Three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, many veterans are just starting to feel some of the most harrowing health effects of fighting on what has now been identified as a toxic battlefield. As diseases with a 30-year latency period begin to surface, 50-year-olds are aging like 70-year-olds, many are being diagnosed with hepatitis C, and birth defects among their offspring are increasingly common.

The cause? Agent Orange, an herbicide containing the toxic contaminant dioxin, which was sprayed in the Vietnamese jungles as a defoliant. In the most comprehensive book on Vietnam veterans’ issues to date, Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement (Crown), Gerald Nicosia discusses the legal fight to recognize these health problems, as well as those found in Gulf War veterans who were exposed to nerve gas and burning oil wells. “We play down the recognition that even though we have high-tech weapons to minimize [the number of deaths], there are new ways of having casualties,” says Nicosia, who spent 12 years speaking with more than 500 veterans and 100 health professionals in the course of researching his book.

Nicosia will read from Home to War on July 12 at the Barnes & Noble at 151 Merrimack Street, in Lowell, and on July 13 at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Coop, located at 1400 Mass Ave, in Cambridge.

Issue Date: July 12 - 19, 2001