"ATOMIC VETERAN" STILL FIGHTING FOR VA BENEFITS --

"All we had were goggles. There was no protection. No

ditches, no bunkers. Not even a tree to hide behind."

For more about "Atomic Veterans," use the VA Watchdog search engine... click here...
http://www.yourvabenefits.org/sessea
rch.php?q=atomic+veterans&op=ph

Story here... http://www.newstimes.com/ci_12072549

Story below:

Your comments accepted at bottom of page.

Share story/email link.
-------------------------

Southbury 'atomic vet' fights for recognition of illness

By Robert Miller
STAFF WRITER

In the 1950s and '60s, Wayne McCormick was haunted by nightmares nearly every night. But when his wife, Agnes, asked him what was wrong, he'd lie.

"I'd say, 'In the Navy, I was in the water with sharks,'" he said.

He could have been arrested for telling her the truth -- that his Navy service included a six-month stint in a tiny chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean, where he saw hydrogen bombs exploding in the sky.

The 1958 mission was top-secret. Until 1994 -- when the Clinton administration began declassifying the information -- witnesses could have been prosecuted for telling what they knew.

Some of the bombs he saw -- 23 in all -- were small scale. Some were roiling megaton blasts that scorched McCormick's face with their heat, blew shock waves against him, and filled the sky with wild colors and vast mushroom clouds.

"It was horrible," he said. "During the Cold War, I was so concerned about my family I was thinking about building a bomb shelter. I had seen hydrogen bombs."

McCormick, 73, of Southbury, is an atomic veteran -- one of hundreds of thousands of members of the U.S. Armed Services exposed to the radiation at weapons test sites between 1945 and 1963.

Many of them served in Nevada, near the national test site. Some were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on those cities.

Others, like McCormick, served in the Pacific. He was stationed at Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The protection he and others got for the radiation from these bombs was all but non-existent.

"All we had were goggles," he said. "There was no protection. No ditches, no bunkers. Not even a tree to hide behind."

Today McCormick suffers from prostate cancer, bone cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and gall bladder problems.

But the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs has refused his application for compensation, saying that according to its calculations the radiation exposure he received was not enough to account for his illnesses.

McCormick is appealing that decision. Two doctors -- Dr. Vincent Rella, an oncologist at Danbury Hospital, and Dr. Ben Mobo, chief of the occupational health service for the VA in Connecticut and an assistant professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine -- have written to the VA in his support.

"There is certainly ample information to verify the connection between ionizing radiation exposure and prostate cancer," Rella wrote.

"It is my opinion that it is at least as likely as not that your exposure to ionizing radiation .... contributed to your prostate cancer," Mobo wrote.

                            click for more information -- a disabled veteran owned business

Dr. Victoria Cassano, director of radiation and physical exposures for the VA's Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards, said the VA makes such evaluations by first verifying that a veteran did serve in areas where nuclear testing took place, and then seeing if the veteran has what's considered a "radiogenic" disease. Those include almost all cancers as well as other diseases.

Her office then uses a computer program to determine the level of radiation the veteran might have been exposed to. Cassano said the VA gives veterans the benefit of the doubt by calculating this not to the lower possible levels of radiation, but to the upper levels.

McCormick said the veterans' administration has no way of knowing how much radiation anyone got during Operation Hardtack I, the mission he was on.

On Enewetak, McCormick and others wore badges to measure the radiation exposure. But these were crude devices by today's standards, and during the six months he was there, he said, no one ever looked at it.

And, he said, no one tried to measure the radiation that was all around the men -- in the dust they breathed, in their food, in the water they drank, or on the ground they walked on.

According to government records, 20,793 atomic veterans have received compensation from the VA. R.J. Ritter, managing director and national commander of the National Association of Atomic Veterans, said only one in five veterans who have applied for compensation for radiation-related illnesses has received it.

Others have not asked for it, not knowing the government lifted the air-tight lock of secrecy surrounding their missions.

"These veterans should be receiving the Purple Heart," Ritter said.

McCormick was born in Oneida, N.Y., in 1935 and joined the U.S. Navy in 1954. In 1958, the Navy shipped him to Enewetak, where he served as his company's graphic artist.

The atoll, while sounding exotic, was nothing more than a small ring of sandy islands with a few palm trees growing on them. "It was anything but a tropical paradise," he said.

McCormick was on hand for 23 of the 32 nuclear bomb tests at the atoll.

"The first one I saw was a dud," he said. "It was a 5-kiloton bomb (a bomb with the force of 5,000 tons of TNT). I remember thinking 'Is that all there is?"'

But when the bombs reached the megaton range -- a million tons of TNT -- McCormick said, "I got frightened. You could feel the heat waves, feel the shock waves hit you."

The men stationed at Enewetak were given three rules to live by. Don't eat the local fish. Don't eat the coconuts. And never, ever, tell anyone about anything they saw or heard while stationed there.

McCormick followed those orders. Once he left Enewetak, he returned to the U.S., first to work as a commercial artist and illustrator, then in advertising, spending 19 years at General Electric Co.

He was in his late 40s when his health began to fail -- first heart problems, later cancer.

Furthermore, three of his four children who were conceived after his exposure to radiation have health problems, including thyroid cancer and multiple sclerosis. His eldest son, conceived before he left for Enewetak, has none of those problems.

McCormick said he believes the U.S. should compensate the atomic veterans for the undue risk they were made to suffer.

He points out the U.S. gave Japanese fishermen on the boat Lucky Dragon about $18,350 each after radioactive ash from a hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in 1954 fell on them.

"I believe they were compensated fairly," he said. "But so should we."

Contact Robert Miller at at (203) 731-3345.

-------------------------
posted by Larry Scott
Founder and Editor
VA Watchdog dot Org
-------------------------

-------------------------
Please post your comments below on Google Friend Connect.  You must sign in.  For larger view and work area, click blue "expand" button in upper right corner of comment box.

-------------------------

Don't forget to read all of today's VA News Flashes (click here)
Click here to make VA Watchdog dot Org your homepage
(go back to VA Watchdog dot Org Home Page)