Together, they told the story of a man I barely knew. I hadn’t heard from my father, Al Weigel, in more than 20 years.
At first, I didn’t read any of it. Why would I want to rip open that wound? I tossed the envelope onto a shelf in a closet, and there it sat for years, forgotten behind a pile of clothes. I didn’t know it held information that would link my life — and health — to a war waged before my birth.
It wasn’t until 2012, not long after I’d become a father, that I remembered the envelope. I pulled it back out, figuring someday I would want to tell my son where he came from.
The package also delivered a warning: A handwritten note attached to a stack of Veterans Affairs medical records. During the war, before I was born, Al had sprayed Agent Orange along riverbanks in Vietnam, often soaking his uniform in the herbicide. The exposure, he wrote, had caused him serious health problems, including a neurological disorder, and he believed it also might have harmed me.
My mind raced as I thought of my own troubled medical history. A heart defect diagnosed at birth. An underactive thyroid. Problems with my nervous and immune systems. More recently, type–2 diabetes, hypertension and a nerve disorder that severely limits the use of my right hand.
I’m now 46. A lean 6-foot–2 and 190 pounds. I don’t smoke. I try to eat healthy. But the number of pills I swallow everyday would make you think I’m twice that age. As a teenager, I was sick so often, I joked that my healthy brother and I couldn’t be related. He’d been born before the war, before Agent Orange.
“There really is nothing that can be done now, as far as I know,” Al had written in 2009, “except be aware of the ravages of A.O.”
What my father didn’t know was that I’d already become familiar with Agent Orange and its consequences.
I’d made several trips to Vietnam by then, photographing people with much worse health problems than my own. They were descendants of the Vietnamese who’d come in contact with the chemicals — those on the other end of my young father’s fire hose.