KILLING OUR OWN by Norman Solomon and Harvey Wasserman The following is an excerpt from Killing Our Own, Delacorte Press, 1982. It is now available at most local bookstores. The First Atomic veterans Like many millions of other Americans. Marine corporal Lyman Eugene Quigley reacted to news about Hiroshima and Nagasaki with relief in August 1945. Atall, large-framed, handsome manwith straight black hair, bushy eyebrows and a friendly countenance. Quigley had enlisted in the Marines soon after Pearl Harbor, at the age of 20. Leaving his lob assembling electric motors in his native Illinois, Quigley went through boot camo and advanced training In California; by soring 1943, he was on a troop carrier In the south Pacific, headed to Australia and New Zealand. As part of the Second Marine Division, during more than two years in the Pacific, he saw combat at Tarawa, Okinawa, then Tinian and Saipan. Quigley remained in the Mariana Islands, working in a Marines bulldozer crew, clearing away an air base for B-29s loaded with explosive bombs and — twice — with atomic weapons. “All we knew as the war was over, and some kind of special bomb had been dropped,” Lyman Quigley recollected a third of a century later. “All I was thinking was, the war was over, I’m coming back. We were so happy, we were going home. But it didn’t turn out that way. Unfortunately.” After the long-awaited formal surrender took place on Sept. 2, Quigley’s orders sent him not home, but toward Nagasaki. “We walked into Nagasaki unprepared, and we were shocked as hell at what was there,” Lyman Quigley remembered many years later. “Really, we were ignorant about what the hell the bomb was. We had no idea what we were going to see. We weren’t given any instructions whatsoever. We were amazed, shocked — and yet stupefied.” It was a grisly scene. Corpses were still being burned in the open air. “Women’s hair was falling out, the men all had their heads shaved, and all of them had running sores pn their heads, ears, all over.” At the time, gruesome as the panorama of suffering was, it seemed to involve only other people’s problems. Quigley and fellow members of Company C, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, made their way up a steep hill from the docks; about 150 strong, the Marines of Company C billeted at a partially destroyed concrete schoolhouse up the hill from the spot over which the atomic bomb had exploded. Orders from above did not include any unusual precautionary guidelines or provisions. Quigley and his buddies drank city reservoir water and worked in the midst of the most heavily damaged area without any protective clothing or special gear. They were not provided with radiationdose badges or any other equipment to measure their exposure to radioactivity. Quigley was in charge of a Marine bulldozer crew razing what was left of wrecked structures, cleaning up rubble, clearing out roads, and leveling the ground. For Company C Marines, 'the long days settled into a busy routine amidst the dusty debris — bulldozing, hauling, standing guard duty in the blast center area by day, sleeping in the makeshift camp at the schoolhouse by night. Quigley bought some silk kimonos for his sister and some young women friends back home. ‘ But there was little time or incentive for sightseeing. Toward the end of autumn many of the Marines were sent out of Nagasaki. On Nov. 4, after 43 days of working in the radioactive rubbish of Nagasaki, Corporal Quigley received a Good Conduct medal (“We used to call it a Ruptured Duck,” he quipped with a chuckle) and later that month shipped back to the States. “When I got back, I had burning, itching, running sores on the top of my head and the top of my ears,” Quigley recalled. The sores looked to him like those on Nagasaki’s residents. He called the running sores to the attention of a doctor during a routine discharge examination in December 1945. “They listed that in my medical records as a fungus, which is wrong — I know that now.” Also: “I had a warm feeling in my lips. I remember that distinctly.” On Dec. 21, 1945, Lyman Eugene Quigley received an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps. On the surface his military service had the trappings of a traditional all-American tale. The troubling radioactive underside, with its ironic and disturbing twists, would not become apparent to him for decades. ALegacy comes Home In the fall of 1946 — a year after the atomic bombings of Japan— Lyman Quigley settled down in Portland, Oregon, where he went to work for the city transit company operating streetcars and buses. Very soon he began suffering acute abdominal attacks. “I’d wake up and be doubled up in pain at night. It kept getting more and more severe. I got haggard-looking. I can’t describe it to you. You’d have to go through it to know what it is. Excruciating.” In December 1951, doctors removed Quigley’s appendix. The severe stomach pains, however, persisted. He later developed stomach tumors. One day, in March 1953, Quigley’s lungs hemorrhaged suddenly, bleeding for over a week. A scar formed on a lung. He was 31 by then — married, and a father. “The doctors told me they couldn’t figure out what was going on. This is when I first got a suspicion.” More than 25 years later, his memory was vivid about the day in the summer of 1953 when he spoke to his doctor about the bulldozer work in Nagasaki’s radioactive rubble. “The doctor starts