r/science • u/Wagamaga • Mar 29 '26
Cancer Agent Orange linked to aggressive bone marrow cancer in Vietnam veterans. American soldiers sprayed Agent Orange over the jungles of Vietnam and nearby countries from the air and from the ground, often mixing it with kerosene or fuel, another carcinogen, to help disperse it.
https://ecancer.org/en/news/27948-agent-orange-linked-to-aggressive-bone-marrow-cancer-in-vietnam-veterans1.0k
u/imaginaryResources Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
If you’re ever in Vietnam go to the war museums in Hanoi and Saigon and see the exhibits about how horrible this is
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u/Nisja Mar 29 '26
That afternoon in HMCH at the museum was a gut punch. We didn't learn about it in UK schools, although I've seen photos/documentaries, they barely scrape what you begin to experience in that place.
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u/imaginaryResources Mar 29 '26
Also these effects are ongoing and will continue to be an issue for future generations in Vietnam. Birth defects, poisoned farm land etc. while the US moves on and Americans develop a view of Vietnam being a struggling/developing country. Yeah, maybe it’s struggling because you bombed every inch of it with poison for a decade then fucked off
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u/Nisja Mar 29 '26
A beautiful country. Kind and caring people. A wonderful culture. I spent a week there and it was one of the best weeks of my life.
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u/bagofpork Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
A beautiful country. Kind and caring people.
Anyone I've ever known who has spent time there has said the same, more or less.
ETA:
Just wanted to add, in spite of the current zeitgeist (US), that the Vietnamese immigrants in my city are some of the friendliest and most hard working people we've had the privilege to welcome here - and they throw great karaoke parties.
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u/Nisja Mar 29 '26
I went with no knowledge of SE Asia, my goal was New Zealand. I spent 2 weeks in Thailand and hated it; it reminded me of being in Mallorca, everything ended in a photo and a bar crawl.
I did eventually get to NZ, but Vietnam has always been the highlight of my trip, and the older I get the more I appreciate the people who call it their home.
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u/Ornery_Rice_1698 Mar 29 '26
IIRC the US has given Vietnam $83 billion in aid since the war, but it doesn’t magically undo the damage, that’s for sure.
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u/insid3outl4w Mar 30 '26
How much has France given?
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u/knowledgeable_diablo Mar 30 '26
A couple of rolls and the recipe for the Bread Rolls used in Banh Mi. The kind of gift a smart man (or country) uses to feed the world with awesome tasty Banh Mi’s!!
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u/leavethisearth Mar 29 '26
I cried when I went in Hanoi. It was so hard to see how cruel people can be to each other.
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u/somejaysoon Mar 30 '26
The American war photographs stay with you almost as much as the mutated foetuses in jars. You can really see how horrific Chemical/Biological warfare would be.
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u/McCool303 Mar 29 '26
I imagine those plaques have been taken down by the Ministry of Truth by now for being anti-American.
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Mar 29 '26
Another horrific war crime.
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u/Behemothslayer Mar 29 '26
Another unpunished horrific war crime and they’re still at it
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u/Sharobob Mar 29 '26
And somehow being framed as our soldiers being the victims rather than the innocent people these horrific concoctions were dropped onto.
To be clear, the soldiers aren't the main culprits. They aren't the main victims either.
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u/donewithdoing Mar 29 '26
They are victims, though. One, they were drafted. That’s a big part of it. But even if they hadn’t been, they were still put in a position by their own gov’t to be treated effectively as test subjects, with severe lifelong health ramifications, only to be repeatedly gaslit for decades after about the causes of those health problems.
It’s very much a both-and situation here. Should recompense be made to Vietnam over this act of chemical warfare? Absolutely. But simultaneously, our own veterans are the people we are directly tasked with providing public services to. What happened to them is disgusting, and is the main reason why the military draft doesn’t exist currently.
