THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, November 5, 1996 TAG: 9611050269
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 141 lines
``Atomic veterans'' in Hampton Roads - Navy retirees who were deliberately exposed to radiation during the early days of nuclear testing in the Pacific - say they're disappointed but not surprised by a new government report failing to link their higher-than-normal death rate to their radiation exposure.
More than one of them use the word ``cover-up,'' and liken it to the government's handling of other cases where the United States has put its servicemen and women at risk and then sought to avoid responsibility for it.
Two commonly mentioned parallels:
Agent Orange, the highly toxic defoliant used in the Vietnam War. The government, after deflecting veterans' claims for years and even obstructing a study of their ailments in the 1980s, has since recognized Agent Orange as the apparent cause of a variety of cancers and other diseases.
Gulf War syndrome, an umbrella term for a wide range of health problems reported by Persian Gulf War veterans. After brushing off their suspicions for five years, the government now says thousands of troops may have been exposed to nerve gas when Iraqi ammunition dumps were blown up.
Last week's long-awaited report from the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine found that the death rate among Navy personnel involved in atomic bomb tests after World War II was 4.6 percent higher than among a comparable group of sailors, but the difference cannot be linked to their radiation exposure.
The news evoked weary cynicism from Donna Jeffers, a Navy widow in Virginia Beach.
Her husband, Ray, an enlisted man, watched an A-bomb test off Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands in 1948. In 1980, he died of bronchogenic carcinoma - cancer of the bronchial tubes. He was 52.
His widow has been trying ever since to get his death ruled service-connected.
She has dealt with a panoply of federal agencies - the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Veterans Affairs. She has written to President Clinton. But the years of paperwork have produced only frustration. She likens the process to a dog chasing its tail.
``Our government is spending money to find out about the kids who suffered radiation at Chernobyl, but they don't bother to take care of their own,'' Jeffers said.
``I'm very disillusioned. In the old days, servicemen couldn't imagine their country would sell them up the creek.''
Last week's report will probably make a favorable outcome in Jeffers' case even less likely.
``It's just like with the gulf veterans,'' Jeffers said. ``They come back and DOD says nothing is wrong. The only difference is, the gulf people are young. They're still alive to bring it to the news. In my case, 99 percent are dead, so we can't keep it in the news.''
Eventually, Jeffers believes, the atomic veterans will be vindicated.
``When all the servicemen are dead, and all the widows, they'll come out and say it's been proven,'' she said.
``I am probably a little bitter, I guess. But I've got 17 years and drawers and file cabinets full of rhetoric.''
The new study is based on the records of 40,000 military personnel who participated in Operation Crossroads, a 1946 exercise in which atomic bombs were detonated over empty target ships in a lagoon at Bikini Atoll, also located in the Marshall Islands.
One of those servicemen was Robert Atchison, 80, of Portsmouth. At the time he was chief engineer of the Sphinx, a light repair ship.
``We had no protection of any kind at all,'' Atchison said. ``No badges, no protective clothing. They had us all go topside and watch the blast go off.
``It was something, all right, I'll tell you - a big cone-shaped cloud went up in the air, and that damn stuff came down all over us.
``Then one went off in the water. There was a captured German cruiser, and it lifted it right out of the water.
``I went down through there the next day, and all those ships were nothing but buckets of rust. Just junk, is all they were.''
For months after the tests, Atchison said, he had red blotches all over his body. Half his face was red and half white. He also believes his nerves were damaged by the experience.
The Navy never provided any follow-up examination or medical care, Atchison said.
When he asked to have a notation about the bomb tests included in his medical records, he said, ``they acted like they didn't want to talk about it.''
Jack Madison, 71, of Norfolk was aboard another ship, the Albemarle, at the 1946 Bikini tests. He seemed in perfect health until recent years, when he lost a kidney to cancer.
He had never smoked. Doctors could find no reason for his illness. He suspects his radiation exposure is to blame, and feels betrayed by the latest findings.
``I feel the same way the Agent Orange people feel, the same way the Persian Gulf people feel,'' he said. ``How else can we feel?''
The panel of scientists found that the Navy test veterans appeared slightly more likely to die from cancer, and leukemia in particular - diseases most likely to be caused by radiation exposure - than other sailors. However, the difference was not statistically significant, the panel said.
Madison believes the survey findings are flawed because the number of sailors studied - 40,000 - was too large.
``They're counting people that brought those target ships out there, and then they anchored them and went back to the States,'' he said. ``They weren't there when the bombs went off. There wasn't a third that many people there.
``They're making the statistics read the way they want to.''
After years of agitation by veterans and their survivors, the government now offers compensation to veterans who participated in the atomic tests and suffer from one of 15 specified cancers.
But veteran advocates say that is inadequate. Not only have atomic veterans been dying prematurely in large numbers, usually of cancer, they say, but many also suffered damage to their reproductive systems that caused birth defects and chronic illnesses in their children.
The National Association of Atomic Veterans, a lobbying group, has assembled the medical histories of 5,000 atomic veterans, of whom 12 percent had died by 1995. Of the deceased veterans, 78 percent had cancer. The median age at death among those studied was 56 - about 20 years younger than among the general population.
``We're not scientists,'' Oscar Rosen, the group's outgoing national commander, acknowledged in an interview. ``We work with the information that's provided to us by veterans and their widows and children. But from what we have heard, we believe that significantly more of the Crossroads veterans died of a variety of cancers than those in a non-radiation-exposed cohort would have died from.''
The new study won't end the controversy, Rosen said.
``It's just going to fire us up all the more. They would like it to be the end of the story, but we won't accept anything less than their acknowledgment that we were exposed to harmful levels of radiation and that many more of us deserve compensation and medical care, and that the children of these veterans who were born with birth defects and suffer from chronic illnesses should also be taken care of.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
MIKE HEFFNER
The Virginian-Pilot
Donna Jeffers, left, is a Navy widow whose husband, Ray, above,
watched an A-bomb test in 1948. In 1980, he died of cancer. He was
52.
An atomic bomb blast fills the sky at Bikini Atoli in the Marshall
Islands in 1946: A recent study found that the death rate amony Navy
personnel involved in such tests was higher than among other
sailors.
KEYWORDS: CANCER ATOMIC VETERANS NAVY BOMB RADIATION
ILLNESS by CNB