to diagram on the blackboard about the atom and the half-life and all this stuff. And all of a sudden he turns to me and says, ‘I wish you wouldn’t come see me anymore.’” In the late 1950s, a painful lump grew out of Quigley’s head. Surgery removed the tumor, diagnosed as a lipoma (tumor of fatty tissue). Later doctors took out “a tumor about the size of a hen egg” from the back of his knee. Pain and weakness in his legs persisted. By this time Quigley was having trouble breathing; he was diagnosed as having “chronic obstructive lung disease.” At the age of 43, he suffered a heart attack — the first of five. Missed work and medical bills outstripped insurance coverage by many thousands of dollars. “We borrowed on the house, borrowed money on the car, borrowed money on the insurance policies we had,” Quigley recounted. In the early 1970s, worsening health problems forced him into retirement. Monthly Social Security disability payments of about $300 and a Teamsters union pension of $140 did little to ease the financial strain. His wife of a quarter century, Bernice, started working in hospitals to counter the awesome financial toll. For a score of years, with increasing intensity, Lyman “The doctor starts to diagram on the blackboard about the atom and the halt- lite and all this stun. And all of a sudden he turns to me and says. ‘I wish you wouldn’t come see me anymore.’” Quigley had read everything he could get his hands on about atomic fallout and radiation effects. In Radiation, an authoritative book by Ralph E. Lapp and Jack Schubert, he found documentation that the Nagasaki reservoir water he and fellow Marines had drunk so freely was probably radioactive. About a mile from Nagasaki’s nuclear blast center, “there was a fall-out at the Nishiyama reservoir area, where a total dosage of as much as 100 roentgens may have been delivered” — a serious dose of radiation if absorbed into the human body. Quigley had attempted to file a claim for service-connected benefits with the Veterans Administration in the fall of 1973, contending that his severe health deterioration resulted from radiation exposure while a Marine in Nagasaki. The VA official he spoke with dissuaded Quigley from filing a claim, saying there was no chance of approval. Two years later Quigley went back and insisted on filing a claim. In January 1976, the VA issued a denial. After a hearing in Portland the following year, the VA sent him a ruling dated March 10, 1978, reaffirming the rejection. “Serviceconnection for residuals of radiation exposure involving the heart, lung, stomach, head and knee is not warranted,” the VA decision declared. “His present disabilities have been determined to be of non service-connected origin.” In Nagasaki, “radioactivity decayed very fast and was all gone within five weeks of the blast,” said a scrawled VA memo in Quigley’s claim file. In a 1976 letter, Dr. John D. Chase, then chief medical director of the VA, wrote: “Navy records indicate that ships did not approach Nagasaki until years for half of its deadly alpha radiation to decay. Other radioactive isotopes left by an atomic bomb include strontium 90, a “bone-seeking” form of radioactivity remaining highly toxic for many decades, and cesium 137 — which is assimilated by muscles. Lyman Quigley pursued a hunch. He suspected that his was not an unusual case among veterans, now scattered throughout the United States, who had traveled up that Nagasaki hill with him as part of Company C, 2nd Pioneer Battalion, 2nd Marine Division. After three decades it was not easy to track down Marine buddies from the Nagasaki clean-up days. Adding to the logistical obstacles for Lyman Quigley, life had long since become almost steady pain. Utilizing old address books, yellowed letters, and telephone directory assistance, by the end of 1978 he had located five men of the Company C Marines. so long after the atomic blast that any residual radiation which might have existed would have been negligible.” But by now Quigley understood that the Nagasaki bomb exploded with plutonium, known to lodge in human lungs and other internal soft tissue; plutonium diminishes so slowly that it will take 24,000 In the small town of Sparta in the eastern Tennessee mountains, Junior Hodge — who was with Quigley on the bulldozers in Nagasaki — had been living with chronic anemia for the past 20 years. “Seems like all my strength is going out of me,” Hodge told us. One of his testes had become enlarged, while the other, with a small growth on it, had almost disappeared. “I ain’t got much money, and I can’t afford to go to doctors,” he drawled mournfully. Hodge’s chronology of stomach and lung afflictions was virtually identical to Lyman Quigley’s. In Pittsburgh, Quigley tracked down John Zotter; in Toledo, Ohio, Willard Good; in Berwyn, Illinois, Philip Leschina; across town in Portland, William Gender. In addition, Quigley located the mother of Floyd Crews, who had been part of the Company C bulldozing detail; he had died in 1972. Quigley took extensive notes and accumulated medical records Victim of the blast in neighboring Hiroshima. * Lyman Quigley at home. At first it seemed to involve only other people’s prooiems. Nagasaki — The day after the bombing. Clinton uarterly Photograph by Mark Albanese Photograph by Yosuke Yamahata Photograph by Shunkichi Kikuchi Clinton St. Quarterly 25
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