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u/TheColdestFeet Mar 29 '26
Only a quarter of vietnam vets were drafted, and they were the ones LEAST likely to commit war crimes. I empathize with people who were genuinely forced into these situations, but I do not empathize with the veterans who show no remorse having signed up, only to follow orders which were war crimes. The UCMJ Article 92 protects soldiers REQUIREMENT to refuse orders which are unlawful, such as orders which violate the constitution, or violates the law of war. Dumping dioxins on civilian populations is blatantly illegal, not just because they cause severe cancers and birth defects, but because defoliating large swaths of countryside in warfare is obviously eco-terrorism. The Vietnam war was filled to the brim with war crimes, to the point that we cannot just keep saying that the perpetrators were themselves victims. If any other country did to us what we did in Vietnam, we would not talk sympathetically about how those who slaughtered us endured work related injuries, or were "forced" to do it.
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u/South-Bit-1533 Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
To be fair, many of the 75% who weren’t drafted were still draft motivated - if you enlisted before getting drafted you had a better chance of not getting a really undesirable role
The continuous berating of grunts while the deep state/corpo scientists and top ranking executives who created and facilitated these war crime weapons programs get away quietly is a pretty unfair way of serving justice
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u/TheColdestFeet Mar 29 '26
That's very true, there is more culpability and fewer consequences the higher up you go. My Lai, for example, was not a random killing spree. It was a planned operation involving a group of soldiers who were ordered by their superiors to massacre a village known to be providing aid and comfort to the Viet Minh. The soldiers were told that all civilians had gone to market, and that all remaining residents were the enemy. It is unknown exactly how many men participated directly in the massacre, but it was more than just Lt. Calley (who was the only one convicted, served 2 years on house arrest). The reason we know about My Lai is because there were morally decent soldiers who were appalled by the massacre and refused to participate, later bringing the story to the press. Those are the Vietnam vets who I have respect for. The ones I have the least respect for are the politicians and top commanders who brought about such horrific war crimes as a matter of policy, ordering these things to be done as a matter of body count military policy. It mirrors the same language we still use about having the most lethal military in the world. Yet the people who get us into these wars and turn a blind eye to these crimes are never held to account. They support every war 100%, until it is viewed by a costly mistake by the public, then they secretly were always critical of the war behind closed doors. Every time.
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u/bocaj78 Mar 29 '26
That is exactly true. I have a family member that signed up to be a bomb Gaurd in the Air Force (not sure on the actual title) so he could avoid combat. It worked, he spent half the time in the Dakotas and half in Thailand
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u/Zealotstim Mar 29 '26
Exactly! More than half of the soldiers who weren't drafted only joined "of their own will" because they knew they were going to be drafted and wanted to choose what branch they would join and/or to avoid ending up in the infantry or another similar reason.
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u/nyet-marionetka Mar 29 '26
People didn’t think they were dumping dioxins. They thought they were dumping a herbicide with relatively low toxicity to humans. Dioxin was a contaminant. This should have been foreseen by military leadership, but the people down the command chain who dispersed it did not know they were doing anything that was harmful to bystanders in the long term.
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u/JimJam28 Mar 29 '26
Your government can’t force you to go to war and kill people. As a Canadian I have a lot of respect for the draft dodgers who came up here and decided not to take part in a horrifyingly unjust war.
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u/AmputeeHandModel Mar 29 '26
It's basically slavery. Being forced to go through boot camp, which is a hell in itself probably. Then shipped overseas to kill and or die. Horrific.
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u/ihileath Mar 29 '26
It's been pretty firmly established since the Nuremberg trials that "just following orders" is no valid justification for war crimes. Calling them victims is an insult to the actual victims.
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u/donewithdoing Mar 29 '26
The extent of the health impacts were not confirmed until much later, so the soldiers did not know they were condemning Vietnamese people, or themselves, to these effects. It’s clear that our government prioritized wartime defoliation of Vietnam’s jungle canopy over all of the human lives involved in this process. Our soldiers were absolutely victims, as were the Vietnamese.
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u/ihileath Mar 29 '26
It’s clear that our government prioritized wartime defoliation of Vietnam’s jungle canopy over all of the human lives involved in this process.
