One Republican senator killed a veterans benefits bill as Trump plans to deport Vietnam war refugees.
My father had been home from his tour in Vietnam for five years when he, along with the rest of the world, watched US service members shove perfectly good helicopters off the flight deck of the USS Okinawa and into the South China Sea. This was Operation Frequent Wind, the final escape plan for US personnel upon the collapse of the war, and when the endgame finally came, it came fast.
The choppers were dumped overboard to make room for more choppers to land, drop their human cargo and be likewise dumped because so many people – soldiers and civilians – were running for their lives from the conflagration on the Vietnamese mainland.
It was the ignominious conclusion to an ignominious war the US had known for years it could not win, but kept fighting anyway for pride and profit. They knew they couldn’t win in Vietnam before my father got there, and yet they let him go anyway, he and nearly three million others who either volunteered like my dad or were pressed into service by the draft.
The war in Vietnam killed more than 58,000 US military service members. Millions upon millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and Thais were killed, maimed or displaced. My father kept walking for another 46 years after he came home, but a part of him he could never quite name died there, too.
The war is not over.
A needed extension of the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act collapsed in the Senate last Monday at the hands of one man. The Act, according to Military.com, “would extend eligibility for disability compensation and health care to ‘Blue Water’ Navy veterans — service members who were aboard aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and other ships, some of whom have fought for years to prove they were exposed to Agent Orange. The dioxin-laden herbicide has been found to cause respiratory cancers, Parkinson’s disease and heart disease, as well as other conditions.”
The House of Representatives passed the legislation back in June by a vote of 382-0, making it one of the most bipartisan bills to move through that chamber in decades. The legislation was held up for a time by VA Secretary Robert Wilkie, the Trump appointee who replaced Trump’s last VA secretary, a self-confessed do-nothing named Peter O’Rourke.
Wilkie thought more research was needed on the effects of Agent Orange, despite the fact that the science on the effects of the chemical and its chief agent, dioxin, were established long ago. Over 2 million servicemembers were exposed to the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange sprayed across Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1961 to 1971.
