Atomic veteran grateful for help of friends

On Nov. 1, 1952, Jim Wallace of Pembroke, a United States Army grunt not yet 20 years old, stood on the deck of the transpsort ship General E.T. Collins in the waters of the Marshall Islands and watched in awe with his shipmates as the world’s first hydrogen bomb was detonated.

In that life-altering instant, Wallace, now 75, was unwittingly inducted into an exclusive military fraternity whose members, having been exposed to radiation, would come to be known as “atomic veterans,” a polite term for human guinea pigs in a dawning nuclear age. As Wallace would learn, it was a club in which no one would ever knowingly seek membership. And the lifetime dues would be steep.

Wallace had enlisted in the Army and taken airborne training for duty in Korea. But after he injured his back in a training jump he eventually wound up assigned to Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshalls, an area where nuclear tests were being conducted. He recalls the Pacific Proving Grounds hydrogen bomb test – code-named “Mike” as part of Operation Ivy – as though it were yesterday.

Part of a joint task force of more than 11,000 men involved in the tests, Wallace and his buddies were “standing on deck just looking around, when all of a sudden we could see a bright red glow in the sky,” he said Tuesday in a telephone interview from his home. “Over the ship’s loudspeakers came an order to close our eyes and cover up. But we didn’t have anything to cover up with, so we just stood there.

“We could feel the heat from it [the blast], and the shock wave just rolled that big ship. A colonel standing behind me said, ‘My God. Do you think it’s ever going to stop?’ I turned to him and asked ‘Don’t you know, sir?’ and he replied, ‘No one knows.”‘

“I’ve forgotten a lot of things in my life,” Wallace acknowledged. “But that’s one thing I will never forget.”

Nor will he forget how scared the men were. “I remember hoping that we wouldn’t have any damn emergency, because no one looked capable of handling it. I’m sure I looked just as bad as the others did,” Wallace said.

Two weeks later, another nuclear bomb estimated to be 25 to 40 times more powerful than all the bombs dropped during World War II was detonated in the air off Runit Island in the Marshalls and Wallace and his comrades endured the experience again.

Bound by an oath of secrecy to not go public with what they had witnessed, the multitudes of veterans involved in nuclear testing in the Marshalls and elsewhere kept the pledge. Many had died by the time the government lifted the secrecy ban in 1993. The stories that subsequently hit the nation’s front pages were not pretty.

Veterans reported getting stiffed by their government when they filed disability claims for service-connected exposure to radiation. The bureaucracy seemed to take particular care not to learn what it didn’t want to know about high cancer rates among atomic veterans.

Long unable to work because of major medical problems, including cancer that a VA doctor had found was related to his Marshall Islands experience, Wallace got snared in the bureaucratic web while trying to get disability benefits due him based on that doctor’s report.

Enter Mainer Glenn MacDonald, now of Chandler, Ariz., whose Web site militarycorruption.com exists to help veterans. Tipped off by a fellow Vietnam War veteran about Wallace’s plight, MacDonald, a former Maine newspaperman, wire service reporter and Vietnam combat correspondent, went to work.

Not one to pass up a chance to play David to the bureaucracy’s Goliath, he wrote several blistering articles for his Web site in behalf of Wallace, augmenting work that the Maine VFW organization had done on the case. According to sources within the Veterans Administration, the effort got the bureaucrats’ attention. Because the VA has consistently been reluctant to open the floodgates of compensation for radiation-induced disability claims, MacDonald and others advised Wallace to take a new tack and file a claim for his service-connected post traumatic stress disorder.

The VA agreed to honor the PTSD claim. Starting July 1, Wallace will get 50 percent disability benefits. “I really don’t think I would have made it without Glenn’s help,” a grateful Wallace said of his turn of fortune “He’s a smart man and 100 percent for the GI.”

“This is one of those cases that makes me glad I chose journalism as a profession,” said MacDonald. “Not only could I help someone – that someone is from Maine.”

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may reach him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.