An endless war

Scott Gilbert was stationed in Vietnam for a matter of months before he was “shredded twice” by land mines. The injuries would lead to decades of complications and the eventual amputation of Gilbert’s left leg. 

“I was in [the U.S. Army] a year and 10 months. A year of that was in the hospital,” said Gilbert, a Hoover resident and Vietnam War veteran.

But it’s not the loss of his leg that Gilbert regrets about his service in Vietnam. It’s the exposure to Agent Orange, which he suspects has led to health complications across three generations.

He marched through fields that had been sprayed with the chemical herbicide, drank and bathed in rivers that it had washed into and, like most soldiers, had little idea of the potential hazards of contact with Agent Orange and other defoliants.

Gilbert, in addition to his injuries from land mines and shrapnel, has PTSD and a chronic skin blistering condition, which crops up every few months and first appeared while he was still serving in Vietnam. His youngest daughter had a pituitary tumor, and her son was born with hearing-related birth defects.

“They’ve tied those kind of things back to Agent Orange exposure,” Gilbert said.

Presumptive conditions

Agent Orange syndrome is difficult to classify and track because its effects can take many forms. According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website, more than 19 million gallons of herbicides, predominantly Agent Orange, were sprayed during the war to remove plants in the Vietnamese jungle. 

Exposure is associated with a list of what are called “presumptive conditions.” These are illnesses that could have occurred regardless of military service, but veterans’ exposure to herbicide chemicals is linked to a heightened risk.

These presumptive conditions include several types of cancers and nerve and skin conditions, among other illnesses: ischemic heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, chronic B-cell leukemia, both Hodgkin’s and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma, soft tissue sarcomas, respiratory cancer, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s disease, neuropathy, AL amyloidosis, chloracne and a disorder called porphyria cutanea tarda, which affects liver function and skin blistering.

The VA has also acknowledged some birth defects in children and grandchildren of Vietnam veterans as presumptive conditions.

Some presumptive conditions show up almost immediately after military service, while others don’t appear for decades. This makes the process of determining the source of a condition even more difficult, especially as Vietnam veterans pass retirement age and start to develop more health problems in general.

Dr. Kenneth Ramos, who has studied different elements of Agent Orange syndrome since the 1990s, said that looking at a single veteran is an impossible way to tell whether their condition developed due to exposure or other life factors. But when looking at the Vietnam veteran population as a whole, significant connections can be found that link Agent Orange exposure to certain medical issues, which allows veterans to receive benefits for those conditions.

Ramos is on staff at the University of Arizona and chaired the Institute of Medicine Committee on Veterans and Agent Orange for its 2014 update. Ongoing research is being done to study the strength of links between exposure and certain conditions such as hypertension, bladder cancer, hypothyroidism and Parkinson’s-like symptoms. Ramos said he is part of a group analyzing veterans’ genetic samples for signs of instability or changes in their genomes related to exposure, which can be another way to confirm whether veterans have Agent Orange syndrome.

Getting benefits

Dr. Vickie Sturdivant of the Birmingham VA Medical Center said Vietnam veterans can take an exam to see if they qualify to be placed on the Agent Orange registry. From there, veterans work with the VA to confirm their exposure and whether any medical conditions would be considered presumptive conditions. Illnesses that are not already on the presumptive condition list must be evaluated case-by-case.

If the VA determines that a veteran does have a condition related to Agent Orange exposure, the veteran can then file a claim for benefits and coverage of treatments. The VA Medical Center serves around 67,000 veterans, mostly in northern Alabama, and Sturdivant said they had given 7,954 Agent Orange registry exams as of December 2017.

“We always err on the side of the veteran. … Even if it’s remotely suggestive, then you default on the benefit of the veteran,” Ramos said of the VA’s approach to research on presumptive conditions.

However, many local Vietnam veterans felt that the registry and benefit claim process doesn’t always have that same approach. 

At a weekly Vietnam veterans support group meeting, held at the Hoover Vet Center in January, veterans spoke of receiving “the runaround,” repeated claim denials and months spent re-filing paperwork and finding doctors to assess their conditions. 

“In the handbook it says, if you’ve got boots on the ground, you’re exposed,” said one veteran at the meeting.