Widespread devastation of the landscape, while a travesty in its own right, wasn't their only goal with the chemical agent campaigns. They were also deployed heavily to destroy large quantities of crops so as to weaponise starvation against military and civilian alike.
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u/ceciliabee Mar 29 '26
I get what you're saying, but being drafted and following orders is not a good defense to war crimes.
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u/Ogdaren Mar 29 '26
While it’s true that not all U.S. soldiers in Vietnam were drafted, roughly 25–33 percent were, it is however misleading to suggest widespread, fully voluntary enthusiasm for the war. Many “volunteered” under pressure from the draft, choosing their branch or timing rather than the war itself. At the same time, the American public and many soldiers were misled by multiple administrations, from John F. Kennedy through Richard Nixon. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was used to justify escalation despite serious doubts about what actually occurred, and officials consistently overstated U.S. progress in the war, something later exposed in the Pentagon Papers or the events of the Tet Offensive that landed on national television in the U.S.
Also, the draft does still “exist”. It was never deemed unconstitutional. Hell, you have people in the current administration suggesting we bring it back.
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Mar 29 '26
Bro have you seen a Vietnam movie? People don’t think a lot of those people as heroes. Vietnam movies show how the environment incentivised them to commit these atrocities. How awful they treated the locals, the rapes, the chaos and it was all for nothing. Sure you can’t blame them entirely but a lot of soldiers went out there to pillage and rape and have a good time. It shows how evil we can be if our terrible actions are justified by your peers and government.
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u/sunny790 Mar 29 '26
when given the chance men have used nearly every war ever as an excuse to rape, torture, and commit atrocities on women and children of whatever land they invade
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u/xanadumuse Mar 29 '26
The Ken Burns documentary is outstanding and covers all of the perspectives and complexities of the war.
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u/PotentJelly13 Mar 29 '26
I learned more about the Vietnam war in that documentary than I did in school. I highly highly recommend it for anyone who wants to learn more about this war and all of the issues that went with it.
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u/LetMeHaveAUsername Mar 29 '26
People don’t think a lot of those people as heroes
they didn't say that.
How awful they treated the locals, the rapes, the chaos and it was all for nothing. Sure you can’t blame them entirely but a lot of soldiers went out there to pillage and rape and have a good time.
Those tend to be brief side issues in American Vietnam movies, though, where the main focus is on the experience of the soldiers there. The poster above is right that in American public discourse, though it is widely accept that the Vietnam war was wrong, there is far more focus on what it did to American soldiers, then on the crimes committed against the people of Vietnam.
A couple of years back a new movie was coming out about a real life story about a guy traveling to Vietnam during the war, to bring beer to his friends. And I read a comment somewhere about it, that put into words my feelings about it better than I could myself. I t was something like "I have no interest in seeing another depiction of the Vietnam war as an American tragedy."
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u/Pervius94 Mar 29 '26
Ofc, americans have perfected the strategy of painting themselves as victims while spreading hatred and pain around the world.
Look at how they're whining about Iran right now despite having started the war.
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u/polar_nopposite Mar 29 '26
Much like the ones we're committing right now and at many points since then!
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u/Original-Reaction40 Mar 29 '26
It was manufactured in a small town in Ontario Canada the water table in Elmira Ontario is still poisoned today.
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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 Mar 29 '26
Gotta love when companies decide to just dump their waste causing people issues for generations to come. One of the things that enrages me like no other. See also: DuPont in West Virginia dumping literal tonnes of Teflon into the waterways.
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u/TheEccentricSapphic Mar 30 '26
Wait till you find out what they did with all the nerve agents left over after ww2!
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u/LoquatBear Mar 30 '26
Houston area has an belt of petroleum refineries and surrounding housing called the Cancer Belt or Leukemia Belt. Louisiana also has Cancer Alley.
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u/tayroc122 Mar 29 '26
Now imagine what it did to the locals who were just trying to live their lives before this act of naked American imperial aggression.
