Michael Ryan tells me, again, that he is not a pacifist. Or a radical. Or a protestor. “And I’m no environmentalist, either.” This wouldn't be surprising if you only knew that Ryan was a New York City police officer for twenty-five years. Or that he’s the son of a man who made five invasions with Douglas MacArthur in World War II, and the son-in-law of a soldier who won a Bronze Star in the Battle of the Bulge—a man whose family is "nothing but law enforcement, nurses, doctors and teachers."

But Ryan’s thirteen-month trip to Vietnam in the advanced party for the 11th armored cavalry regiment in August of 1966, at age 21, just ten days after eloping with his wife, Maureen—and his battle ever since—complicates things a great deal. 

There he was in the jungle with two hundred other young men, wading through enemy elephant grass, building a camp for three thousand countrymen who had yet to set foot on this dank foreign soil. As they worked their way into the jungle, Ryan’s regiment followed a group of army engineers wielding chemical guns that sprayed herbicide from the backs of their trucks. 

"Picture them riding around us spraying these chemicals, and we're opening these crates, pitching these tents, and it's a hundred degrees, and a hundred percent humidity,” Ryan told me. “Then it starts raining. We take out our mess cups and catch the rainwater—because it’s the purest water we can get—and we drink it as it runs off the tops of the brand new tents."

Ryan survived Vietnam and returned home to enter the New York Police Academy. The physical horrors of the war were behind him, he thought. But he didn’t know that deadly dioxin—a toxin in the so-called Agent Orange he had unwittingly ingested in the jungle rain, and elsewhere—was already beginning to leave the fatty tissue in which it had been stored and enter his blood stream.

In 1971, Maureen gave birth to their first daughter, Kerry. Despite a clean genetic history and fastidious prenatal care, Kerry was born with twenty-two birth defects. Every one of them occurred within the first five weeks of the pregnancy. And every organ in her body was affected. She was missing part of her spine. She was missing part of her intestines. She had two cervixes. Two uteruses. No anus. She was born without a thumb on one hand, with her radial bone missing, and four deformed fingers on that hand attached to the elbow. She was also born with a hole in her heart.

In 1978, when Maureen saw a Vietnam Veteran, who was dying of cancer, on television, the Ryans began to suspect that Agent Orange might have caused their daughter’s birth defects.

“Maureen found out that Agent Orange has a chemical—245T—that creates a by-product chemical called 237A. At five parts per million, 237A causes birth defects,” said Ryan. “That’s when we knew we had to go public with this before more people got hurt.”

In the coming years, the Ryans spoke out every way they could against Agent Orange. They wrote a book. They participated in a class-action lawsuit. They appeared on television and talked on the radio. They went to veterans’ meetings. They spoke to Congress.

"I told the committee that we were waging war on such a sophisticated level that we were drafting the unborn,” said Ryan. “My daughter got her wheelchair in Vietnam the same as a Vietnam Veteran catching a bullet through his spine." 

Posted on Sep 11, 2006 at 2:05 PM
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