“These are things that the government won’t own up to, so we have to deal with these the best we can,” said another.

Army veteran and Ensley resident Daryl Osborne was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and prostate cancer, and he said he found it relatively easy to get benefits approved for these presumptive conditions. However, he’s heard of other veterans going “through holy hell” while trying to get disability benefits.

Gilbert said his daughter and grandson deserve benefits as well, though he is just beginning the Agent Orange testing process.

“I feel like all of that ought to be covered by the VA. They’re having to pay for that themselves. But it’s because of my exposure that they’re suffering from that, and my grandchildren are suffering with it. That’s the worst part of it to me,” Gilbert said.

Even the understanding that Agent Orange syndrome is difficult to diagnose doesn’t blunt the emotional impact for veterans who have felt attacked or ignored for their service since they returned to civilian life.

“It seems to me that when you don’t allow us to file a claim, you’re waiting for us to die out,” Fields said. “It’s something that makes you wonder if the country cares as much about you as they told you because they’re not willing to do the right thing about the whole situation. They’re just wanting to sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened, the same way they did us when we came back from Vietnam.”

Between public perception of the war and the emotional trauma, some of the veterans said they rarely talk about their Vietnam experiences outside of their support group. Indeed, many were glad to share their painful memories for the sake of spreading the word about the ghosts of Vietnam that continue to linger.

“It’s hard to explain war. If you haven’t been in it, it makes a different person out of you,” said Army veteran David Freeman, who has ischemic heart condition and Type 2 diabetes. “I wanted to give it to you as straight as I could, without any exaggeration, because war is real, it’s devastating, it’s a nasty business.”

Clyde Fields Sr.

Going to Vietnam forced Clyde Fields Sr. to “grow up pretty fast.” The Ensley resident was drafted in 1971, at the age of 19, and worked as a wireman handling communication wires for the Army. He served in Vietnam for 18 months.

“I saw some things happen that nobody at 19 should ever have to see,” Fields said. “I’ve seen the worst of the worst.”

He carries those memories with him. Fields’ PTSD means he often has to avoid crowds and social situations. He can’t drive at night because of the risk of flashbacks.

“A lot of things that happened in Vietnam happened at night. When you got into real bad firefights, it was at night. When you got shelled real heavy, it was at night. And it was very, very dark there. When they started shelling, that was the only light,” he said.

He once was 60 feet up a telephone pole when shooting began. Fields had a decision to make: jump, almost guaranteeing serious injury, or try to climb down the pole safely, leaving him an easy target for approaching Viet Cong soldiers.

He jumped.

“It wasn’t much of a choice,” the Ensley resident and Vietnam War veteran said. “It was a choice between living and dying. For me it was an easy choice. My thought was I’d rather have broken bones than to not be able to go home at all.”

Returning to Birmingham had its own challenges. Fields recalled being told not to wear his uniform home and being asked whether he had killed children. He said employers turned down his job applications if he mentioned his service.

“We had been given a stigma,” he said. “If you mentioned that you served in Vietnam, people would get away from you. They would just walk away.”

The bitterness, he said, hasn’t faded because he feels like Vietnam veterans’ treatment hasn’t really changed.

Fields recalled seeing herbicides handled and, in one instance, spilled while on a base in Vietnam. He said he feels lucky that signs of Agent Orange exposure appeared early. He had to have a liver biopsy at age 21 and found cysts on his bile duct. Fields has been on the Agent Orange registry for several years, though he hasn’t been approved for benefit claims.

Since he was drafted rather than volunteering, Fields said he thinks the VA should do more for its veterans with Agent Orange exposure. 

“I didn’t do it because I wanted to, I did it because the country said I had an obligation to the country, but the country didn’t have the same obligation to me,” Fields said.

Scott Gilbert

 “Devastated. Stupid. Aggravated.” That’s how Gilbert felt when he was drafted from Auburn University at age 20, because his grades had dropped.

Gilbert was even more surprised when his father, a World War II veteran, tried to talk him into flying to Canada to escape the draft.

“He said he didn’t have a good feeling about this war and didn’t see the point of me going over there in the infantry,” said Gilbert, who now lives in Hoover. “I couldn’t even consider it.”

