Toxic War: The Story of Agent Orange

By Peter Sills

The war in Vietnam, spanning more than twenty years, was one of the most divisive conflicts ever to envelop the United States, and its complexity and consequences did not end with the fall of Saigon in 1975. As Peter Sills demonstrates in Toxic War, veterans faced a new enemy beyond post-traumatic stress disorder or debilitating battle injuries. Many of them faced a new, more pernicious, slow-killing enemy: the cancerous effects of Agent Orange.

Originally introduced by Dow and other chemical companies as a herbicide in the United States and adopted by the military as a method of deforesting the war zone of Vietnam, in order to deny the enemy cover, Agent Orange also found its way into the systems of numerous active-duty soldiers. Sills argues that manufacturers understood the dangers of this compound and did nothing to protect American soldiers.

Toxic War takes the reader behind the scenes into the halls of political power and industry, where the debates about the use of Agent Orange and its potential side effects raged. In the end, the only way these veterans could seek justice was in the court of law and public opinion. Unprecedented in its access to legal, medical, and government documentation, as well as to the personal testimonies of veterans, Toxic War endeavors to explore all sides of this epic battle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780826519641

Peter Sills

Peter Sills is an attorney who helped represent the Vietnam Veterans of America in the Agent Orange class action lawsuit and is now active in environmental causes.

Book preview

TOXIC WAR

TOXIC WAR

The Story of Agent Orange

Peter Sills

Vanderbilt University Press

NASHVILLE

© 2014 by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

All rights reserved

First printing 2014

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

LC control number 2013032550

LC classification number DS559.8.C5S55 2014

Dewey class number 959.704'38—dc23

ISBN 978-0-8265-1962-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8265-1964-1 (ebook)

For my Grandfather, Elias Fife

For Crow

And most of all, for Susan

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: One Statistic

1. Techniques and Gadgets

2. Trail Dust

3. The Single Solution

4. We Didn’t Have Any Information That It Was Safe

5. The Chemical Corps and Dioxin, Part 1

6. Ranch Hand

7. Good Citizens

8. The Chemical Corps and Dioxin, Part 2

9. The Rise and Fall of Ranch Hand

10. Medicine from the Sky

11. There Is No Immediate Cause for Alarm

12. Activist Science

13. Bionetics

14. The End of Trail Dust

15. Guinea Pigs

16. Two and a Half Million Plaintiffs

17. Politics and Epidemiology

18. The Management Committee

19. People Lost Track of What Was True: The Agent Orange Research, Part 1

20. Validation: The Agent Orange Research, Part 2

21. The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Agent Orange Research, Part 3

22. The Ongoing Cost of War

Epilogue: One Story

Glossary

Appendix A

Appendix B

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

This book has been gestating for a long time—since the early 1980s, when Vietnam veterans and their families brought a class action against the federal government and the manufacturers of Agent Orange. The court ordered the defendants to turn over every piece of paper in their possession mentioning either dioxin or herbicides used in the Vietnam War. The case was settled before going to trial, and all the protective orders covering these records were removed.

In a former life, I was an attorney tangentially involved in that litigation, so I had a pretty good idea what was in those documents. I telephoned Joseph Ditalia, the deputy clerk in charge of the federal court in Uniondale, NY, for permission to see them. He enjoyed my request more than any good bureaucrat should, laughing nonstop for about forty-five seconds and then warning me (while still gasping for breath): Some reporter came down to check them out the other day, and lasted about fifteen minutes.

I didn’t grasp what had amused him so much until I visited the courthouse. Boxes nearly bursting with paper were piled ceiling high, completely filling two large basement rooms. I never bothered to count them all, but ten million pages is a conservative estimate. Mr. Ditalia, Cynthia Mann (the court’s operations manager), and the rest of the courthouse staff were uniformly friendly, helpful, and efficient, despite my sometimes odd and difficult demands.

More times than I care to remember, I led a research crew of six Vermonters down to Uniondale to copy many of these documents. It was a preposterous task, and I thank the crew—Anne Miller, Lawrence Black, Jeffrey Gilbert, Trish Nunan, Tim Sestrick, and Spencer Smith—for making it sort of fun (and for doing an excellent job).

