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WHERE ARE THEY NOW?
BY RICHARD CURREY
On April 26, 1984, after returning from a trip to Vietnam,
VVA National Board Member Dr. Jim Rogers filed a report to
the Board in which he laid out the case for the toxic effects
of Agent Orange. That document, “Agent Orange Research
in Vietnam,” stands as a historic manifesto for VVA
and for all Vietnam veterans.
Rogers, a physician, wrote in his report that “in most
heavily defoliated areas, the natural flora has not yet returned.
Sparse grasses now grow in areas which were once heavily
forested. This profound change, together with the direct
toxic effect of the [Agent Orange] chemicals, has resulted
in the local and regional disappearance of many species of
large predatory animals and birds.”
It was clear that
Agent Orange and similar defoliants were not just harmful
to trees but, even if indirectly, to every living thing these
chemicals came in contact with.
Rogers’ report went on to describe the impact of herbicidal
defoliants on human reproduction (increased rates of miscarriages,
stillbirths, sterility, and birth defects), increased cancer
rates, stomach and liver diseases, and psychological disturbances.
“VVA
should take the lead in organizing the necessary scientific
cooperation between Vietnamese researchers and American scientists,” Rogers
wrote, “and should
also undertake consultations with leading medical researchers
in the United States to determine the relevance of [Vietnamese]
studies to research on veterans currently under way in the
United States.”
At the time that Rogers submitted his
report, Agent Orange was still largely dismissed by the VA. “I
think a number of people in the VA thought it was a passing
fad,” Rogers
says, “a bandwagon people wanted to jump on. But the
fact is that there was a great deal of compelling evidence
that Agent Orange causes all kinds of illness, even at that
time.”
Rogers helped a researcher named Arnold Schecter,
who was studying the effects of herbicides and defoliants.
One such study demonstrated that North Vietnamese Army veterans
who had fought in the South had elevated fat tissue levels
of dioxin while North Vietnamese who had never been in the
South did not. “It was quite clear that something was
going on with Agent Orange,” Rogers says. “I
wrote about the growing body of evidence for The VVA Veteran
and other publications in this period, making the case that
the VA was not considering all the scientific evidence when
deciding what conditions were related to Agent Orange exposure.”
Rogers
published a similar report, “Agent Orange in
Vietnam: America’s Shared Legacy,” in Indochina
Issues in the fall of 1985. “All delegates to the 1986
VVA National Convention received a copy of that,” Rogers
recalls.
Jim Rogers’ professional clout as a practicing
physician brought additional legitimacy to Agent Orange at
a time when more than one federal agency would have been
happy to dismiss the controversy. Many veterans have since
been served, through disability ratings and VA assistance,
by Dr. Jim Rogers’ early
campaign to get the word out on a problem unique to Vietnam
veterans. Rogers continues to practice medicine today, as
a surgeon in the Department of Surgery at the Northern Navajo
Medical Center, on the Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners
area of New Mexico.
But Rogers did not start out in New Mexico—he’s
a native Appalachian, born nearly 1,500 miles to the east
in the small town of New Martinsville, West Virginia. “I
graduated from high school and spent three semesters in college,” Rogers
says. “By that time most of the guys in my high school
graduating class had been to or were still in Vietnam. I
didn’t feel too good about that, so I decided I’d
go, too.”
To do so, though, Rogers notes that he “didn’t
enlist in the Army and wasn’t exactly drafted.” That’s
because even though he was volunteering, Jim Rogers figured
he shouldn’t spend any longer in the Army than he needed
to. When he discovered that the term of enlistment was three
years but draftees served only two years, he decided it might
be better to get drafted. “The lady at the draft board
was very accommodating and moved my name to the head of the
list,” Rogers says. “Her only question was, ‘Does
your mother know about this?’”
Rogers married
before he shipped out and served with MACV Advisory Team
98 as a radio operator in 1968-69, both in the bush and in
the rear. Meanwhile, back home in West Virginia, his first
child, a daughter, was born.
The young father and veteran
came home from the war to work with his father installing
carpet. “Then I got a job
in the coal mines,” Rogers says. “That didn’t
last too long, because I got fired during a wildcat strike.”
Rogers
decided to return to college and graduated from West Virginia
University with a B.A. in philosophy in 1973. “I
was a supporter of the antiwar movement,” Rogers recalls. “I
went on to medical school in New York, at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook. Then it was back to West Virginia
and a residency in general surgery at the Charleston Area
Medical Center.”
Rogers became active with VVA in the
early 1980s and served as president of Chapter 38 in Charleston,
West Virginia. He served three terms on the VVA National
Board of Directors and returned to Vietnam twice in 1984
with VVA delegations.
The return to Vietnam was, in part, to participate in Agent
Orange research and look at the results of defoliation ten
years after the war was over. Rogers revisited areas where
he had once been on combat missions, and stood where he had
stood sixteen years earlier, but in a different country—one
at peace, but with the forests and wildlife fighting to return
despite the old assaults of toxic clouds of herbicides.
Rogers
returned to write his seminal report to the VVA Board. “For
the next several years, I did a lot of public speaking about
Agent Orange, mostly to VVA chapters and state councils.” While
serving as a kind of organizational expert on the impact
of Agent Orange, Rogers continued to practice medicine in
West Virginia. “But I’d been thinking about a
different horizon for a while,” he says. “I answered
an ad in a medical recruiting magazine for a position in
Glendive, Montana. My wife, Roxane, and I went to visit.
It was February in Montana and the Yellowstone River was
frozen solid. But we liked it and decided to give it a shot.”
They
stayed on in Montana, and Rogers’ career has been
Western-based ever since. He continued his VVA activities
in Montana, serving as president of VVA Chapter 420 in Havre
and as president of the Montana State Council. He finally
closed his Montana surgical practice in 2004, dividing his
time between the Indian Health Service and the VA medical
system over the next two years. Then, in October 2006, he
joined the Northern Navajo Medical Center, and he lives in
the small town of Shiprock, New Mexico, with his wife.
Rogers’ passion
and concerns as a Vietnam veteran, coupled with his medical
and scientific knowledge as a physician, helped legitimize
Agent Orange as a medical issue. By working to establish
the reality of Agent Orange’s toxicity,
Rogers helped set the stage for more responsive treatment
and improved benefits for an entire generation of veterans.
That contribution continues today, as veterans and veterans
service organizations recognize that exposures to a plethora
of agents, from herbicides to depleted uranium to vaccines,
carry toxicities that are difficult to track, define, or
even identify, all while inflicting often debilitating medical
damage.
“I would recommend to new veterans that they
commit some time to veterans affairs and veterans issues,” says
Dr. Jim Rogers. “They have no reason to believe that
their needs as veterans will be met without active involvement
in the political process. Ours weren’t.”
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