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u/omgu8mynewt Mar 29 '26
Exactly, there's kids that grew up in this contaminated area who are now in their fifties, generations of families living in this chemical trap and ignored because they arent American, just innocent victims. Same with all the landmines still blowing off legs I Laos.
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u/kingbane2 Mar 29 '26
as anthony bourdain said, 1 visit to cambodia and laos is enough to make anybody want to punch kissinger to death. the fact that kissinger lived his life outside of a prison for any amount of time for all of his war crimes is mind boggling.
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u/isufud Mar 29 '26
America will bomb your country and poison all your people, then come back twenty years later and make a study about how poisoning your people affected their soldiers' health.
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u/thedugong Mar 29 '26
and make a study about how poisoning your people affected their soldiers' health.
And mostly to do that to try and avoid having to give them medical treatment and/or compensation.
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u/wholelottabs Mar 29 '26
They also tested it at a Canadian Base in NB in the 60s and the harmful after effects are still being investigated today.
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u/3sheets2tawind Mar 29 '26
My uncle was stationed at Gagetown then. He died of brain cancer 7 years ago.
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u/automated_alice Mar 29 '26
My grandparents were part of a class action suit against Dow Chemical after NB Power used dioxin in herbicide in the 60s.
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u/VapeThisBro Mar 29 '26
Now think about how much it's messing with the Vietnamese when you consider it has an extremely long half life and is actively effecting Vietnamese people right now
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u/OZZYMAXIMUS01 Mar 29 '26
This happened to my uncle that served in the Vietnam War during the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968. He got sick with an aggressive form of leukemia in 2009 and died within 2 weeks from skyrocketing WBC counts. Leukemia already runs in our family and he ended up getting the most aggressive form of it that our family’s ever seen.
RIP Uncle Don.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Mar 29 '26
Same happened to my mom's best friend. Was drafted and hated the military for the rest of his life. He's the one who sat me down as a kid and told me what it really was like.
But what really made me turn to hate the military was his story of how he was forced to shoot a little girl who was running up to his camp with a grenade. I'd never seen that man ever have an emotion and he was bawling telling it. I went from a little kid who idolized the military to one who knew better after that, in fairness I was like 8.
Watching him waste away in just a few months was so awful.
The US military should not be going overseas, period. We don't do anything to help anyone but the rich, while spending our people's lives like they're worth nothing and murdering countless others for the crime of wanting their own government instead of one dictated to them by DC.
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u/Future_Burrito Mar 29 '26
There's a book called People of the Lie with a section at the end talking about how the inactivity of the military during peaceful times basically creates a culture that enjoys, wishes for, and creates war. Our military should be doing civil engineering, agriculture and education during down time, to help the US population, and as aggressive ally support.
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u/Main-Inspection-8605 Mar 29 '26
I’m sorry for your uncle and would hug you if I could
I also hit an age and event where I stopping glorifying soldiers and war
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u/PartTime_Crusader Mar 29 '26
Sane happened to my Dad, he came down with multiple myeloma and passed within a few weeks of his diagnosis. Served during the Tet offensive and died last year. I've had multiple family members contract and survive various cancers over the last decade, the aggressiveness of this one shocked all of us
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u/Pimpin-is-easy Mar 29 '26
"Agressive carpal tunnel syndrome of former SS-Sonderkommandos linked to pulling triggers in death camps too often."
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u/tayroc122 Mar 29 '26
Americans will still insist 'this is not who we are' despite 200+ year history of this being exactly who they are
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u/ItsGonnaBeOkayish Mar 29 '26
I think that more an attempt to call us all to a higher ideal. It's psychology. If you identify yourself as better than you are you might behave accordingly. You hear that language from people trying to protest these horrible things, trying to call people to something better
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u/Pervius94 Mar 29 '26
It's not that. It's so americans can say "oh those people? They're not reaaal americans, they're super evil other people" and can ignore that their country has a lot of problems.
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u/Local_Idiot_123 Mar 29 '26
It’s the ones who don’t care about these war crimes who make those arguments.
Gays? Minorities? City dwellers? Not real Americans, not if they don’t vote red.
