Roddy Lewis grew up there.
There, on the edge of the jungle as an 18-year-old Airman. There enemy soldiers jumped out of graveyards firing at his base. When he talks about Southeast Asia, his voice is distant sounding more like a teacher giving a history lesson rather than a man who had survived.
There he sloshed through an herbicide sanctioned by the U.S. government in the Vietnam War.
That herbicide is what he blames for killing his brother. That herbicide is what he blames for his bladder cancer. That herbicide is what is consuming the men sitting around the table at the Veterans Cafe and Grill in Socastee on Wednesday mornings. That herbicide is what they talk about between bites of sausage and eggs or sips of coffee.
That herbicide, Agent Orange, is what is emblazoned on their shirts, hats and medals each one wears.
Agent Orange is blamed for killing more Vietnam War veterans than died in the war. That herbicide is blamed for killing Vietnam veterans at a higher rate than other veterans are dying.
Named for the orange stripes on the barrels it was stored in, Agent Orange was a chemical substance that the U.S. military sprayed during the Vietnam War to destroy foliage and food sources to expose and weaken enemy forces, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. It has been linked to bladder cancer, chronic B-cell leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, multiple myeloma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, prostate cancer, Parkinson’s Disease, hypothyroidism and lung cancer.
Lewis has his own description.
“Sprayed and betrayed,” Lewis said, running his fingers over the words on his shirt.
Horry County is home to a chapter of the Orange Heart Medal Foundation which is a 501(c)(3) dedicated to recognizing Vietnam veterans suffering from Agent Orange-related ailments.
Qualifying veterans or their spouses, if the veteran has already died, are gifted an orange emblem, or medal.
Local veterans and Orange Heart Medal holders meet each Wednesday morning at the cafe located at 3544 Northgate Drive in the Socastee community by the old back gate to the former Air Force base. They eat breakfast, give advice on dealing with Veteran Administration paperwork and ask about health issues they face. And they exchange knowing nods when someone talks about the intense traumas experienced while in the war.
“I graduated from high school in 1965 at 17 and three days later, I was waiting to go into the war. I wasn’t going to college. I was in Vietnam at 18,” Lewis said. “You can holler for mama but mama’s not there. You just had to grow up and man up.”
Another group member, veteran Marion Chestnut served in Vietnam from 1966 to 1968.
“I have issues. I don’t heal, I blister all over and I got this ongoing situation for the rest of my life,” Chestnut said. “I’ve had operations to minimize my problems, but I am black and blue all over like a bruised piece of fruit. I have medical conditions that will never change.”
Chestnut said that the potential for his ailments to get worse with age worries him.
“It bothers me because you never know when it’s gonna get worse,” he said. “Nowadays, they take good care of the soldiers but when I got back, I was called a baby killer.”
Veteran Ronnie Elvis, director of Veterans Affairs for Horry County Government, said the effects of Agent Orange linger.
“A lot of people think that Agent Orange itself is a disability and it’s not. It was a chemical that causes a lot of nasty medical conditions and symptoms,” Elvis said.
About 2.7 million served in the Vietnam War, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. More than 60,000 died in the war while five times that – 300,000 – have died as a result of exposure to Agent Orange, according to the Pew Research Center.
The veterans’ affairs department states the median age of Vietnam War veterans is 73 years old.
Pew estimates most who served in Vietnam War era will have died by 2046.
One study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that Vietnam veterans were dying at a 17% quicker rate than other veterans during the late 1980s.
The herbicide was sprayed so often and in such large quantities that any veteran who served in Southeast Asia during the war is presumed to have been exposed to Agent Orange, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Army veteran Bobby Tyner who served from 1965 to 1974 is the head of the Horry County chapter of the group.
He was exposed to Agent Orange when he served with the 53rd Combat Demolition Engineers as a “tunnel rat,” which, according to the National Museum of the U.S. Army, was a soldier that would venture into the Viet Cong’s underground tunnel systems on search and destroy missions.
Being a tunnel rat was a deadly job and Tyner said he will never be able to talk about some of the horrors he witnessed during his service in Vietnam.
“I got out of Vietnam in 1967 and then I spent ten years in the military and in ten years in the military, I never heard of Agent Orange,” Tyner said.
He has undergone multiple surgeries for multiple Agent Orange-related cancers and ailments with his most recent being brain cancer.
Agent Orange and younger generations
Tyner said that one of the goals of the foundation is to spread awareness about the fact that some of the descendents of the people exposed to Agent Orange are suffering from related ailments.
“My grandson is 10-years-old and has already had 30-something surgeries,” he said.
Tyner’s daughter, Kady Turner, explained that her son has Kabuki Syndrome, which, according to the Boston Children’s Hospital, is a “rare congenital disorder.”
“Children with Kabuki syndrome usually have distinctive facial features, mild to moderate mental impairment and growth problems. Kabuki syndrome can also affect many other body systems, including the heart, intestines, kidneys, and skeleton,” according to the hospital. “Kabuki syndrome occurs in about one out of every 32,000 births. It affects males and females equally.”