In this book, I’ll refer to the lawsuit as the Class Action and to these records as the Class Action Documents. These documents will be identified in the same manner as they were submitted to the court during discovery. A list of these identification labels and their respective sources is included at the beginning of the Notes section. All these documents have since been taken from the courthouse and placed in a government repository. I’ll occasionally focus on the documents themselves, instead of the information contained in them, especially when they omit an important part of the story. Sometimes documents that ought to exist aren’t there. Others fail to mention important events and conversations that unquestionably took place. It would be unfair to automatically presume an intent to hide something, but it’s a possibility that needs to be considered. I’ll also quote from some of the depositions taken during the Class Action. Unless I specifically state otherwise, any testimony mentioned in this book comes from those depositions.

My analysis of the government’s Agent Orange health studies is based largely on records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request made by Congressman Ted Weiss (now deceased). At the time, attorneys for the American Legion and Vietnam Veterans of America were preparing a lawsuit against the government for failing to conduct this research properly, and they invited me to look through these documents. I’d like to thank Bart Stichman and Mark Venuti of the National Veterans Legal Services Project for giving me that opportunity, and Congressman Weiss and his committee’s investigator, Mark Smolonsky, for graciously providing me access to those records. The rest of the book is based on interviews (all of which I conducted myself), government documents, scientific journals, newspaper articles, and presentations made at scientific and other public conferences.

This is an enormous topic that can’t be covered completely in one book. I’ve focused primarily on the decisions made by industry and government concerning 2,4,5-T and dioxin. I’ve also shied away from matters already well covered by other writers. This book includes a bibliography for those who want to study those other areas in more detail.

I’d also like to apologize in advance for using so many abbreviations. Chemicals, diseases, and government bureaucracies all tend to have lengthy, complex names. Abbreviations can be awfully bloodless, but they’re less eye-glazing than repeating long-winded technical jargon over and over.

I could not have written this book without Anne Miller. Anne’s general brilliance, astute reading of the documents, and capacity to grasp biology, epidemiology, statistics, and other branches of science well enough to impress experts in those fields were all indispensable. Thank you so much, Anne.

I would also like to thank Eli Bortz for his inspiration, encouragement, and support in taking this book to print.

Introduction

One Statistic

Something is tragically wrong out there. Too many veterans are sick. Too many have lost faith in the system they fought to protect. Too many are crying out for answers that do not seem to be forthcoming. These men and women are not ‘cry babies’ as some heartless souls have suggested. They are the cornerstone of this democracy. They are the ones that volunteer to place their very lives on the line when their country calls. They are the backbone of our society. They deliver our mail, work in our factories, drive the trucks, and tend to the sick. If we forget and abandon them, we abandon all that is worthwhile about this country.

—William W. Lewis, director of the Pointman Project

He who suffers remembers.

—Chinese fortune cookie

Dave and Laurel Maier spent the first night of their married life in downtown Cleveland, in a hotel that later became the local YWCA. They waited two months and journeyed several thousand miles for their second night together. They had no idea what they’d gotten themselves into—a strange, terrible war, and two glaringly different, barely comprehensible societies. But their adventure didn’t really begin until they got back to Cleveland.

Twenty-seven years later, Dave and Laurel told me they were, in some ways, grateful for the suffering they’ve endured. Their lives are undoubtedly richer, and they’ve had a powerful impact on others. But when asked if they would choose to go through it all again, Dave could only laugh. Laurel cried out, No! Nobody would ever choose that! That’s why those choices aren’t left to us.

They met placidly enough, in 1965, at a Methodist young adult group in the Cleveland suburbs. Dave was twenty-one and in college. Laurel was just under eighteen and about to graduate high school. Both were devout Christians, descended from a long line of German settlers. They had always kept close to home.

They started dating almost immediately and were engaged a year later. Dave dropped out of college to work as a bank teller. He joined the Navy Reserves in 1964, partly to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. He hoped the war would be over by the time he finished his two years of training. But he was wrong.

