Friendly Fire A Meditation on my Brother's Cancer
Ashes to ashes
And clay to clay,
If the enemy doesn't get you
Your own folks may.
James Thurber, Further Fables of Our Time (1956)
And the politicians throwing stones,
And the kids they dance and shake their bones,
Cause it's all too clear we're on our own,
Ashes, ashes, all fall down.
Grateful Dead, "Throwing Stones" (c.1982)
My brother The Gunsmith never talked much to me about his tours of duty in Vietnam, but I do remember one story he told me about his unit being strafed one night by their own planes. My brother said he woke up with a .50-cal. hole on each side of him the round that would otherwise have killed him was a dud.
Two years ago my brother noticed a strange growth on his upper thigh, a growth that reached the size of a golf ball in a few weeks before it was surgically removed. He also received radiation therapy and chemo therapy to be on the safe side. The doctors said that the growth was consistent with growths caused by exposure to Agent Orange.
On April 15 my brother was hospitalized with a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), very likely the result of his chemotherapy two years ago. ALL is more common in children, but in older adults, the survival rate is about 50%. My brother called me from the hospital at 2:30 a.m. Easter morning (Eastern Time). He sounded weak and dispirited. His condition was complicated by pneumonia, which made it difficult for him to talk. We talked over old times he remembered a time in our pre-teen years when I fought off bullies who had attacked him. At one point, his sardonic sense of humor surfaced briefly, and he said, "I bet you wouldn't trade places with me right now." "I would if I could," I said, not missing a beat. Long pause. "I love you, man," he said. "I love you, too, bro," I said. "See you on the other side," meaning the other side of his next round of chemo.
Agent Orange was a defoliant made by Monsanto and Dow and used in Vietnam from 1962 to 1971. The public rationale for its use was that it deprived the Viet Cong of infiltration routes by destroying jungle cover. U.S. troops, who knew that most of the land being defoliated was crop land, were told that the crops were destroyed to deprive the Viet Cong of food. In actuality, Operation Ranch Hand targeted primarily civilian food crops, with the goal of driving peasants from the land and into the cities. This in and of itself probably constituted a war crime, the kind of use of chemical weapons for which we vilified Germany in World War I. U.S. servicemen were also told that the compound was harmless, but it apparently was contaminated with dioxins, some of the most toxic compounds ever developed. Ooops. The photos of the resulting cancers and birth defects in Vietnamese children on Wikipedia are horrific. And since dioxin is no respecter of nationalities, thousands of U.S. service men and their families have been harmed as well. Several dozen of the former military bases in Vietnam still have hazardous levels of dioxin contamination. The irony is that the South Vietnamese peasants whose lands were sprayed were theoretically our friends and allies and whose country we were supposedly trying to save since the dusting took place with the encouragement of their military government, it was no wonder that they preferred the Communists.
You understand, the ones who poison and contaminate the earth care nothing for you. They do not care about your health and well being or that of your parents or your children or grandchildren. They do not care if you are happy or in agony. They do not care if your children suffer birth defects or grow up sick and uneducated. They would prefer a world based on slavery, where they could hurt you for failing to do their bidding and discard you when your usefulness was used up. Accidents of history have pushed overt slavery into the background, but they are happy to lie and deceive you even while ostensibly acting in your interest. They lied to the workers doing uranium processing at Hanford and Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project, concealing the dangers of radioactivity ... they ignored the farmers and ranchers in eastern Nevada and western Utah during the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere in the 1950s ... and they have consistently lied persuasively and with great vigor about the dangers posed by nuclear power. We are bombarded with propaganda designed to make us complacent about radiation, but the fact is, there is no such thing as a safe exposure to radiation. Even background radiation can kill you.
Who are "They"? You need to find out for yourself they hold your future in their hands. (Hint: Don't believe everything you see on TED or hear from the Breakthrough Institute.)
In the next few years, our species must make decisions about about minimizing the impact of global warming and climate change. Plan Green calls for massive reduction of energy consumption in the form of conservation, improved efficiency, public transportation, and a ManhattanProjectscale development of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Plan X calls for massive investment in and development of nuclear power, holding out hints (but no promises) that we will not need to reduce our catastrophically wasteful consumption of energy ... that new reactors will make the problem of disposing of nuclear wastes magically vanish ... and that new reactor designs will make accidents such as those at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima impossible.