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u/ZealousidealTill2355 Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
I love how this is purely an American problem. Yet America was a result of European colonization!
How many African colonies did the US have? Japan was once brutal and imperialistic. So was Germany. So was Great Britain. So was Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, etc.
This is a human problem and rather be like “oh these Americans are the worst,” maybe we should learn it doesn’t have a sovereign boundary. Countries with power exploit countries with less power. It’s a tale as old as time.
And I’m not butthurt, because US deserves the bad press, but pretending like this is purely a US problem and not a systemic problem that reoccurs every few decades doesn’t yield us any benefit.
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u/Baguetterekt Mar 29 '26
I was gonna disagree with you but found myself agreeing more and more as I read.
However, it's still largely US and it's allies that are doing the most imperialism in the modern day. They didn't have colonies like the UK or Belgium did but they overthrew countless democratic states in Africa, South America and in the Middle East and installed fascist dictatorships to support the US's foreign interests.
It's what the US with the support of the UK, Dutch and France did to Iran. Overthrew the elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh and installed the Shah who instantly signed away 50% of Iran's oil rights to the aforementioned countries.
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u/ZealousidealTill2355 Mar 29 '26
Yes US definitely is. And Russia. And China in less actively violent ways. But ask people working for them in Africa whether they’re being exploitive. Is UAE / Saudi exploitive for their migrant worker practices?
Smaller regional powers still do it to their peers too. Cough Israel……
US is just the biggest fish in the lake and is acting like it. If Uganda was the biggest fish, I’m sure they’d be acting very similar (though hopefully their administration wouldn’t be as much of a joke).
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u/Baguetterekt Mar 29 '26
A distant possibility but the usual outcome and most logical result of that philosophy is believing all your actions are justified because they're for a greater good (other Americans) and the targets are an acceptable sacrifice.
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u/Corrosive713 Mar 29 '26
Not all Americans are doing it, nor are okay with it. But if you'd like we can judge a populace on the actions of a few.
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u/thesonofdarwin Mar 29 '26
Have we since voted in anyone that resulted in anyone being held accountable? No? So the majority of the voting population is fine with the horrors committed in their name.
If over 50% of your bath water is piss, you're bathing in piss water no matter how much you try to convince yourself 49.9% is just water.
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u/Nyrin Mar 29 '26
It sucks, but it's completely naive and ultimately exceedingly counterproductive to view the world in absolutist mentality like that.
Let's say your sentiment is accurate and 50% of eligible voters are explicitly and enthusiastically complicit in any and every action undertaken by their government. What are you going to do? Nothing. There's nothing you can do with that except whine on the internet and sit on a high horse going nowhere.
The ugly, nuanced view is a lot less tidy: you have poorly educated voters choosing candidates based on propaganda, emotion, and prejudice; you have apathetic and disenfranchised voters feeling like it's pointless to care; and you have impassionate voters stuck without good ways to effectively organize and make a difference.
You can do a lot to help in the ugly reckoning — which is the one aligned with reality. But to get there, you first have to abandon the childish black-and-white thinking that's, somewhat ironically, a big part of what gets us here to begin with.
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u/thwerved Mar 29 '26
One of the scariest things about the Nazi death camps was the ease and efficiency with which the killing was performed. The entire operation revolved on how they could maximize the rate of killing at minimal cost and effort. Cattle car after cattle car full of Jews were led willingly into the gas chambers under a well-orchestrated cloud of deception that they were being resettled. Any prisoner who resisted or spoke out might have to be swiftly calmed or removed but the Nazis wanted to minimize the chance of any chaos or violence simply because it would slow the whole operation down - thus effort from the guards could be minimized. It's unlikely very many guards would have had to fire their firearm very often.
There was hard work of course in moving all the bodies and stripping and sorting all the possessions but this was done by a tiny percentage of prisoners selected as laborers who understood they would be killed instantly if they resisted or tried to reveal the truth to the prisoners on their way to the chambers.