Dave was due to ship out sometime in 1967. They wanted to get married as soon as possible, but their parents were against it. Laurel’s mother and father liked Dave, but their daughter was only twenty, and her new husband would be leaving for two years, maybe to die in combat. It made more sense to wait.

But Dave and Laurel were determined to get married. They were in love, and in the 1960s, caution somehow seemed inappropriate. Laurel remembered, There was an intensity about that time that you don’t always have in your life.

But they didn’t want to sneak off or rush things. They scheduled a large, traditional wedding for March 4, 1967. In the middle of February, Dave finally received his orders to ship out—on March 5. Everything had already been arranged; the invitations had gone out. They couldn’t change the date.

It was a joyful wedding. Reality didn’t set in until Laurel drove Dave to the airport early the next morning. They had no idea when, or even if, they’d see each other again.

After several unexpected transfers, Dave was assigned to the Westchester County, an LST¹ that traveled all over Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. Its home was a huge naval base in Yokosuka, Japan. Laurel would be able to come out and live with him. Dave met her in Tokyo, and after they spent that second night together, they drove to Yokosuka, about fifty miles away. They moved into a tiny house a few miles from the base.

The Westchester County usually left for three to four months at a time, carrying troops and materiel to the Philippines, Okinawa, and Vietnam. When it reached Vietnam, it traveled up and down the coast, on alert to either pick up or drop off troops and supplies.

Twice during Dave’s tour, the Westchester County served as a station ship on the Mekong River. It sailed about thirty-five miles inland and dropped anchor for three months. Soldiers doing combat duty in the jungle came aboard for two to three days’ leave. They would get hot meals, showers, movies, laundry, and a good night’s sleep, along with necessary supplies. This was really a job for what was known as the brown water navy, whose ships were designed to serve on the river, protected by appropriate camouflage. The Westchester County belonged to the blue water navy. It was battleship gray, and its sailors wore either blues or whites.

Dave didn’t know that the riverbanks had been defoliated with Agent Orange to protect against Viet Cong attack, or that the herbicide had washed off the banks and into the river. But he did notice that the shoreline somehow looked wrong. There was too much sand, and the vegetation just drooped. Most trees looked like sticks, with nothing growing on them. The river itself looked absolutely terrible. It looked like the color of coffee. Some of his shipmates tried to fish in it, but they never caught anything.

His first time in Vietnam, Dave stood on the deck of his ship and studied the river. He remembered reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring back in high school. He kept bees then and wanted to find out whether pesticides could hurt them. I’m up there on the deck, and I’m looking at that river, and all this crap floating through it, it’s like a dead river, and not much vegetation along the sides. And I thought, if there ever was a silent spring, this is it.

The Westchester County had no facilities for storing fresh water. Ships from the blue water navy were designed to desalinate ocean water for drinking and general use. Unable to do this in Vietnam, the ship simply pumped river water into its holding tank. This water, which looked so much like coffee from a distance, was the color of tea when it came out of the ship’s pipes and faucets. The men brushed their teeth with it, showered and shaved with it, did their laundry in it.

The water smelled bad. It just reeked. The men were told not to drink it, but the only clean water was up in officer’s country, on the bridge. The enlisted men compensated by drinking coffee, condensed milk, sodas, and juice. Dave’s stool was so dry he developed hemorrhoids. They didn’t know there was poison in the water. We thought it was just dirty. The men often swallowed it inadvertently. It would get on their shaving gear. They would brush their teeth with it, spit, and then swallow.

The Westchester County’s crew regularly received inoculations while in Vietnam. These were given with shot guns instead of needles; they could cut a slice out of your arm if you moved even slightly. Dave, who always received shots in the left arm (the same one that would be affected later), remembered showering immediately after being inoculated.

Dave and Laurel both hated military life. Laurel explained, We were civilians at heart, playing the game and doing what you feel you have to do, but not what you would choose to do. They thought the Navy’s hierarchical system was just silly. The war didn’t make sense to either of them. They believed the United States was putting their friends at risk by not doing all it could to win.

