A victim of Agent Orange, double-amputee served his country in the Marine Corps during Vietnam
By Tamara Stevens
Special to Emmet County
David Allen Riley volunteered to serve his country, like his father and his grandfather before him. At the age of 18, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. It was 1968, three years after the United States became involved in ground combat operations in Vietnam.
“I didn’t want to get drafted,” said Riley. “If I had to go to war, I wanted to be in an outfit that would properly train me. To get drafted in the Army wouldn’t have been good.”
Riley was aware at that time of what he was going to get into once he was shipped over to Vietnam, but he enlisted anyway. He completed his basic training in San Diego, California, at Hollywood Marina, where he remembers having to deal with an abundance of sand fleas. From April until July, he and other men learned “how to be Marines,” he said.
From Hollywood Marina he went to Camp Pendleton, also in California, where for three months he was taught how to fight. “They turned me into a combat vehicle mechanic,” Riley said. From there, Private Riley (Private, First Class, PFC) was sent to Vietnam in January 1969. He flew on a commercial airliner from California to the Da Nang Air Field compound.
“The VC (Viet Cong) set fire to the ammo dump next to us and blew our compound to pieces,” Riley recalled.
After the Da Nang compound explosion, the Marines built a new compound at Red Beach, right on the shore of the South China Sea. Riley would spend the next 11 months repairing tanks and artillery vehicles in the Track Vehicle Platoon, consisting of 350 men. They were stationed right on the ocean shoreline and would watch the Navy fire heavy artillery inland from the bay right next to the compound.
Living conditions were “as nice as you could get there,” Riley said. They slept in barracks, but the temperatures were usually in the three digits most of the time. Riley said he saw some fighting, but was never actually involved in it.
Riley returned to the U.S. after his tour of duty without any apparent injuries or health problems.
“Anybody who comes back in one piece feels pretty lucky,” he said.
Today, however, 44 years after returning home, Riley is a double amputee.
“Agent Orange, DDT, blew my circulation,” said Riley, who uses a sophisticated wheelchair to get around. “They banned it in the U.S. in 1966, but they sprayed it in Vietnam in the ‘60s and until 1972. I will never forgive any of them for that.”
Agent Orange was a powerful mixture of chemical defoliants used by the U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, as well as crops that might be used to feed them. The U.S. program of defoliation, code-named Operation Ranch Hand, sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972. Agent Orange, which contained the chemical dioxin, was the most commonly used of the herbicide mixtures, and the most effective. It was later revealed to cause serious health issues, including tumors, birth defects, rashes, psychological symptoms and cancers among returning U.S. servicemen and their families, as well as among the Vietnamese population.
Riley describes the military planes flying over the jungle spraying Agent Orange as a defoliant.
“It killed anything in the jungle,” Riley said. “It was the way to win the war. It killed them and us, too.”
Signs of PTSD, Agent Orange exposure emerge
Riley’s health appeared fine when he was first discharged. He earned his GED (high school diploma) while in Okinawa. Once he was back in the States, Riley wanted to be as far away from the military as possible. He returned to his home of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and went to work as a truck driver. For 25 years he drove big rig trucks in 48 states and Canada, primarily delivering new cars for General Motors (for 15 years) and then transporting meat and produce (for 10 years).
Riley said he liked “anything west of the Mississippi” when it came to the countryside he saw from the cab of his truck. He’s been to all 50 states, 48 of them by truck.
Over the years he’s been married and divorced four times. He has four children and 12 grandchildren, all of whom live in the western Wayne County area.
Now, at 64 years old, Riley lives in northern Emmet County in a modest home in a rural setting with his two dogs. He drives a pickup truck and gets around independently with the use of the electric chair.
In 1972 he went to the Veteran’s Administration (VA) hospital in Ann Arbor because he was having nightmares and other symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was told at the time they couldn’t help him.
In the early 1980s he began having severe pain in his legs. By the early 1990s Riley was experiencing such debilitating pain in his legs that he couldn’t walk. It progressed and got much worse.
By 1996 the pain was so intense he stopped driving a truck. His brother lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where Riley went to a surgeon for help with the pain. He had his first amputation there. They removed his left leg below the knee. Over the next few years he experienced numerous operations and by 2010 he had both legs removed above the knees.
“I was in so much pain, they couldn’t provide enough pain killers,” Riley said.
When he first lost his left leg, his mother was living in Charlevoix, where she was raised. Riley needed a place to stay, so he moved in with her and helped her out any way he could. She passed away three years ago.
Over the years, several physicians recommended that Riley go to the VA to be evaluated for Agent Orange. He finally followed their advice. In 2002 the VA approved his application for disability and he’s been receiving assistance since. He’s been treated for melanoma (skin cancer) several times, lost his bladder, and suffered numerous other health issues.
Riley has owned his own home for the past nine years and is grateful for the support and assistance he’s received from the Emmet County Veteran’s Affairs Department. They have built a two-car garage onto his house, put in a new bathroom, and this past year they built a wide covered porch on his house, allowing Riley to enjoy views of the valley and listen to the birds. It’s peaceful and quiet, he said.
“I’ve been treated better in the last 10 years than in all the years prior to that,” Riley said.
When he first arrived back in California from Vietnam he flew into an Air Force base. Protesters were there, he said. He received his assigned transport and was walking across the tarmac when a woman spit on his uniform and called him a “baby killer.” Riley reacted to this assault after his voluntary service by hitting the woman.
“I almost went to the brig for that,” he said.
Riley feels the Gulf War has finally made Americans realize that they can’t blame the troops for what happens during war. “We’re just doing what we were told,” he said. The cost of that loyalty was 58,220 U.S. service members died during Vietnam.
After all he’s been through, though, Riley said he would “never tell a kid to not join the military. It’s an experience you have to have for yourself.”
The training soldiers receive today is better than anything back when Riley enlisted, he said.
With phantom pains and other health issues, Riley still says, “I’m a lot better off than 58,000 other men.”
Operation Ranch Hand and Agent Orange
From 1961 to 1972, the U.S. military conducted a large-scale defoliation program aimed at destroying the forest and jungle cover used by enemy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops fighting against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces in the Vietnam War. U.S. aircraft were deployed to spray powerful mixtures of herbicides around roads, rivers, canals and military bases, as well as crops that might be used to supply enemy troops. During this process, crops and water sources used by the non-combatant peasant populations of South Vietnam could also be hit. In all, Operation Ranch Hand deployed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land.
Questions regarding Agent Orange arose in the U.S. after an increasing number of returning Vietnam veterans and their families began to report a range of afflictions, including rashes and other skin irritations, miscarriages, psychological symptoms, Type 2 diabetes, birth defects in children and cancers such as Hodgkin’s disease, prostate cancer and leukemia.
In 1979, a class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of 2.4 million veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during their service in Vietnam. Five years later, in an out-of-court settlement, seven large chemical companies that manufactured the herbicide agreed to pay $180 million in compensation to the veterans or their next of kin. Various challenges to the settlement followed, including lawsuits filed by some 300 veterans, before the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed it in 1988. By that time, the settlement had risen to some $240 million including interest. In 1991, President George H. Bush signed into law the Agent Orange Act, which mandated that some diseases associated with defoliants (including non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, soft tissue sarcomas and chloracne) be treated as the result of wartime service and helped codify the VA’s response to veterans with conditions related to their exposure to Agent Orange.
