ONE MAN'S DEATH
Berger, JohnJ.
ONE MAN'S DEATH BY JOHN J. BERGER Chuck Broudy grew up with five brothers and sisters in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Detroit, where his parents—Russian Jews—ran a "Mom and Pop" deli, then...
...He could be driving on the freeway in extremely bad traffic and fall asleep...
...it accused several major corporations of violating product safety laws in manufacturing atomic bombs...
...Broudy crouched low in a trench bottom, covering his face with his arms...
...They're trying to wear me out," Pat remarked...
...Through closed eyelids, Broudy could see the bones in his arm...
...They said they didn't have them and that the VA did, and that the Marines had his DD 1141.1 wrote to all these places and they didn't have anything...
...It was in 1968, eleven years after Hood, that Broudy, now retired from the Marine Corps, began suffering lapses of consciousness...
...But unlike other atomic test victims who have strangled in red tape and quietly abandoned hope, she persisted...
...Abraham Lincoln...
...Because Chuck was a pilot, he had to have a comprehensive annual physical examination, including blood tests, to keep his flight clearance...
...With thousands of other men, Broudy was shuttled to Camp Desert Rock for the Plumbob atomic test series, part of a Cold War effort to prepare troops to fight an atomic war...
...She found that dozens of references, including studies of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, linked lymphoma with low-dose radiation...
...The Atomic Energy John J. Berger is the author of "Nuclear Power: The Unviable Option...
...Once inside the body, radioactive particles can stay there for life...
...A judgment in the Broudys' favor would also assist the civilians who have brought more than a thousand claims seeking compensation for deaths and sickness caused by atomic testing...
...The stationery of the VA's Bureau of Veterans Appeals in Washington, D.C., bears the motto: "To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan...
...By the war's end, he knew the Corps would be his career...
...After about eight hours of maneuvers in the blast vicinity, Broudy's forces began the standard military procedure for decontamination: They dusted each other off with brooms...
...The records bore a notation stating that the missing papers had been sent to the Bureau of Medicine in the Navy Department in Washington, D.C...
...At 4:40 a.m., Hood went off with a flash of light and a hellish roar...
...This was in April—and in August it was denied for the first time...
...By this time, Broudy was seriously ill, and his wife appealed the VA decision herself...
...Cancer usually occurs within twenty years of exposure," Pat said, "and Chuck was finally diagnosed nineteen years after Hood...
...A biopsy revealed that the lump was malignant...
...After flying hazardous wartime missions, Broudy had little reason to feel apprehensive about his new assignment...
...While her third claim was still pending, Pat Broudy filed suit for $10 million in damages...
...Within minutes, the Marines crawled out of their trenches in a fierce, hot wind beneath a roiling, multicolored mushroom cloud that consumed miles of empty sky...
...As a veteran, Chuck was entitled to free medical care anyway, but disability and death benefits would have meant $1,100 per month for the Broudy family, and school financing for his son, David...
...One morning in September 1976, just after the Broudys returned from a Hawaiian vacation, Chuck noticed a large lump under his arm...
...All were rejected...
...Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia...
...I was watching the news on television one night in 1976," Pat Broudy remembers, "and there was this man at a veterans' hospital telling the reporter that he was dying of leukemia caused by a nuclear test that he witnessed called 'Smoky.' " That night, Chuck called the man in the hospital, Paul Cooper, and told him that he had been in the test right before Smoky...
...In late October 1977...
...Hood," about five times more powerful than the Hiroshima blast, would be the largest atomic bomb ever detonated at Yucca Flats, and Pat would be able to see it from her window...
...Providing military housekeeping services seemed dreary duty for a fighter pilot, but he rarely complained, even to close friends...
...atmospheric nuclear test program probably could not have taken place in Nevada...
...As the Marines marched over the blazing desert floor—advancing, feinting, retreating—the dust blew so thick that helicopter pilots participating in the test maneuvers often could not see their objective...
...It was still dark on the morning of the "Hood" test, July 5, 1957, when Chuck Broudy and his companions crept into the test-site trenches that had already been used for other atomic tests...
...Veterans seeking remedy through the courts have been stymied by the Feres Doctrine, a legal precedent that keeps the courts from ruling on military matters...
...She was told by the Government that radiation could not cause lymphoma...
...This was also the opinion of Dr...
...ONE MAN'S DEATH BY JOHN J. BERGER Chuck Broudy grew up with five brothers and sisters in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Detroit, where his parents—Russian Jews—ran a "Mom and Pop" deli, then a tailor shop, later a small dry-cleaning store...
...If Hood was typical of other tests, troops with Geiger counter readings above a designated level were washed until their readings were acceptable...
...The doctors told him it had been in his body for years...
...But the VA at the time ordinarily required that a veteran must show some sign of harm within one year of separation from the military service...
...He was cheerful, soft-spoken, and good-natured—too honest to hold on to a job in a local health food store because he told customers exactly how old the foods were...
...It was very strange," Pat Broudy recalled...
...For the Broudy family to receive the disability award in 1977, the VA would have had to rule that Chuck's illness was incurred in, or aggravated by, military service...
...Some arrived in tanks...
...He was too weak to eat unaided...
...Officially, military personnel at Hood were allowed to receive a radiation dose of ten rems a year...
...Joint U.S.-Japanese studies on victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings began in 1951, and evidence of serious long-term harm mounted every year...
...Chuck had developed lymphoma—cancer of the lymph gland...
...None of his physicians could provide an adequate medical explanation...