Dave finished his tour of duty with one last trip to Vietnam; the Westchester County again served as a station ship on the Mekong River. On November 11, 1968, at 3:22 a.m., Dave was blasted out of bed. There was smoke everywhere and loud moaning from the deck below. Someone, probably a Viet Cong diver, had set off a bomb beneath the ship’s waterline. The Westchester County was the only United States vessel to be sunk in Vietnam. Twenty-nine men died and fifteen more were injured. Dave was unhurt, but he felt enormous grief. He couldn’t sleep the next night and asked the medic for a tranquilizer. Without thinking, he popped it into his mouth and washed it down with the ship’s tap water, drawn straight from the Mekong River.

Laurel found out about the explosion that evening, from a friend who’d been listening to the radio. She immediately contacted the base’s information office, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t say anything. She went to the captain’s house, hoping for some real information. The officers’ wives were all there and seemed to know what was going on. They told Laurel not to worry—all the officers were safe. That did it, she remembers. I was willing to live with their hierarchy, but that was the last straw.

Over the next several days, various incomplete lists of killed and wounded were sent back to the base. None of them mentioned Dave, but a bunkmate of his was listed as dead. Laurel’s mind couldn’t stop repeating the same absurd mantra: I’m only twenty-one. I can’t be a widow. Five days after the explosion, Dave called to tell her he was fine. He hadn’t even gotten a scratch.

By the time the Westchester County finally struggled home several weeks later, Laurel had completely given up on Navy protocol. Whenever a ship landed, the captain’s wife was supposed to come aboard first, followed by the rest of the officers’ wives in descending rank order, and finally the wives of the enlisted men. Laurel told one of her friends, They better get out of my way and nearly bowled them all over to get to Dave.

They both were eager to get back home. They assumed they would be returning back to our lives and everything would be fine and it would be behind you. But they had been profoundly changed by the past two years. They’d been children when they’d gotten married, then quickly tossed into Japanese culture, the Navy, and the war. They were different now. Their old lives didn’t fit them anymore.

Their friends and family didn’t understand any of this. Nobody really wanted to hear much about it. It was like, ‘Oh, did you have a nice trip?’ We had experienced a lot of things in life that a lot of our friends hadn’t and never would. There was no one else to really share it with. Their parents were just happy to have them home. Dave remembers his folks telling him, You’re back, it’s over. Now get on with your life. But I felt like a zombie when I first came back here. They were talking about me going back to school, but I just couldn’t focus.

Dave did go back to college several months later and earned his bachelor’s degree. Laurel worked as a secretary so she could support them both while he was in school, which shocked her parents.

Without consciously realizing it, they had drawn back from the world. We were just trying to put ourselves together, Laurel remembers. It seemed as if they were starting their married life all over again, except this time they no longer trusted the institutions they had once taken for granted.

Dave felt abandoned by Laurel’s family church. No one from the congregation had ever contacted them during the war, even though they had both been active members. Dave and Laurel had lost the habit of public worship anyway; military chapels just seemed sterile. They tried going back to their old church, but their resentment was too much alive and their return taken too much for granted. They wanted us to do all the things we were doing before—teach Sunday school and participate in everything. It was like we hadn’t even been gone. We just decided not to go. Period. Their decision to stop going to church wasn’t a rejection of religion. They had never left the Christian faith. We didn’t really think about it. We didn’t need it then, but it must have been there. It just doesn’t come out of the air.

They never talked about the war and ignored the frequent campus demonstrations against it. There was nothing we could do about it. It was terrible, and it was going on regardless. Dave didn’t join the Vietnam Veterans against the War because I felt like I knew it. We did our share.

After college, Dave hoped for a job in consumer affairs, helping people who had been manhandled by the system. He wanted to do something more important than just make money. But most of the work in that field was for volunteers, so he became assistant manager at a large bank. It was a particularly bad place to work and he hated it. Laurel kept her job, and in 1972 they moved to Bay Village, a suburb of Cleveland, ready to reclaim a normal, suburban life.

Dave’s left elbow began to hurt in 1974, five years after he left the Navy. He was thirty-one years old. He assumed he’d pulled a muscle and went to an orthopedist. X-rays didn’t show anything wrong. He was told it was probably tennis elbow; the worst-case scenario was either arthritis or rheumatism.

