VA, Admit that Blue Water Veterans were exposed to Agent Orange!
- par: Susan V
- destinataire: U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs Secretary Robert McDonald
Currently the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) presumes that only veterans who set foot on Vietnam soil or served on boats in the country’s inland waters were exposed to Agent Orange. But other vets, sailors stationed on boats in “blue waters” offshore, insist they were also exposed to AO’s dangerous contaminant, dioxin.
According to an investigation by ProPublica, these Blue Water vets have a good argument. They say they were exposed because their ships sucked in dioxin-contaminated water that sailors used for showering, laundry, drinking and cooking. The distillation process used could have actually concentrated the poisons, and even though Navy policy advised against using water too close to contaminated shores, veterans claim that practice was “unavoidable” and routine.
Last April, adds ProPublica, a U.S. Court of Appeals agreed that there was reason to side with the veterans and ordered the VA to review its policy.
But earlier this month the VA denied blue water veterans’ request to be included among those exposed to Agent Orange, using the same old worn out excuse that there’s not enough “available scientific information" - the same excuse it’s been using for decades to deny benefits to veterans who were regularly sprayed with the herbicide, which was mixed with jet or diesel fuel, while stationed on land in Vietnam.
ProPublica says advocates have been pushing for over a decade for the VA to “broaden its policy” to include these 90,000 or so Blue Water Navy vets, some of whom are dealing with adverse health effects likely connected to their exposures to dioxin-contaminated water.
Sign this petition to demand the VA admit Blue Water vets were exposed to Agent Orange.
To VA Secretary Robert McDonald:
The routine denial of benefits to veterans has been and continues to be a dark stain on the integrity of America.
What may be most disturbing about the unconscionable denial of benefits to ill veterans who were no doubt exposed to contaminated waters while serving offshore, is ProPublica’s report that these vets were “initially deemed eligible for compensation under the Agent Orange Act of 1991, only to have the VA change its interpretation a decade later.
Furthermore in it’s recent report, which fails to conclude that Blue Water vets should be presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange, the Institute of Medicine “..confirmed that the intake of Agent Orange-contaminated seawater on Navy ships could result in exposures through the Navy’s potable water desalinization process.”
Based on my 24-year claim experience with the VA after a spouse who served on land in Vietnam died from leukemia, I've learned that one of IOM’s favorite and most deplorable excuses for denying benefits to veterans presumed to be exposed to Agent Orange, is the same excuse it’s using to deny claims of the Blue Water vets: “there’s insufficient evidence,” to presume a connection. But I say the IOM's research amounts to looking for whales in the forest, refusing to give serious consideration to all the existing evidence, cherry-picking, and hearing what it "wants to hear” and disregarding “the rest.”
Most unforgivable is that IOM and VA are not listening to the veterans who report that boats routinely recycled water too close to shore and evidence reported by numerous sources, including Unearthme.com, that after and during the war, a “good portion of unused Agent Orange was dumped in the open ocean…."
Furthermore the Blue Water Navy websites says there were several ways dioxin entered the blue waters:
the run-off of the millions and millions of gallons of herbicide sprayed on the land that drained by streams and rivers into the ocean; herbicide spray drift (up to 13% of what was sprayed) that settled onto the inland and offshore water surface; thousands of gallons that were periodically dumped into the ocean when the Ranch Hand spray planes had to eject their loads in an emergency; and the aerial spraying of inland waterways and shoreline water. Additionally, brown water sailors sprayed the shorelines of the canals and rivers they patrolled.
Attorney John Wells, whom ProPublica says has been advocating for the Blue Water Veterans for over a decade, admits he’s not surprised with the recent decision, because he and the veterans are “used to being betrayed by the VA." I understand completely.
The same week VA denied Blue Water Veterans’ presumed exposure to Agent Orange, it denied - yet again - death benefits to my children whose father served in Pleiku and died of leukemia at age 44, before the children even reached their teens. Even worse the Regional Office in Winston Salem, North Carolina went so far as to misrepresent IOM’s inexcusable excuse (as it was) to support its upteenth denial of benefits to my family, outright lying that IOM found “no connection” between AML (an acute leukemia) and Agent Orange.
But the IOM said no such thing. Basically the IOM is saying, on both issues, that it cannot rule out the connection.
I and others are saying that IOM just hasn't found the evidence that's actually out there - or hasn't looked for it where it exists.
John Wells told ProPublica that he and the vets are “going to fight this thing until we’re done or dead.” But that shouldn’t be necessary.
Therefore I, the undersigned, insist the VA change its policy immediately to include Blue Water Veterans as presumed to be exposed to Agent Orange
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