A Death Delayed: Agent Orange: Hidden Killer of Vietnam

This really happened. For privacy, I have changed the names of the people in this soldier’s story. This is the story of the last few days in the life of a Vietnam vet who died, in 1995, from the aftereffects of Agent Orange exposure. I wrote this essay in 1995 as a memento for my friend who was devastated by the loss of her fiancée. I gave it to her, then put the manuscript on a shelf where it resided until 2017. Cleaning out a closet, I rediscovered it. Over the years, I have worked with colleagues and had neighbors and friends who came home alive from Vietnam. None of them escaped wounds from that conflict. Most of them suffer, to this day, from nightmares, flashbacks, anger, anxiety, and grief. Many of them brought home deadly and hidden toxins from Agent Orange. The relief, for those soldiers, at having come home ‘alive’ has been, in many cases, replaced by the nightmare of deadly later-onset cancers. Also, there have been birth defects in some of their children. The Vietnam Veterans of America provides a brochure entitled: Service-Connected Disability Compensation for Exposure to Agent Orange. This brochure is dated: ©May 2016. This is happening now. Vietnam veterans are dying now. Even fifty years after their exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Hospice. This is where the last great battles of nations are fought. Futile battles. Stupid skirmishes. This is the meeting place for a hopeless and perverse truce between good and evil. It is the place where nuns do good work to provide ‘last aid’ for soldiers who are dying from the evil of warfare. Danny lies here in this place, dying as surely from his wounds as if he had stopped a bullet in Vietnam in 1968. Of the many enemies hidden in those jungles, Agent Orange was perhaps the most insidious. It hid within the very bodies of soldiers who returned home from those jungles without apparent wounds. You might as well have ordered his body bag in ’68. Kept it in a trunk. I have tried to honor him by telling some of his story, recording, to the best of my ability, my eye-witness account of ten days during the final moments of his Vietnam war.