In 1978, House, now 56, was an E-4 specialist and bulldozer operator with D Company 802nd engineers at Camp Carroll, a U.S. Army base in South Korea, where House said he and four fellow soldiers were ordered to dig an enormous trench on the base, then bury 250 barrels of Agent Orange.
In separate, exclusive interviews, former soldiers House, Bob Travis and Richard Kramer each told IBTimes how their postwar exposure to the harmful agent has had a profoundly negative effect on their lives and that the DOD and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) continue to call them liars.
"They didn't tell me what we were burying, but on the side of the 55-gallon barrels it said in bright yellow and bright orange letters, 'Province of Vietnam, Compound Orange’,” House said. “We knew that stuff was bad, and I had a lot of guilt about what I’d done to the people in Korea. I also felt really betrayed by my own government and the country that I love. "
Travis, an Army private first class and one of the two truck drivers who dumped the Agent Orange along with House, said he didn’t know much about Agent Orange at the time, “but our sergeant, who’d been in Vietnam, told us this was the stuff he had sprayed on the trees. We just did what we were told. It isn’t right that the government keeps lying about what happened at Camp Carroll.”
The widespread use of Agent Orange in Vietnam was a dark chapter in U.S. military history that proved devastating for countless Vietnamese civilians as well as hundreds of thousands of American troops. After decades of denial, VA in the early 1990s first started acknowledging the direct
scientific links between exposure to the herbicide and a variety of cancers as well as Parkinson's disease, diabetes, birth defects and more. But the government has never talked much about the allegedly harmful ways in which DOD stored, tested and then disposed of Agent Orange on U.S. military bases across the globe before, during and after the war.
The VA still consistently denies claims from veterans like House who say they were exposed after the war but can’t empirically prove it. And in 2009, the Supreme Court made it impossible for any veteran to sue Monsanto Co. and Dow Chemical Co., makers of Agent Orange. Without comment, the justices declined to review a 2008 ruling by a U.S. appeals court that the veteran plaintiffs could not pursue their claims for their alleged injuries from their exposure to the defoliant.
“No one’s accountable,” said House. “Not DOD, VA, politicians or the courts. Everybody’s running from the liability.”
But the paradigm for veterans exposed to Agent Orange after the Vietnam War may be about to change in their favor. A study published last week in Environmental Research found that airmen who flew and maintained the C-123 Provider aircraft long after the planes were used to spray Agent Orange over Vietnam were exposed to dangerous levels of the dioxin that remained in the aircraft.
The American Legion, the nation’s largest veterans organization, responded to this news last week with a new call for VA to extend disability compensation benefits to former C-123 aircrews.
“I believe this new study will blow a big hole in the DOD and VA’s story,” House said. “Now there’s proof that vets were exposed well after the Vietnam War. But the C-123s are just the tip of the iceberg.”
What Happened at Camp Carroll?
For nearly a decade, House, who lives in Algonac, Mich., 45 miles north of Detroit, has been fighting VA to get coverage for his multiple illnesses, which several doctors including two from VA have said, in writing, were caused by his Agent Orange exposure at Camp Carroll. House suffers from an enlarged liver, failing pancreas, and other problems that have all been scientifically linked to Agent Orange.
Despite his worsening condition and inability to work, House was given just a 30 percent disability rating by VA for Post-Traumatic Stress (PTSD), which is not related to his exposure.
The Army now admits that toxic chemicals were dumped in that large ditch in 1978, though officials insist that Agent Orange wasn’t one of them. After House first went public with his story to an Arizona TV station in May 2011, a joint U.S.-South Korean investigation team reportedly spent as much as $4 million looking into his claims.
Col. Joseph Birchmeier, head of that investigation, said at a 2012 press conference that he was “99.9 percent confident” that Agent Orange was never buried there. But he also said it is possible that the toxic chemical may have been buried there and removed without leaving a trace for investigators to find years later.
The investigation did reveal that other herbicides, pesticides, solvents and chemicals were buried where House said he buried the Agent Orange. In 2011, groundwater testing at the base reportedly found trace amounts of 2,4,5-T – an herbicide that is a component of Agent Orange.
“We’re telling the truth,” House said. “Bob [Travis] saw the barrels first, then came up to me and said, ‘I don’t have a good feeling about this. They have a whole damn warehouse of Agent Orange’.”
"They Wanted to Put Me in a Straitjacket”
Richard Kramer, the bucket-loader operator who worked with House, Travis and others at the Carroll dump site, said that after just a few days on this toxic job, he started to experience numbness in his feet. His health degenerated from there.
"My condition got so bad that in a few weeks I became paralyzed from the waist down," Kramer said. "I was medevaced to Seoul and from there was transported to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where I stayed for the next two and a half months. They could not find what was wrong with me. I was diagnosed with Reiters' Syndrome, which they also call reactive arthritis. They never took care of me. There was no follow-up. I've had this in my body all these years. I am 50 percent disabled now. But I can't work. I have no doubt that this was because of my exposure to Agent Orange."
When Kramer went looking for his medical records, he said some of them were missing or blacked out.
Today, ProPublica published another in their outstanding series on Agent Orange, this one reporting the link found by VA researchers between Agent Orange and hypertension. VA itself presently doesn't recognize hypertension among the fourteen ailments for which it provides care and compensation, but the decision to change that now rests with the incoming Trump administration.
