Jan. 24, 2003), reporting that the defoliant used in the Vietnam War was linked to a form of leukemia; and "U.S. Reports Disease Link to Gulf War" (New York Times, Dec. 11, 2001), which reported that veterans of the Persian Gulf War were nearly twice as likely to contract Lou Gehrig's disease as other troops.
That last admission vindicated U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays, a Republican from Stamford and a rare congressman. Shays is chairman of the House Human Resources and Intergovernmental Relations Subcommittee, which has held hearings about possible exposure to chemical weapons during the war. Shays brought a Connecticut veteran, Maj. Michael Donnelly of South Windsor, to the hearings in 1997 so that members of Congress could see this once vibrant pilot who flew 44 missions in the Persian Gulf War but is now paralyzed by advanced Lou Gehrig's disease. I had the privilege of meeting this victimized veteran, who, with his sister Denise, has written about the more than 110,000 gulf war veterans who have become sick with cancers, heart conditions and neurological conditions of unknown origins. In their book, "Falcon's Cry, A Desert Storm Memoir," Maj. Donnelly questions why the military establishment "let us die, when all the while they know exactly what it was that poisoned us and, no doubt, what would have saved our lives." I could relate so completely.
This Memorial Day, we should honor the troops who have died in war, but equally important, we should honor veterans who are still with us by demanding that the government give them the financial and medical care they need and deserve.
Antoinette Bosco of Brookfield has recently revised and expanded "World War I" (Facts on File, 2003), written by her late son, Peter Bosco, in 1991.
Copyright 2003, The Hartford Courant
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