Former Air Force Sgt. Larry Kerr has been lobbying for years to come up with a plan to honor the Vietnam veterans who developed cancers and other related diseases from exposure to the Agent Orange defoliant that their leaders, and what was then the Veterans Administration, claimed was safe.
“I just got tired of watching my friends die” without recognition, Kerr said of what drove him two years ago to found the Utah Agent Orange Veterans Foundation, a non-profit with the mission “to honor veterans of the Vietnam War who were exposed to the deadly herbicide known as Agent Orange.”
In a phone interview with Military Times, the 78-year-old Kerr said, “We’re just a bunch of old guys trying to get this done” by Veterans Day.
Kerr served two tours in Vietnam with the 412th Munitions Maintenance Squadron, whose members have a presumption of exposure to Agent Orange based on the locations in which they served. Since leaving the service, Kerr said he has dealt with a bout of testicular cancer and heart disease, and will soon face an operation to remove three tumors on his bladder.
But what angers Kerr most is the treatment of veterans who came back from Vietnam with medals for valor and were told that their illnesses were not service-related.
“We’ve had so many survive, come back with Purple Hearts, Silver Stars, and then come back here to die of Agent Orange — that’s what really burns my butt,” Kerr said.
Kerr’s push to honor Agent Orange victims led Mayor Scott Wiggill and the city council of Sunset City, Utah — a town of 5,400 about 25 miles north of Salt Lake City — to grant permission to the Utah Agent Orange Veterans Foundation to put up a memorial in Sunset City Veterans Park.
“We were more than proud to do it,” Wiggill, whose office is non-partisan, said in a phone interview with Military Times. He added that “It’s a shame our federal government failed to recognize the Agent Orange victims for such a long time.”
The Memorial will mark one of the great tragedies to come from the Vietnam War that began with the approval in 1961 by the administration of President John F. Kennedy for the military to conduct defoliation and herbicide spraying missions.
On Jan. 18, 1962, Operation Ranch Hand was launched using twin-prop Air Force C-123 Provider aircraft. The initial spraying missions focused on transportation routes and the perimeters of U.S. bases.
Soon, the Ranch Hand aircrews began engaging in gallows humor about their missions, claiming that their new motto was “Only you can prevent a forest,” a takeoff on the Smokey the Bear public service announcements of the National Park Service.
The operation quickly expanded beyond Agent Orange to include other herbicides, code-named Agents White, Purple, Blue, Pink, and Green. In all, more than 20 million gallons of tactical herbicides and defoliants were sprayed in Vietnam between 1961 and 1971. Roughly 61% of the total came from Agent Orange, which was contaminated with the highly toxic chemical compound dioxin, according to the National Institutes of Health.
The strategy behind the use of the defoliants was intended to deprive the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars of the cover provided by the forests and jungles; make them more vulnerable to ground and air attack; and also destroy the crops that sustained them.
Army field manuals at the time stated that the agents were “relatively non-toxic to man or animals,” which led commanders to drop precautions when spraying was nearby.
In his memoirs, Army Gen. William Westmoreland, the former commander of all U.S. forces in Vietnam, defended the use of Agent Orange as a tactical necessity: “The enemy used the jungle to hide, to ambush, to move troops. We had to find a way to deny him that cover.”
Following the war, veterans continued pressing for a service connection to the illnesses they developed after the conflict and for disability compensation that would come with the service connection. However, the VA maintained that “there is no positive evidence for deleterious effects on the health of individuals exposed to these herbicides which is of a permanent nature,” according to a 2024 VA report.
Yet the military discontinued use of Agent Orange and the other herbicides in 1971 and, tellingly, it gathered up the remaining stocks of Agent Orange and shipped them to Johnson Atoll, about 825 miles southwest of Honolulu, where they were incinerated in 1977.
In 1984, Vietnam veterans and their families filed in Brooklyn federal court what would become a landmark class-action lawsuit against seven chemical companies, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto, which resulted in a $180 million settlement for the veterans while allowing the chemical companies to continue denying any liability for the health problems of the veterans.
At the time, Victor John Yannacone Jr., the Long Island lawyer who first filed the class action suit for the veterans in 1979, said that the settlement should spur more action in Washington: ‘’I hope that the President of the United States directs the Veterans Administration to honor the claims of the Vietnam combat veterans and recognizes that chemical bullets are just as deadly as lead bullets — they just take longer to kill.”
Finally, on Feb. 6, 1991, President George H. W. Bush signed into law the Agent Orange Act to establish a group of “presumptive” conditions for Vietnam Veterans exposed to herbicides, meaning that veterans with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, soft tissue sarcomas and chloracne could now receive medical benefits from the VA as a result of service in Vietnam.
Since the signing of the Agent Orange Act, the VA has added to the list of “presumptives,” and there are now roughly 19 specific presumptive conditions linked to Agent Orange and other herbicides.
Now, Kerr and his fellow veterans in Sunset City, Utah, are working to recognize the decades-long fight to recognize and honor Agent Orange victims.
The inscription on one of the panels being put up by Kerr succinctly speaks to the veterans affected by Agent Orange:
“This memorial stands as a promise that their sacrifices will never be forgotten, their voices will never be silenced, and those who follow will be protected.”
