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Robert Ross heard the low-flying plane heading his direction as he stood on the signal bridge of USS Vega on a late-summer day in 1966. Bathed in Southeast Asian sunshine, he was listening to Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons when he looked up just in time to get a face full of spray.
"The officer on deck was panicking," Ross recalls. "They hollered, 'Everybody inside! Agent Orange!' But it was too late."
Forty-three years later, time is running out for Ross and tens of thousands of other sailors suffering from various cancers, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and heart conditions caused by Agent Orange exposure during the Vietnam War. For nearly a decade, VA, acting on a Bush administration directive and a punitive court decision, has severed their benefits or denied their claims. Under these new VA rules, so-called "Blue Water" and "Blue Sky" veterans are deemed not to have suffered any ill effects from the millions of gallons of toxic defoliant spread across the jungles during the war, regardless of any contact they may have had with it. The government's rationale: they did not set foot on land or couldn't meet VA's stringent requirements for proof that they were exposed.