Dave didn’t really believe he had tennis elbow. The pain was in his left arm and he was right-handed. Also, the doctor had warned him that overtaxing the muscles in his arm would make things worse, but it actually hurt most when he tried to relax, especially at night. As soon as I lay down in bed, it would start. The pain became excruciating. Even cortisone shots didn’t help. Sleep became almost impossible.

At first, Dave wasn’t particularly concerned about his arm; he and Laurel were having too many other problems. His job had become intolerable. Laurel couldn’t seem to get pregnant and had suffered at least one miscarriage.

Dave left the bank in November 1975. He and Laurel started their own photography business. It didn’t earn nearly enough money, so Dave took on an additional job selling janitorial supplies. He had to carry heavy packages, which made his arm hurt even more.

In December, Dave underwent surgery to clean out his elbow. For a while, he actually felt better. Looking back, he now thinks the cast he wore after surgery was so painful that removing it a few weeks later had provided some relief. But after four or five months, Dave realized he was still getting worse. Still, he and Laurel weren’t particularly concerned; the doctor had assured them that the problem wasn’t serious.

Laurel finally became pregnant in January 1976. Mark’s birth the next October was a difficult one, requiring him to spend several days in intensive care. Dave’s elbow was a low priority, even though the pain remained terrible. He was now taking twelve to sixteen aspirins a day, but he still couldn’t sleep at night. He kept up with all his work obligations, but there were times when I would pull off the road and just be in pain.

He wondered why he was suffering so much if there was nothing really wrong with him. Was he making it all up in his head? Meanwhile, Laurel was focusing on Mark, who remained sick and very miserable.

Dave was under enormous pressure. His two new jobs weren’t panning out, his arm was getting worse, he couldn’t sleep, he was worried about his new son, and his wife couldn’t give him the attention he still wanted. Then the pain moved into other parts of his body, shooting up through his shoulders and neck. He began getting severe headaches. Dave and Laurel kept their fear private. Both realized that the situation was more serious than either was willing to acknowledge out loud.

When Dave had a routine checkup six months after his elbow surgery, the orthopedist gave him more cortisone and warned him that he might just have to learn to live with the pain. Dave lost his temper, yelling, There’s no way I can live with it. For the first time, he questioned his doctor’s judgment. He talked about how the pain had moved to new places in his body and suggested that his elbow might not really be the source of the problem. To mollify Dave, the orthopedist offered to give him full body X-rays, although he was sure they wouldn’t find anything.

They took the X-rays that afternoon. While the doctor was examining them, he suddenly just stopped. His mouth got bigger. To me, it just looked like snowflakes, some bigger, some smaller. The doctor told them, I don’t think it’s serious, but can you be at the hospital this afternoon? He’d obviously seen something that confused and scared him.

Dave stayed in the hospital for two weeks while they ran tests. The pain was now worse than ever, since he wasn’t allowed the sixteen aspirins a day he needed. They gave him a biopsy and took out a tumor the size of a walnut. The doctors had no idea what it was, but they were sure it wasn’t malignant and told Dave not to worry; he was too young to get cancer. Dave and Laurel were more than willing to believe it.

The doctors at the local hospital called in several consultants. They weren’t sure what was wrong with Dave, but their best guess was hemangiopericytoma, a rare blood disease. There was only one place that could treat it: the Mayo Clinic. They had already made him an appointment for the following Monday. Although the prognosis was serious, Dave felt relief. There was actually something wrong with him, and there seemed to be a real hope of curing it. What I had experienced for the last two and a half years wasn’t all in my head.

Dave was dismissed from the hospital on Saturday morning, June 25, 1977. They left Mark with Laurel’s mother and began the fifteen-hour trip to Rochester, Minnesota. Dave was in too much pain to help drive, so they took their time getting there, stopping to visit Dave’s parents in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. It was a pleasant visit. Everyone just assumed that he was about to get better. They were just going to act on this. We had something to focus on.