Make no mistake we don't have the time or money to do both. Plan Green can be implemented now, can come up to speed quickly, but will need massive investments in money and creativity. Plan X will also require prodigious amounts of money, won't come to fruition for twenty or thirty years, and is not guaranteed to solve the problem. This is a zero-sum game with a vengeance. Many well-intentioned people concerned about global warming have reluctantly embraced nuclear power. My fear is that kids these days have no conception of the massive size of the well-funded and unscrupulous propaganda machine that floods every corner of this discussion with misinformation. Today's kids prefer to believe that all sides of the debate are honorable people seeking a rational solution to a common problem. They are naive about the existence of Evil, the kind of Evil that does not hesitate to use its own people as collateral damage to preserve its power and profit.
One of the points used to promote nuclear power is that "coal is dirty too," with the figure of ten thousand deaths a year in the United States due to air pollution, asthma, and lung cancer. That sounds like a lot of people, but let's put it into perspective ten thousand deaths over twenty-five years is 250,000 deaths. In the twenty-five years since the Chernobyl disaster, over a million people have died as a result. Do the math. QED.
"Wait a minute!" I can hear you saying now. "Where did you get that one million figure from? The official report of the International Atomic Energy Agency said that about fifty people were cooked [acute radiation poisoning] and that another four thousand deaths from cancer and whatnot were attributed to the accident. What kind of bullshit are you trying to pull, Kansas?"
I'm glad you asked me that question. Greenpeace has long disputed the IAEA figures. And in 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences published the English translation of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment (Yablokov et al.) as volume 1181 in its Annals series. The "one million" figure cited by Yablokov is based on extensive studies of declassified documents and studies published in Slavic medical journals. The Yablokov study has been praised by both Amory Lovins and Dr. Helen Caldicott.
I have not yet read the Yablokov book, but I like looking at original sources in these matters. My attempts to purchase a copy is a small story in itself. Amazon.com lists the book with a price of $125.00, and several weeks ago, I ordered a copy. A week later, Amazon informed me that their supplier could not fulfill my request, and they cancelled the order. LCB found that Books-A-Million also offered the book for sale (at the price of $160.00) and placed an order for me. A few days later, the order was cancelled, with no mention of a back order. While reading customer reviews of the book on Amazon, I found a comment that stated that the NYAS had waived copyright on the book, and that a link to the PDF was included on the Wikipedia page for it. I found the link, downloaded and printed the PDF, and look forward to reading it, although the medical stuff looks like heavy slogging. I like to think that the book is unavailable due to unanticipated demand following the Fukushima accident, but my paranoid side wonders if "They" are buying up copies to slow the dissemination of information. In the former Soviet Union, dissidents used to circulate forbidden books in samizdat ("self-published", such as photocopy), so perhaps this PDF is a twenty-first century implementation. If I find that in fact the NYAS did not waive the copyright, I will send a donation or contribution to reimburse them.
"Well, what about the World Health Organization?" you might ask. "Wouldn't WHO independently evaluate the IAEA figures? Isn't that what WHO is for?" Actually, no. WHO is good at getting malaria out of your swamps, but if you want information on the impact of radioactivity, you're out of luck. Since 1959, WHO has deferred to the IAEA on matters involving radiation. It's kind of like having the tobacco companies in charge of information about the dangers of cigarettes. Don't worry, be happy.
I have no hope, actually. Proponents of Plan X are too well funded, too unscrupulous, and too well organized. They will win, and Plan Green will remain a niche technology. Fukushima is still burning, and it will be another year before They bring it under control if They can bring it under control. That won't stop the building of new nuclear power plants. Just don't build them too near the ocean in case they don't actually prevent global warming.
I have seen the future, and it glows. Even under water.
Epilogue
My brother The Gunsmith fell ill forty years after his exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. This kind of timeline makes it very difficult to assess the impact of chemical and radioactive poisoning. He is fighting hard, but he may be outmatched this time.
My friend and lover Ava (195588) died of multiple cancers six years after working for a prestigious San Francisco research laboratory that was twice cited for unsafe handling of radioactive tracers. Coincidence? Or cause-and-effect?
Tokyo, Japan, 28 April 2011 The Japanese Government has refused to grant Greenpeace permission to carry out independent radiation monitoring within the country's 12 mile territorial waters, approving only a much more limited program further out to sea.