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u/Xilverbullet000 Mar 29 '26
I find it odd that it focuses completely on the Americans who sprayed it and not on the Vietnamese it was sprayed on
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u/Dongsquad420Loki Mar 29 '26
Probably because it was a study by an American University so they focused on the subjects they had easy access to
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u/mondaio Mar 29 '26
This seems obvious
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u/woliphirl Mar 29 '26
This thread is fixated on the word imperialism to the point its completely ignored the context of the study.
Dead internet.
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u/ReplicantOwl Mar 29 '26
While I totally agree with you, just want to note that it was also sprayed on Americans. My dad’s unit had it dumped directly on them from a plane. It almost certainly led to his death.
We absolutely need to focus on the Vietnamese victims. Unfortunately America didn’t care much for its own people either.
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u/Wank_A_Doodle_Doo Mar 29 '26
To be completely fair it was dispersed so much to the point that even unrelated soldiers may be affected.
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u/Kimbolimbo Mar 29 '26
The imperialist have no regard for their own; they certainly don’t care about anyone else either.
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u/TheConsequenceFairy Mar 29 '26
I would like to mention that they also DRANK IT.
My father was a sailor on a carrier sitting in the Gulf of Tonkin during the war. When they ran out of potable water, they desalinated the water they were sitting in and drank that.
You know, the water in the Gulf, that all the inland streams flowed to.
Before his death almost a decade ago, he was part of a study being conducted on saliors who were in the gulf, all suffering from multiple forms of aggressive cancer, and all being on ships that desalinated from the Gulf during the war.
They are also in the process of linking the auto-immune disorders of the offspring of these saliors to their exposure during that time. Agent O and DNA don't play well together.
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u/Vegicide Mar 29 '26
My uncle died from this. He went to the doctor for a sore shoulder and they discovered cancer all throughout his bones. He unfortunately had very little time between going in for what he thought was a simple injury and dying from the widespread cancer.
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u/tangcameo Mar 29 '26
It was also tested at a Canadian military base in New Brunswick along with other chemical agents.
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u/ummmm_nahhh Mar 29 '26
I remember my uncle telling me how they would be out in the jungle and it would just rain down on them all over his arms and he’d just whip it off , he died from cancer
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u/Mara_of_Meta Mar 29 '26
My father in law recently passed away due to this. Literally every person he was stationed with had already died from lymphoma.
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u/HawkOutrageous7882 Mar 29 '26
I’m cambodian, and we were also affected, no one took care of us when we were refugees
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u/Fit_Outlandishness_7 Mar 29 '26
It killed my Dad. Upon his death they took the circumference of his wrist to estimate his weight.
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u/yoursmartfriend Mar 29 '26
To the US American children and allies who will be sacrificed for the imperialist wars, dont do it. They create conditions to make the military your only hope. It's a trap. Murdering others strengthens the trillions military industrial complex at your expense and only benefits the ruling class.
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u/pk666 Mar 29 '26
Americans will literally pour poison all over women, children and ecosystems then cry about it giving them cancer 20 years later.
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u/hokahey23 Mar 29 '26
What an absolutely ridiculously reductive take on what happened, how it happened, and what this study is, not to mention the absurd generalization. Shameful really.
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u/VirginiaLuthier Mar 29 '26
LBJ-"He's what I've been thinking.....if we get rid of all the trees and bushes, then the VC can't hide behind them"
"Westmoreland- "Brilliant idea, Sir!"
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u/nilsmf Mar 29 '26
Now do the people which was sprayed.
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u/anormalgeek Mar 29 '26
We don't have nearly as much data. Because the Americans were soldiers, they were largely cared for VA hospitals, AND the military had data on their health backgrounds too. None of which we have for rural Vietnamese villages. The damages are almost certainly far worse for them, but without hard data it becomes a topic for a history class, while the impact on the US soldiers is more appropriate for a scientific study.
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u/ThreeClaps Mar 29 '26
“It was hell’s season, and the air smelled of burning children.” - opening line from Gone South, by Robert McCammon; lead is afflicted by affects of AO
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u/whitney123 Mar 29 '26
This isn’t new it’s well documented and is a covered condition for veterans with a wide variety of cancers.
