Scorched Earth

I have been reading Scorched Earth by Fred A. Wilcox. It is about Agent Orange in Vietnam. My father suffered from exposure to Agent Orange.

The Vietnam War was not the first time that young men were sent off to kill and die for what their government and their fellow citizens considered a noble cause. Nor was it the first time that young men who’d been sent to war by flag-waving crowds returned home to find that they were expected to marry, find a job, start a family, and get on with their lives. Men and women who have experienced combat would like to do these things, but they carry scars, memories, and terrors, that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. Vietnam veterans did not want to believe that their government would expose them to chemicals that, years later, would devastate their immune systems, making them susceptible to a host of diseases like kidney failure, heart disease, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, brain tumors, and various kinds of cancer. They did not want to believe that corporations that profited from manufacturing and selling deadly chemicals would chose to deny their products’ toxicity, and that these corporations would refuse to offer to help veterans of what, at the time, was our nation’s longest, second most expensive, and most divisive conflict since the Civil War.