He entered the Army 199th Light Infantry Brigade and was in Vietnam from July 1968 to January 1969, five weeks of which were spent in the hospital after stepping on a land mine and his bone marrow got infected. The injuries would lead to decades of intense leg pain and multiple procedures before his left leg was amputated in 2009. Gilbert’s right leg is in a brace, as well.

“If I had known it was going to be this much better, I would have cut it off the day I stepped on the mine,” Gilbert said, adding that he still experiences phantom limb pain. “It’s like real pain. It’s like the foot’s still there. Sometimes I’ll reach down to grab it, … [and] there’s nothing there to grab.”

Gilbert said it’s scary to remember the way that being at war “turns you into an animal that enjoyed killing.” He remembers being ambushed by the Viet Cong and patching up children after they got caught in the middle of firefights.

“It haunts me,” he said. “I wish I could get that out of my mind.”

While he never saw planes spraying Agent Orange, Gilbert served in fields and jungles after they had been treated with herbicides and “had no idea how lethal the stuff was, other than it would certainly strip leaves off trees.” His skin began blistering every few months while he was in Vietnam.

Though he receives VA benefits for his leg injuries and shrapnel wounds in his right arm, Gilbert said he has been denied for benefits related to PTSD and is working on receiving benefits for Agent Orange, both for himself and his family. 

“I feel so guilty about it, to have passed some of this terrible down,” Gilbert said. “Hopefully before I die, I’ll be able to get them some sort of VA assistance.”

Wesley Watts

To handle the stress and pressure of serving in Vietnam, Pinson area resident Wesley Watts recalled that he created a whole new persona.

“I had to tell myself, ‘Wes can’t take this, all this blood and all this killing.’ So in my mind, I took Wes and put Wes in the closet,” Watts said. “I pulled out another person and called him Robert. So I become Robert, and Robert was my no-nonsense person. Nothing bothered Robert.”

Watts was living in Southside when he was drafted in 1968, at age 19. His mother talked him into serving, though he recalled trying to get back at her by saying “my death will be on you” and carving his birth and imagined death dates into the surface of her stove.

“When you’re young, you do stupid stuff,” he said.

Watts learned to be a wireman and went to drill sergeant school, too. He worked in a variety of roles and locations in Vietnam, including as a tank gunner and radioman.

“I liked it so much they started calling me Gung-ho. I did everything fast,” he said.

But it was while serving as a gunner that Watts saw a tragic accident that has stuck with him through the decades: a soldier was playing with his rifle, which he thought was empty, and it accidentally went off and struck another man through the head.

“He was in his last two weeks. Matter of fact, that would have been his last time going back out there … on that day he got killed,” Watts said.

Watts saw soldiers die in battle, in ambushes and in accidents. Taking on the persona of “Robert” enabled him to stay detached from some of the realities of war.

“When they told us ‘Kill or be killed,’ that simplified things for me,” Watts said. “I had predicted I was going to die, but I didn’t know when. It was like people were getting killed so fast.”

Getting rid of that detachment when he returned home, however, was no easy task. He said he was angry, distant and prone to fighting for many years after returning to civilian life.

“I had to force myself, see, because I had built this stone wall around my heart. I didn’t want to feel nothing,” Watts said. “I thought by staying angry I’d keep people away from me.”

Watts began the process of filing an Agent Orange exposure claim last year, though proving his exposure while serving has been a challenge.

“They ain’t going to make nothing easy for you,” Watts said of the disability claims process.

Daryl Osborne

Daryl Osborne marched in the civil rights movement, had friends killed in the 16th Street Church bombing and was once jailed along with Martin Luther King Jr. as a teenager.

Coming back from Vietnam to protesters and continued racial struggles made Osborne almost regret what he had left behind.

“I thought, ‘What am I coming back to? I should have stayed in Vietnam. At least I knew who the enemy was in Vietnam,’” he said.

Osborne now lives in Ensley, but he was fresh out of high school and living in Titusville when he volunteered to join the Army in 1965. It was his first experience living and working alongside a group of both black and white people from a variety of backgrounds, and Osborne said it opened his mind in many ways.

“In Vietnam you become closer as a family… you got my back, it ain’t no black and white. We’re all brothers and we’re here to solve this thing and then go back home,” he said.