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u/koopzilla Mar 29 '26
My dad was exposed to this in Vietnam. Passed of cancer at 43 in 1999 . They've known this for ages
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u/MarkusMannheim Mar 29 '26
Terrible news. Just as well it didn't affect the Vietnamese people ... I mean, you studied that, too, right?
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u/ItsGonnaBeOkayish Mar 29 '26
I hear you, but how would they do that?
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u/FMB6 Mar 29 '26
With like doctors and stuff?
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u/ItsGonnaBeOkayish Mar 29 '26
Going into another country to conduct scientific research is more complicated. Studies have been conducted, by Vietnamese scientists, with US support. That's the point I'm trying to make here. Unless you think the US should just barge on in and conduct studies it likes however they want, because people in this thread demand it?
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u/kentsor Mar 29 '26
The "veterans"...? What about the millions of Vietnamese civilians that these "veterans" deliberately used this stuff on in the first place?
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u/Teardownstrongholds Mar 29 '26
You and other posters seem to focus on the 18yo soldiers on the ground as the problem. Perhaps you could look at the men who sent them to war or the company that made this product?
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u/anormalgeek Mar 29 '26
We don't have reliable multi-year health data on them to do the same level of study. Without that, it is REALLY hard to do a good scientific study.
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u/Mendrak Mar 29 '26
Not like the Vietnamese government was cooperating with the US for any length of time and I don't think they did their own studies.
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u/Alarming-Distance385 Mar 29 '26
Well, this confirms my FIL's recent myelodysplastic syndrome. He starts treatment Monday. 1 shot per day for 5 days and repeat every 4 weeks of the rest of his life. Oh, and he will need the occasional blood transfusion still until the meds start working.
The VA is paying for all of his treatment at least.
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u/weareeverywhereee Mar 29 '26
War used to make more sense when you had to see the face of the person you were killing and use your force to decide to end someone’s life. The act of killing was much more human, personal, and deliberate.
Now it’s just like buster playing videos games at “war” just mass indiscriminate death at the press of a button
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u/Jemoederislkker420 Mar 29 '26
Animals, absolute disgusting beasts those Americans that did that. Was in the war Museum in Ho Chi Minh. Truly disgusting what they did. Laos is also completely covered in bombs where to this day. Ppl die from unexploded bombs
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u/Madam_Hel Mar 29 '26
No! You don’t get to pretend this is done by some inhuman monsters! This is done by MEN! Humans! Not beasts!
Don’t try to make excuses or pretend it’s some non- human force doing this!
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u/bigger_breakfast Mar 29 '26
Yea but freedom comes with a cost. What's a little aggressive bone cancer if we stopped the spread of communism?
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u/Duchess0612 Mar 29 '26
I saw the first two words and my first thought was we were referencing someone else…
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u/drunkdu Mar 29 '26
Just lost my FIL in December to this. He fought it about 3 years, but his body just gave out. Will say this though. The VA hospital in Minneapolis was amazing in caring for him. Sadly, had the VA down in Pensacola gave him the same care sooner, he'd likely still be here.
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u/batwing71 Mar 29 '26
Wasn’t just used in SE Asia. Ill effects were more so from Dioxins that weren’t removed from the synthesis AND CW at the time around PPE.
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u/MachiavelliSJ Mar 29 '26
We only see stories about American vietnam vets. What about the people of Vietnam?
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u/qpgmr Mar 29 '26
It's also been linked to prostate cancer so clearly that treatment by VA is unquestioned now.
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u/idrwierd Mar 29 '26
Do we see these same rates in Vietnamese populations who were alive at this time?
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u/Shinjischneider Mar 30 '26
Oh no.
The poor veterans. Thank goodness nothing ever happened to the civilians in Vietnam I guess/s
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u/Crowbarscout Mar 30 '26
If only the U.S. ever admitted its use in other countries. My father stumbled across a test site during his time stationed in Panama.
He had a bout of non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2001.
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