Vet felled by Agent Orange never stopped loving U.S.

Thomas Pleasants "Tom" Stockton of Winston-Salem died a few days ago, a victim of the war he came home from almost 40 years ago.

Stockton, who was 63, died of lung cancer that spread through much of his body and brain. The Department of Veterans Affairs had granted him full disability benefits after ruling that his cancer was apparently caused by exposure to Agent Orange during his service in the violent Mekong Delta in the Vietnam War. "I just don't think that people realize that we still feel the repercussions of this war, and what war in general does to people," his widow, Susan Stockton, said last week. "Any war lingers … I had a beautiful husband and he's gone because of the Vietnam War. It's so easy to think of a war as over, but it's not really over."

When pressed for an interview a few years ago by a young friend doing a school project, Tom Stockton said that the Vietnam War was a great waste of life, but it wasn't a wasted effort, in that it was aimed at stopping the spread of communism. Many of his peers would have disagreed with him, arguing that the effort was wasted, too. But Tom Stockton never talked much about the war, even as he was dying.

On our country's birthday, his story, that of unintended consequences and one man's clear-eyed love for his country, is worth pondering.

Stockton, who came from the family that founded Pleasants Hardware stores, graduated from Reynolds High School in 1965. He attended Louisburg College, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1967. His father and his father's brother were veterans of World War II. Tom Stockton, about to be drafted, enlisted so he could choose the branch of service he wanted. He wanted to be on the water.

Stockton was soon in Vietnam, a petty officer third class on board the U.S.S. Satyr, a support ship built in World War II. Agent Orange was in widespread use in Vietnam, often as a defoliant to kill the lush greenery that gave the North Vietnamese cover to fire from riverbanks such as the ones the Satyr went by. The dangers Agent Orange and its dioxin posed to humans weren't widely known at the time. Many troops, including Stockton and Elmo Zumwalt III, the son of the admiral who'd ordered the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam, were exposed to the chemical, as were many Vietnamese civilians.

Upon his return in 1971, Stockton worked in the family hardware business, where his wife said he must have felt a sense of security after the war. "We don't have to go into the history of what it was like for those boys coming back," his widow said. "It wasn't glorious."

After a few years in the family business, Stockton spent most of his career working in loan administration. He was a handsome man who enjoyed dancing with his wife, volunteering in the community, singing in church choirs, coaching his daughter's soccer games and golfing, fishing and hunting. "He was a Southern gentleman, and a gentle man," his wife said.

Her husband was diagnosed with the cancer last year. Susan Stockton said doctors told her that the cancer was clearly caused by exposure to Agent Orange. Doctors said it started in his lungs and spread to his renal glands, lymph nodes and brain. "Other veterans will have this happening sooner or later, and it's very sad and devastating," said Tom Stockton's daughter, Jennifer Stockton Robertson.

In 1988, Elmo Zumwalt III had died of cancer in Fayetteville. "I am a lawyer and I don't think I could prove in court, by the weight of the existing scientific evidence, that Agent Orange is the cause of all the medical problems -- nervous disorders, cancer and skin problems -- reported by Vietnam veterans, or of their children's severe birth defects," he had said in The New York Times Magazine two years before. "But I am convinced that it is.

"I realize that what I am saying may imply that my father is responsible for my illness … I have the greatest love and admiration for Dad as a man, and the deepest respect for him as a military leader. I do not doubt for a minute that the saving of American lives was always his first priority."

Tom Stockton might have agreed. The war, he told his student interviewer, was "hard to think about it when you're young. But later in life, you learn to buck up a little bit and are able to be more comfortable talking about it."

He never achieved great ease with chatting about a painful, private subject. But he never expressed any anger at his government about Agent Orange, his wife said, and he never stopped loving his country. He accepted his condition, she said, with his faith and self-composure. Toward the end, a minister asked him what he wanted her to pray for.

Peace, he said.

jrailey@wsjournal.com


727-7357