...A victory for the Broudys would set an important legal precedent for thousands of atomic test victims—military and civilian...
...Chuck Broudy died...
...The suit was dismissed in Federal Court and now is before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals...
...Broudy's father had fled Russia at sixteen to avoid conscription in the Czar's army, but the son eagerly joined the U.S...
...He could be talking to somebody, and he'd fall asleep...
...The law provides that "when a reasonable doubt arises regarding service origin, the degree of disability, or any other point, such doubt will be resolved in favor of the claimant...
...It was like an earthquake and an avalanche, under supernaturally bright light...
...The medical bills were piling up...
...The Broudys first took their case to the Veterans Administration's Los Angeles office...
...I believe the Navy removed them at the time I sent for them," Pat said...
...Chuck grew progressively weaker during 1976, and his lapses of consciousness and hospitalizations became more frequent...
...When the dust had subsided, they were taken by helicopters to a spot only 400 yards from Ground Zero, where the earth had just been a glowing inferno...
...It looked like a very bright sunrise," she said later...
...The standard covered only gamma radiation, similar to x-rays...
...Glyn Caldwell, epidemiologist at the U.S...
...Recently, a Princeton physicist, Professor Frank von Hippel, calculated the probable radiation dose that Broudy received at Hood: From the radiated soil on which Broudy maneuvered, he could have received ten rems or more...
...He put in some ground duty in Japan, and then, in 1957, was assigned as a logistics officer to a provisional unit headed for the atomic weapons testing site in southern Nevada...
...No more than two rems could come from radiation by the blast...
...Sparks to Pat, "it is unlikely in light of present knowledge that his disease resulted from radiation exposure...
...Other troops marched in...
...They can keep it up forever...
...Alpha, beta, and neutron radiation exposures were not measured...
...Then they went back to camp and showered...
...Broudy took his difficulty stoically, hardly mentioning it to friends...
...If Major Broudy's diagnosis was accurately established as Lymphoma, Stage IV-B, Non-Hodgkin's nodular mixed histiocytic lymphocytic," wrote a Rear Admiral H.A...
...At the time of the explosion, Broudy was in an earthen trench about three miles from Ground Zero...
...Strontium lodged in bone marrow can cause leukemia or bone cancer...
...I wrote to BuMed and asked for the deleted portions of his medical records," Pat said...
...Gradually, the Broudys became convinced that Chuck's lymphatic cancer was caused by the radiation he received at Hood...
...He fought in the Korean war as a fighter pilot, receiving five Air Medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross...
...Although more than two thousand atomic radiation cases have been filed with the VA, the agency has paid only twenty-two claims for suffering from test radiation exposure...
...He could no longer participate in his appeal...
...But when Pat finally received Chuck's medical records, she found that all of his blood and urine analysis reports and comprehensive physicals had been removed...
...Her complaint charged the nation's highest officials, past and present, with negligence, medical malpractice, and fraud...
...Government, so adamant in disclaiming responsibility for the consequences of the tests, knew, even as it conducted them, a great deal more about the effects of atomic radiation than it told the public...
...No one warned them that they might be inhaling lethal particles of plutonium, cesium, and strontium...
...In any case, the pre-test military briefings of that day were designed to allay fears of atomic tests...
...A single speck of plutonium can trigger lung cancer...
...Cooper then gave Broudy some advice...
...At five feet, six inches, he had to stand up to see properly from the cockpits of the gull-winged Corsair fighters he piloted during World War II, but his height did not prevent him from serving with distinction...
...One day he phoned his wife, Pat, and told her to get up at 4:30 the next morning to watch the eastern sky from their home in Santa Ana, California, about 200 miles from Las Vegas...
...We were living on credit cards," Pat recalls, "and were going very rapidly into debt...
...Marine Corps in 1940 at the age of twenty...
...We went to the Veterans Administration right away and filed our claim," Pat continued...
...Nor did anyone explain that internal exposures to radiation can be more deadly than a single external radiation exposure...
...Had the Government not kept this information to itself, the U.S...
...When Pat filed the claim, she had requested Chuck's medical records, seeking early (but unrecognized) lymphoma symptoms to help establish a "service connection" between his lymphoma and his radiation exposure...
...Their claim was denied on the grounds that Major Broudy's illness was not caused by radiation exposure...
...davidjohnson Commission had once recommended that participants be kept at least seven miles from Ground Zero, but now the Pentagon was making the safety rules, and military commanders were allowed to station their men as close as one mile from the blast...
...After her husband's death, she continued the struggle against the VA, filing five separate appeals...
...In one experiment, several volunteers sat directly under the explosion of an A-bomb suspended high overhead from a balloon...
...These tests had left behind high levels of plutonium...
...The noble sentiment has a false ring for Pat Broudy...
...Thousands of men had already participated in the exercises, which were intended to hone the Pentagon's atomic warfare capabilities and to calibrate the effects of nuclear tests on troops...
...The shock wave caved in trenches, covering the troops with dirt and dust...
...All Pat really knew was that the incident and the symptoms matched up...
...Joshua trees and yucca plants burst into flames or were blown off the desert floor...
...The U.S...
...Skeptical, Pat went to a medical sciences library where, using medical indexes, she began studying lymphoma...
...Because "low-dosage" radiation typically causes latent injuries that are imperceptible for many years, it was Catch-22 for the Broudys and many other veterans and their families...
...from the blast itself and its fallout, his eight-hour dose would have been sixty rems...
...But how could they prove it...
Vol. 45 • August 1981 • No. 8