After a year of special training, Osborne volunteered to go to Vietnam in the 5th Special Forces Airborne.

“Going through all that training, I said, ‘I’d like to go to Vietnam and experience some of this’ – I thought,” he said. “You’re young and you got an ego that big, you’re going to try it.”

Despite living through dangerous and harrowing situations in Vietnam, on the whole Osborne said he would do it all over again. That doesn’t mean it was all easy, though.

“You learn so much about how to kill and what to do to the enemy, but there never was a class on, ‘Now, you’re going to have some bad times, too.’ They didn’t get you prepared for what you might experience,” Osborne said. “That was the shocking part to me. I was doing damage to the other people, but what about the damage that was done to me?”

A few months after returning home in 1968, Osborne was hospitalized due to “battle fatigue,” which left him frequently angry and violent. In some ways, he couldn’t cope with the sudden change to civilian life, especially with family and friends who didn’t understand what he had experienced.

“I drank from 1968 until 2016,” Osborne said. “I was a job-working, dressing-nice drunk.”

Osborne developed Type II diabetes, resulting in the loss of one leg in 2016, and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer a matter of months after the amputation. It was that same year that he stopped drinking.

Both his diabetes and his cancer are on the presumptive conditions list, so Osborne said he found the process to get disability claims for those conditions, as well as a hearing disorder and PTSD, fairly straightforward.

“VA has been real good to me. Other guys have bad experiences, I know,” he said. “I’m just speaking for myself, they’ve been good to me.”

Osborne said he doesn’t know if other conditions related to his Agent Orange exposure might turn up later on.

“All the problems I had, I’d do it all again,” he said. “I’d go to Vietnam again, knowing I might come out with all of this.”

David Freeman

David Freeman was older than most Vietnam draftees. The 24-year-old was married and had two daughters when he received his draft notice in 1965. It was a shock, but Freeman said it was never an option to conscientiously object.

“If you don’t bend, you’ll break. So I bent with the breeze and realized my country had called,” the Irondale resident said.

His past involvement in civil rights rallies got Freeman noticed in boot camp.

“He said, ‘You wanna march? Well we’re going to teach you how to march,’” Freeman said of one drill sergeant.

But most soldiers, regardless of color, seemed to realize they were “eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, getting the same haircut” and getting ready to fight the same enemy.

Freeman sailed into Vietnam as part of the Army’s 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, with a “horrible feeling of helplessness. He didn’t know much about the reasoning behind the war, beyond “fighting communist aggression,” but he was focused on survival.

“[I was] thinking and wondering whether the next incident or the next explosion or the next round would just take me out of this mess. But still you felt – I felt – that I had to do what I’d been called upon to do for this country. Didn’t know nothing about the politics,” Freeman said.

He was trained to be a radio operator, and Freeman said carrying the equipment and antenna sometimes felt like a target on his back. He saw a friend from his football team at Jackson-Olin High School die while in Vietnam.

“The chance of getting away and getting back home was slim to none, and slim had left town on us,” Freeman said. “You grow some guts, I think. You know that if it’s your time, there’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to keep the faith, suck it in and keep moving.”

Freeman recalled seeing both Agent Orange and napalm sprayed across fields, sometimes a little too close for comfort.

“It’s a weird feeling to lay here and see a ball of fire and smoke less than a quarter of a football field away, I’d say. And you know what’s going on, you know what’s happening. But you know what you hope: that they don’t get off course and spray that napalm right where you are,” he said.

Freeman developed a chronic skin rash while in Vietnam, and he later developed ischemic heart disease and Type II diabetes, both considered Agent Orange presumptive conditions. He had open heart surgery in February 2017.

“I know the condition will be there until the good Lord calls me on in,” Freeman said. “You can’t un-ring the bell.”

Freeman said attending the support group at the Hoover Vet Center has helped him process the emotional baggage both of his service in Vietnam and the medical effects of Agent Orange exposure. He was one of several veterans there who said, despite the long-term impact, they would make the same choice to serve if they had to do it all over again.

“[I] wonder sometimes if I would do it all over again, and the answer is, ‘Yeah,’” Freeman said. “With all its drawbacks, with all its shortcomings, this is a wonderful country and it’s worth fighting for. Worth dying for, which it looks like I’ll end up doing.”