In the Grip of Agent Orange
Wilcox, Fred A.
In the Grip of Agent Orange WAITING FOR AN ARMY TO DIE by Fred A. Wilcox Random House. 222 pp. $ 15.95 hardcover. $6.95 paperback. In Waiting for an Army to Die, Fred A. Wilcox has compiled a...
...That the VA, the Pentagon, the chemical companies, and the EPA are now in firm control of the issue of herbicide health effects seems undeniable...
...Instead, the VA has lent its wealth, an annual outlay of $24 billion, to the creation of a sham Agent Orange program that demeans the veterans and defends the interests of the Department of Defense, the chemical industries, agribusiness, and the most conservative elements of medicine and science, all of whom parrot the credo of "better living through chemistry...
...We read, once again, about the victims...
...There are other lost opportunities Wilcox might have explored to broaden and enliven his text...
...Typical of Wilcox's reporting is the experience of the Straits...
...The main problem is that in spite of the moving portrayals of the victims, Wilcox seldom takes his material beyond the understanding or ideas that have already been widely reported by the mainstream press...
...I The bombardment of a nation not only by dioxins, but by other labor-saving chemicals that are delivered to us untested and without adequate regulation...
...Michael Uhl (Michael Uhl, formerly with Citizen Soldier, is a free-lance writer...
...II The acknowledgement that for the millions in this country unfortunate enough to be pressed by grave medical problems, the Agent Orange victims are only the most visible...
...After years of heroic personal effort, in which the parents exercised Lori often for hours at a time, there was dramatic improvement...
...Today, Lori attends a school for handicapped children...
...She showed no sign of becoming ambulatory, no gripping of fingers on toys, no sitting up...
...By digging a little deeper, Wilcox might have added a richer connective tissue to his narrative, which jumps from one tragic case to another...
...He got neither...
...As for some new interpretation of the now familiar events—so necessary to help us grip the complex conditions underlying the painful lamentations of the victims—it just isn't there...
...In Waiting for an Army to Die, Fred A. Wilcox has compiled a selection of tragic episodes from the postwar lives of several Vietnam veterans and their families...
...The trail has been opened up...
...The VA, as Wilcox points out frequently in his narrative, has been anything but the guardian of the veterans' interests concerning the issue of Agent Orange...
...In 1969, Jerry Strait, Lori's father, participated in the campaigns of the all-but-forgotten A Shau Valley, an area in Vietnam heavily sprayed by the U.S...
...We have a right to expect more from a book about Vietnam veterans and Agent Orange at this late date...
...Lori was examined by a doctor who said she suffered from a nerve disease for which there is no cure...
...Air Force with dioxin-laced Agent Orange and other vegetation-killing chemicals...
...The Straits, refusing to give up on their child, began a program of rehabilitation on the advice of a physical therapist...
...To name a few: f The dominance of the VA by the Department of Defense...
...He might have noted, for example, that the VA, with its network of 174 hospitals and clinics, is a latter-day bedlam for the approximately 10 per cent of the national veteran population whom the Government considers indigent...
...She began to have seizures...
...We feel pity, but we are no longer shocked, only further frustrated...
...It has refused to investigate the health consequences of exposure to the substance that contains the most deadly synthetic toxin, dioxin...
...Their daughter, Lori, was born apparently normal in every way, but after a few months, the child failed to develop...
...In discussing the VA, Wilcox passes up an opportunity to analyze that institution's role in greater detail...
...During Lori's infancy he began to develop rashes and other mysterious symptoms...
...Agent Orange is an important issue precisely because it gives us a keyhole through which to observe many interlocking social issues of significance...
...Jerry's mother alerted him to the Agent Orange controversy she had read about in the papers, so he visited the VA hoping to get answers and assistance...
...This orientation toward the poor might be laudable but for the clamor one hears from vets about the terrible services, the emphasis on high-tech medicine, the underhanded use of experimental drugs, and the often unsupervised "training" of medical students, whose ratio to certified physicians in the VA is far higher than in the rest of the hospital sector, private and public...
...As a combat soldier, Jerry was often exposed to the defoliants...
...In each case, the focus is on a debilitating health problem attributed to exposure to Agent Orange, and on the failure of the Government, especially the Veterans Administration (VA), to provide the necessary treatment, humane support, and compensation...
...The wider world beyond the VA's chicanery and the vets' litigation for redress and damages is missing...
...why has Wilcox chosen not to follow and improve upon it...
Vol. 48 • January 1984 • No. 1