On Sunday evening, they checked into a Best Western motel three blocks from the clinic, ready for their Monday morning appointment. On Wednesday afternoon, after a two-day battery of tests, they met with their doctor to discuss the results. We came in. We sat down. Right away, he said, ‘We have a problem. You have cancer. We think we can save your life by amputating your shoulder.’ Just like that.

It was soft tissue sarcoma, a rare type of cancer that, as its name suggests, afflicts the soft tissues of the body. More specifically, it was an angiosarcoma, which forms around blood vessels. The tumor was actually in Dave’s shoulder, but as it began eating through his nerves, it referred the pain down to his elbow. The doctor explained that this cancer was so uncommon that Dave’s doctors in Cleveland had no real chance of recognizing it.

Dave remembers actually feeling some relief when he heard the news. They had found the real cause of his problem, and they were going to do something about it. But then he wondered what happened to your arm after they amputated your shoulder. He suddenly realized what those words really meant, and started to cry. But what choice was there? There really wasn’t a choice.

Dave assumed they wouldn’t operate on him for at least several weeks, and his mind began working out the logistics of how to take off from work, how to get back to Minnesota, and who’d stay with the baby. I asked the doctor, ‘How soon?’ He said, ‘This is an aggressive cancer and we’d like to do this at 8:00 tomorrow morning.’ The doctor explained that if they waited, even for a few weeks, it might be too late. Dave thought of all the time they’d lost fiddling around with tennis elbow—two and a half years—while he was slowly and obliviously dying.

Laurel remembers that once Dave knew what was wrong with him, he couldn’t have them take his arm off fast enough. But she was terrified he was going to die. It was so unreal. I saw cancer as a death sentence. I never knew anyone who survived it.

They left the doctor’s office and stood in the hallway talking. The thought came to them (as they later learned it comes to so many others in the same situation) that maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe they had confused him with somebody else. They asked to see the doctor again, to make certain those were the right X-rays, the right test results. He patiently reviewed everything, confirming the awful reality of his diagnosis.

They went back to the Best Western. We walked out of there and it was a bright sunny day. And all these people were walking around, and this is going on, that’s going on, and you don’t know how that can be. It was like our world had just come to an end.

Dave checked into the hospital that afternoon. Laurel stayed with him as long as she could, until about 10:30 that night, and then went back to the motel to call her parents. She dreaded making that call. No matter how old I get to be, I’m still the child of my parents. My mom answered, and I wanted to make sure my Dad was there too. I told her, and I started crying right away. Dave called his parents from his hospital bed.

Everyone insisted on coming up right away. Laurel’s father and brother arrived the next morning, Dave’s parents and sister the day after that. Laurel’s dad was upset he couldn’t be with her that first night, but she was actually grateful to be alone. I needed the time. She still breaks into tears when thinking about that night. I don’t remember going to bed. I cried a lot and walked around a lot.

Dave was pacing the hospital floor. I was really psyched up to get the arm off. If it was this bad, it was doing this terrible thing to me, it’s got to come off. But I just couldn’t imagine getting to sleep that night. The nurses couldn’t give him anything to knock him out because he’d be taking so many powerful drugs the next day. Then, just before Laurel left, a man came into the room. He looked about fifty years old and wore a tie, blue blazer, gray slacks, and a little plastic name tag identifying him as the clinic chaplain. Dave instantly took to him. He asked Dave why he was there, and they began talking:

I told him about some of my relatives who had serious things wrong with them. My grandfather had glaucoma and lost his vision. My grandmother had arthritis since she was eighteen and had been in bed for about the last eight years. You know, terrible things, and yet those people had good lives.

He asked if he could offer a prayer for me. I said, I’m not used to that, but go ahead. He offered a beautiful prayer. He got everything in it. He talked about the same things I was thinking about—facing the unknown and hoping you’d be all right. And it worked. Even as he was walking out the door, this tremendous peace came over me. Just a total relief! There’s nothing to be worried about. Everything was going to be fine. And I went right to sleep. They had to wake me up in the morning.

