Exposed to Agent Orange at U.S. Bases, Vets Face Cancer Without VA Compensation

As reported April 29 by Hannah Norman and Patricia Kime for KFF Health News, mounting evidence shows, as far back as the 1950s, in an effort to kill the ubiquitous poison oak and other weeds at Fort Ord, the military experimented with and sprayed Agent Orange. As a young GI at Fort Ord in Monterey County, Calif., Dean Osborn spent much of his time in the oceanside woodlands, training on soil and guzzling water from streams and aquifers now known to be contaminated with cancer-causing pollutants. “They were marching the snot out of us,” he said, recalling his year and a half stationed on the base, from 1979 to 1980. He also remembers, not so fondly, the poison oak pervasive across the 28,000-acre installation that closed in 1994. He went on sick call at least three times because of the overwhelmingly itchy rash. While the U.S. military used the herbicide to defoliate the dense jungles of Vietnam and adjoining countries, it was contaminating the land and waters of coastal California with the same chemicals, according to documents. The Defense Department has publicly acknowledged that during the Vietnam War era it stored Agent Orange at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport, Miss., and the former Kelly Air Force Base in Texas, and tested it at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base. According to the Government Accountability Office, however, the Pentagon’s list of sites where herbicides were tested went more than a decade without being updated and lacked specificity. GAO analysts described the list in 2018 as “inaccurate and incomplete.” Fort Ord was not included.