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Wars take toll on Valley families
By Elise Franco
Memorial Day is a time for families to celebrate those lost to war, but for Heather Bowser and Colleen Village, today’s holiday is a reminder of the effects war has waged on their families.
Bowser, 38, of Canfield, and Village, 35, of Austintown, both have family members who served in past wars. Both women have seen, felt and are living with the consequences of combat.
Village, a mother of three sons, spends most of her days at ValleyCare Northside Medical Center in Youngstown at the bedside of her 41-year-old husband Michael Village, who is diagnosed with Gulf War Syndrome.
Village said her husband served in the Army Reserve, and in 1991, fought for less than one year in Iraq.
She said continual exposure to anthrax during that time eventually took its toll on his body.
“It was just chemical warfare over there,” she said. “He has these chemicals festering in his body, and now they’re attacking.”
Michael Village, once perfectly healthy, was diagnosed in 2001 with Hodgkin’s disease, his wife said. He’s had two heart attacks, congestive heart and kidney failure and has had seven emergency surgeries since the beginning of May.
Now he’s in an induced coma, which family members say he may never come out of.
Village said GWS is recognized by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, but it’s been a constant struggle to convince doctors to take the diagnosis seriously.
“We had a hard time with a lot of the doctors who didn’t want to recognize it,” she said. “A lot of them just kind of fluffed us off when we told them it was Gulf War Syndrome.”
But Village is not alone.
She said out of 400,000 soldiers who fought in the Gulf War, 100,000 of them are sick or dead, and many of their offspring — though none of her own — have suffered complications.
Bowser is a second-generation victim of Agent Orange exposure.
Agent Orange is the chemical defoliant sprayed heavily in Vietnam by plane, helicopter and hand by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to deny the enemy cover.
Bowser, who has become an advocate of Agent Orange education and awareness, was born two months premature and missing her right leg below the knee, several fingers and a big toe.
“The VA continues to add problems to the list, so it’s starting to come out that a lot of veterans’ children have birth defects, cancer and auto immune diseases,” she said.
Bowser said her father William Morris, who served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, suffered the effects of direct exposure before dying of a heart attack at 50.
“When he first came home, he was almost immediately diagnosed with hypertension,” she said. “At 38 he ... had to have five bypasses on his heart. At 48 he had a stroke, and at 50 he died of a massive heart attack.”
Bowser said Agent Orange exposure will continue to be passed down through generations in the U.S., as well as in South Vietnam, where the chemical still is in the soil.
“What we’re finding is that one of the biggest issues right now is so many not born with obvious birth defects will have children with learning disabilities, autism and other things that never ran in the family,” she said.
Through years of extensive research, Bowser said she has no doubt her father’s conditions, as well as her own, are the result of Agent Orange exposure.
Bowser said the U.S. government acknowledges birth defects in the children of females who fought in Vietnam, but not in male veterans.
The VA web site states, “The VA recognizes a wide range of birth defects as associated with women Veterans’ service in Vietnam. These diseases are not tied to herbicides, including Agent Orange, or dioxin exposure, but rather to the birth mother’s service in Vietnam.”
Nearly 10,000 women served in Vietnam, and about 2.5 million men served.
“They don’t recognize the defects in male soldiers,” she said. “There are so many [male veterans] that they won’t do the research.”
She said her mother Sharon Morris is currently awaiting payout of a large claim from the VA, settled in 1984.
“There have been 90,000 more new claims on top of 150,000 denied previously, so the VA is struggling to make the payments,” she said, “They owe her retroactively back to 1984.”
Village said because Gulf War Syndrome is recognized by the VA, her family receives federal benefits, but it’s still not enough to keep them afloat.
“He gets $1,000 per month from Social Security and $200 per month from the VA,” she said. “But it’s been really rough, and we pretty much lost everything. [Michael] hasn’t worked in nine years, and I haven’t been able to work in four because I’ve been taking care of him.”
Village and Bowser both said they’re proud of the sacrifices their respective veterans made, and proud of the sacrifices made by millions more who serve and have served in the U.S. military.
Village said despite the suffering her family has endured, her husband expressed no regret.
“Somebody told him he was a hero one time, and he said, ‘I’m not a hero. I’m just doing my job,’” she said. “I asked him knowing everything he knew now if he would do it again, and he said ‘Absolutely’ ... I feel proud.”
Bowser said her father, a man she said was known for his patriotism, had a different reaction to that very same question.
“He’d said if he’d only known he was essentially taking his children with him to Vietnam, he would have dodged the draft,” she said. “That’s is absolutely opposite of who my father was. My father was a patriot. He loved his country.”