Laurel waited in the hospital the next day, just hoping that Dave would live long enough for Mark to get to know him. The operation took about five hours and went perfectly. The cancer hadn’t metastasized. They’d gotten all of it. When Dave woke up, he was wrapped like a mummy. He felt pain in his left arm. He thought, Maybe they didn’t have to take it off after all. But then he sat up and saw himself.

Angiosarcomas tend to be extremely aggressive. The doctors wanted Dave to begin chemotherapy as soon as he was strong enough, in about three months. He’d have to be watched closely. He’d need an X-ray each week for the next five weeks, and still more, with decreasing regularity, over the next five or six months. The chemo and X-rays could be done in Cleveland, but he’d need to come back to Minnesota twice a year for a checkup. Dave was eager to start rehabilitation. I was so happy that they had found it and it’s gone, and I can recover now.

Their families visited for another four days. The phone rang off the hook with calls from friends and other family members, and the chaplain kept coming back to pray and offer support to both of them.

On Dave’s eighth day in the hospital, a stranger walked into Dave’s hospital room. He wore a tie, gray slacks, blue blazer, and a plastic name tag identifying him as the clinic chaplain. He apologized to Dave and Laurel for being away during their time of need, but he’d just gotten back from his vacation. Dave told him, Your assistant was here a little while ago and did a fine job. The chaplain answered, No. I’m the only chaplain. We don’t have another chaplain.

Dave and Laurel were stunned. Who had been praying with them for the past few days? They’d seen so many different identification tags that they couldn’t even remember his name. They tried, but they never found out who this man was. Of course, it could all have been a bureaucratic error, but Dave and Laurel believed they had been witness to a miracle, one that gave them the strength and comfort they needed when none was officially available.

Ever since that time, the Maiers felt that something special had been planned for them.

Dave checked out of the hospital the next day. When they told us we could go, we just packed up and we were going. They came in with a pain shot. I said, ‘Give it to somebody else!’ Later, I wished I’d taken it.

Dave began his rehabilitation right away. The state gave him some small, practical gadgets to help him drive, dress himself, do what he could to live a normal life. It didn’t take him long to get over his self-consciousness. And the missing arm didn’t seem to bother Laurel at all. I hated that he had to go through that, but I didn’t think he was any different.

The janitorial supply company didn’t want a one-armed salesman. They offered Dave a job on the telephone, but he wasn’t interested, and he let himself be fired. The photography business wasn’t going well either. He took only one picture in the month after his operation.

Meanwhile, they found themselves battling several bureaucracies at once. Since Laurel was healthy and Dave spent most of the day looking for work, she was the one forced to deal with all the tiny-minded clerks and administrators whose primary goal was to save a little money. You’re fighting for your life and then you have to deal with all this other crap that comes along. Her experiences with the Navy hierarchy increased her intolerance for this kind of closed-off stupidity. She couldn’t help but lose her temper occasionally. Now and then you just blow up.

Blue Cross refused to pay for Dave’s operation because the Mayo Clinic wasn’t a member facility. Laurel was furious, since their own (insured) doctors had sent him there. She fought with Blue Cross for several months until it finally agreed to pay 80 percent of their costs. The state social services agency wouldn’t offer them any financial assistance because they already owned a house and car. Laurel asked, with more than a little sarcasm, Do you want to wait until after we have nothing? The federal government wouldn’t help either, denying them social security benefits on the grounds that Dave wasn’t sufficiently disabled. Paradoxically, the state wouldn’t let him keep his driver’s license, despite the gadgets it gave him, because he was too disabled. He was eventually granted a new license after he took a new written exam and road test.

Still, they were lucky. Dave missed only one paycheck. Laurel’s father, who was the head of the finished products division at Superior Alloy Steel Company, was able to offer Dave a job as an estimator, really a project manager. Basically, they created the position for me.

A YEAR OR so later, they learned about a new type of prosthesis developed in Oklahoma, just a few hours away. It was advertised as an artificial arm that actually worked. Dave believed he could do whatever he needed without it; he really didn’t feel disabled. But he still wanted the arm so that other people would feel more comfortable around him. He assumed that everyone was always looking at him and that visually he was some kind of a freak. I just had to have an artificial arm.