Research has not been done to determine if Kabuki Syndrome is directly linked to Agent Orange, but Turner said that both of her son’s grandfathers, including Tyner, served in Vietnam and were directly exposed to the herbicide.
Additionally, Turner said that both her and her husband were tested to see if they were carriers of the syndrome and neither one of them were.
“I know it's affected my dad a lot more than it has my son, but, looking into it a little more, I see where my dad's coming from. Agent Orange is passed down to the grandkids, the kids and so on,” Turner said.
Agent Orange and reproductive toxicology
Kaylon Bruner-Tran, a medical research scientist with a laboratory at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, studies the effects Agent Orange has on the offspring of those directly exposed to the substance.
“For Agent Orange, it's two different compounds, two different chemicals, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D and it was that mixture that was supposed to be the weed killer, and it was, but during the manufacturing process of 2,4,5-T, dioxin was inadvertently produced,” Bruner-Tran said. “And there is evidence that we've known dioxin was a bad thing for a long time, but it was not public knowledge that Agent Orange was contaminated with dioxin for a long time.”
Bruner-Tran said that the younger a veteran was exposed to Agent Orange, the more likely that veteran is to experience intense illnesses throughout their life.
In mice, Bruner-Tran said, exposure to dioxin is creating birth defects throughout “four to five generations.”
“I do believe our veterans are seeing their children and probably their grandchildren having these issues. Now it should get better with each generation, but how many generations will it take? I can't say,” she said.
Some of the other veterans in the group have family members in younger generations that are faring with health issues likely related to dioxin exposure.
“My daughter just found out she only has one kidney,” Chestnut said. “And my son is a bad diabetic.”
The adverse effects Agent Orange has on Vietnam veterans and their families has not always been widely recognized in the medical field.
“So, if you do environmental toxicology, and my field in particular is reproductive toxicology, people just assume that if it's produced, then it's been tested, and so it must be okay. They say, ‘If our government allows it to be produced, it must be okay.’ That's why Red Dye 40 is still in a lot of products,” Bruner-Tran said. “Since the 1950s, it's estimated that 150,000 chemicals have been introduced in our environment, and very few of them have undergone rigorous testing.
“People don't want to believe, physicians included, don't want to believe that these exposures can cause serious disease. But like I said, the evidence is just becoming so overwhelming within the scientific community.”
Post-war lifestyle
Bruner-Tran also said that lifestyle factors can exacerbate ailments linked to Agent Orange.
“Dioxin is one very major hit to your body and your health and then choices that you make are probably going to make that manifest either earlier, or make it manifest more severely,” she said.
Tyner said that “pretty much everyone” in the Orange Heart Medal Foundation abused substances to cope with war trauma.
“I’ll be honest with you, pretty much everyone at this table, we become alcoholics. We drank, we worked, and we drank, so we had no feelings,” he said.
The horrors Vietnam veterans endured while in service, Agent Orange exposure included, live in their minds and bodies and while some of them admit to having intense fear of the war before they went to Vietnam, they say that it is impossible to know how one will react to such horrors until they are actually living them.
“When you’re under attack, there are these guys that are real macho, but when you come under attack, you find out who is actually macho,” Lewis said. “The ones that walked around macho were the first ones in the bunker.”
Deborah Lee Lewis, Roddy Lewis’ wife, encourages him to wear his Vietnam veteran hat often because such veterans are treated with more respect these days and she wants him to be thanked and to connect with other veterans.
“[Roddy Lewis] has relationships with all those guys, and they have their meetings and they talk and it's been wonderful for them,” she said. “And I think that's helped him a great deal.”
Other Agents
The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs lists the war as officially spanning from August 1964 to May 1975 but herbicide spraying activity was from 1962 to 1971 in Operation Ranch Hand.
During the operation, according to veteran affairs, the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million gallons of various kinds of herbicides including Agent Blue, Agent Purple and Agent White.
Agent Blue contained cacodylic acid and about 4 million gallons were sprayed to destroy rice. It has been linked to bladder cancer.
Agent Purple had components that are linked to dioxin as a byproduct.
Agent White was used after Agent Orange spraying was ceased. It was used as an herbicide to clear woody areas.
Support, other resources
Veterans are encouraged to attend the Wednesday meetings at the cafe. Any Vietnam-era veteran or family member can apply for an Orange Heart Medal at orangeheartmedal.org.
Veterans can also learn how to file a claim for compensation from Veterans Affairs at va.gov.
U.S. Navy Vietnam veteran Ken Gamble of Tennessee founded the Orange Heart Medal Foundation in 2018. He suffered from Agent Orange-related cancer and post-traumatic stress disorder, according to the foundation’s website. The foundation has funded memorial wall in Springfield, Tennessee with the names of those impacted by Agent Orange from 1955 to 1975.
There is an annual gathering at the wall in March.
Janet Morgan contributed to this report.
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