He is also a Vietnam Vet.
John has a degenerative neurological disease that has attacked his feet making it very difficult for him to walk.
John shares a house in the Blue Mountains and I was there this weekend past doing some work on some theme music for a program that is being produced by one of our companies. I had heard from his brother that John was doing it tough. So I asked him what was happening.
John told me that the specialist that he has been seeing about the illness asked him if he had ever come into contact with Agent Orange during his tour of duty in Vietnam. John told him how he had been accidentally bathed in it when one of the helicopter gun ships he was guarding was having its tanks topped up. His neurologist believes that this is the reason for his illness.
Problem is this: Our government has not accepted that Agent Orange can be the cause of anything.
So that leaves John pretty much outside the system. He ekes out his life nowadays on a pension that is below the minimum wage. And this is guy that served his country.
During the time we were making records together, John never talked about his time in Vietnam. I learnt on the weekend that when he left the army he made a conscious effort to not talk to anyone he had served with, to not be associated with anything during that period in his life, to shut the door on it. Now he is having to relive it.
The local Vietnam Vets Association is being very supportive, but they have also told him that in their ranks are others who have had problems with being exposed to Agent Orange, and that no one has won against the government.
Isn't it amazing that our governments (of all political persuasions) find it so easy to send people to war, but so hard to take care of them when they come back, broken.
I asked John what he thought about the Iraq war and its effect on the soldiers. He said that he thought the effect of this war on soldiers had to be far worse than Vietnam. His view was that their lives were now over, wasted.
We really have to come to our senses in Australia. Wars may or may not be inevitable. But we must all start making the effort to put pressure on the government to support the soldiers who have served and to give them better health care (both physical and mental) after the war, and spend money on the vets.
The one thing that governments really respond to is money. When they start seeing that returning soldiers will have a negative impact on the country's balance sheet maybe they will think twice about the need for war in the first place.
Keywords:
Government