The prosthesis cost more than they could afford, so they asked the state social services agency for financing. Someone from the agency called Laurel to explain that their request had been denied because the prognosis was not good. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ I knew what she meant, but I wanted them to say it. She said they didn’t feel he’d be around long enough for them to invest in it. I hit the roof. I said, ‘You don’t have any guarantees with anybody. A person could be sitting at your desk, go out and get hit by a car and that’s it. The Mayo Clinic hasn’t given up on him. How can you?’ The woman at the other end of the line was unmoved, until Laurel casually mentioned that Dave couldn’t come to the phone because he was at work. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s at work? Did we get him that job?’ ‘Absolutely not,’ I told her. ‘He got it himself.’ All of a sudden we got a whole different ball game. Dave was a success story. He got the arm, although it took another year to get it properly fitted.

Before beginning chemotherapy in September, they met with their new doctor, who warned them about all these terrible side effects. They couldn’t guarantee that you’d feel better or that the cancer would be gone, or that your hair would come back. There was no known formula for treating angiosarcoma, so they had to invent one for him.

Laurel was terrified that Dave might not try the chemotherapy. I kept my mouth shut, but I really wanted him to do it. I was scared to death he wouldn’t. No matter what she felt, she knew Dave had to be the one to decide. He was the one who would have to live through it. Dave was apprehensive, but eventually he figured he had no real choice but to go ahead. Laurel remembers, After going full circle, he said, ‘How can you not try everything?’ Dave warned his new employer that he’d need to leave work for two days every three weeks, and that he had no idea how energetic he’d feel the rest of the time. Then they went shopping for a wig in case his hair fell out.

Lying there during his first treatment, attached to three huge feeding tubes, Dave didn’t feel too bad, except for the strange, metallic taste in his mouth. Then he went home and ate a cheese sandwich. My stomach just started to roll. I was really sick. I started throwing up every forty-five minutes for two days. The blood vessels in my eyes all burst and became real red, and for the first couple of days I couldn’t sleep. I was constantly getting up to go to the bathroom. One week later, I went into the shower, and my hair was coming off in globs. The shower was full of hair. He began wearing his new wig.

Every treatment made Dave’s nausea worse. After the third one, I’d had it. Laurel began driving him to the hospital; he couldn’t manage the trip alone. When they reached the Lorrain Avenue Bridge, just blocks from the hospital, he was already gagging. It took years before I could go over that bridge and not get sick. Once he made it inside, he’d throw up in the waiting room. They give you a pill to stop the nausea, and that was the first thing up. It’d be down about fifteen minutes maximum. By the fifth treatment, he was projectile vomiting. I could vomit fifteen feet across the room.

Dave really believed the chemotherapy was going to kill him. Laurel remembers him saying that if the cancer didn’t get him, the chemo would.²

When they came home after the treatments, Laurel’s mother, who was babysitting Mark, left immediately. Then Laurel would go out with Mark and leave Dave alone. We’d go for a walk or visit somebody because there was nothing I could do for him. No way to make him more comfortable. And it was so hard to stay there and listen and watch him going through it. So, part of it was selfish. But there was nothing I could do.

Still, they tried their best to live a normal life. Fortunately, Mark kept them busy. Having a young child forced us into a structure and routine. We had to get up. We had to take care of somebody else. Mark’s first birthday was in October, during Dave’s chemotherapy. And it was like, Oh well, we’re going to do this. And you do it. Dave also remembers relying on routine to keep going, trying to act as if everything was normal. And yet after every treatment, I’d barf my brains out in the men’s room.

The pressure on Laurel was tremendous. Everything was really hard. And as far as looking ahead, we were just looking at the next couple of days to try and deal with everything. We were dominated by it. We were not in control. At times, I just felt numbness, a sensation of just nothingness. And there was nobody. We had each other to talk to, but there was no one else. I think I’d be more open about it now.

There was occasionally some friction between them, but not too often. According to Laurel, "if Dave was having a bad day, it had to be here, because he couldn’t let down and let anybody else see that. This was where he could be himself. And if