Toxic Semen

A Seminal Event

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my father’s sperm. Well, why not? That is after all what began life for me, right? The joining of my father’s sperm and an egg from my mother, precisely five months after they were married in September 1948 was the seminal event of my life. February 1949, however, is not the month for which I am concerned. Nor am I concerned with the second union of my father’s sperm with an egg from my mother, which resulted in my beautiful younger sister. Actually, the time frame I am concerned with, which resulted not in a life, but possibly a slow train to death, was the joyous homecoming reunion, and of course sexual union, between my parents, in early June, 1952.

The reasons for my fascination with this act of copulation more than fifty years ago have evolved slowly and erratically over time. Although it may not have been the only union that could have had adverse effects on the lives of so many people, it was surely the most important one for me. There is no way I can know for sure whether my mother and father waited till we were safely asleep, or left us with my grandmother while they ran off to a hotel for a rendezvous, but I am sure that there was a very quiet event which occurred on that day or a few days later, that ultimately resulted in my mother’s early death from a rare form of cancer. This day I think about so much is about ten days after my father witnessed an atomic bomb called Shot Charlie, which was part of Operation Tumbler-Snapper, and which was detonated in May, 1952.

By all accounts, my mother was one of the gentlest creatures who ever graced this earth. If she ever got riled up, you’d never know it until a cabinet door was shut a trifle too forcefully, and then you’d know you had stepped over the line with her. She would cry if she had to scold or punish us, and once she even sat at a typewriter and wrote me a full page note explaining why I could do better as a teenage daughter. Though she didn’t say it in so many words, I knew I had been steadily wounding her with my thoughtless and headstrong ways. A very private person, she could not talk about sex with her daughters, not even to discuss things young growing girls need to know. She would have been horrified to think I would someday write a story about something as private as her sexual relations with my father.

My mother didn’t live to celebrate her fortieth birthday. The staggering loss to my father was the subject of most of the attention after her death, but many others were impacted in profound ways. Annually, a scholarship is awarded in her name at Bayside Academy, the school she helped found the year before her death, and the shadow of her memory lingered over my father’s second and third marriages like a ghost. Of course, in the late 60’s cancer was not associated with any toxins, or food additives, or even with radiation exposure. While our government knew that radiation from various sources was deadly, we didn’t know it, and in fact we were reassured that just the opposite was true. I was given radiation treatments for a skin ailment when I was an adolescent, and though I found it horrifying that my fingernails had a ridge that gradually grew off, caused by the radiation, killing the cells in my fingernails, this treatment didn’t help the skin ailment, though I have never had any adverse effects from that radiation that I’m aware of.

I do not consent to be irradiated any longer, however, without there being a very dire need for the exposure. Dental x-rays, chest x-rays, and mammograms are not a routine thing for me. I asked a dental technician once when the pan-o-rex she was about to use had been inspected, and when she didn’t have any idea, I got up and left the dentist chair. I’ve had one mammogram, and I’ll never consent to another one. Radiation killed both my mother and my father, and I am going to try to live long enough to see my grandchildren, if I possibly can. There may be a number of other things I can’t prevent, but I’m not going to add to them by submitting to unnecessary radiation.

So, how do I know that radiation killed both my parents? It’s simple, really. When you consider that there are twelve known cancers that resulted from the exposure to the Atmospheric tests that were conducted above ground from 1945 to 1962 (and below ground thereafter)and when you consider that the children of these same men and women who were exposed to some type of atomic blast had children born with birth defects and leukemia, you begin to get the sense that at least my father’s exposure might have been the cause of his eventual death of bladder cancer in 1991. After a protracted battle with the Veterans Administration after his death, my father’s cancer was eventually ruled a service-connected illness.

My mother’s cancer was, I am told, not in any specific organ, but more or less “between her lungs and her spine” which meant that it was inoperable by the time they determined the source of her rapidly declining health. What makes this all the more tragic is the knowledge that she had a new-found passion and she was really thriving on it. She and some friends had founded a new day school. Her creative energy had gone into high gear. I remember clearly how I would come in from school to find her, instead of sewing my cheerleader uniform, cutting out felt shapes for an instructional project for the kindergarten, or painting up an old VW beetle for children to scamper in and out of on the playground.

And then just as suddenly she was complaining of a hip problem, which we thought might be bursitis, but in reality was the mass near her spine. X-rays didn’t show anything in September, and by January of the next year she died of this cancerous mass, which had grown so large that it simply suffocated her to death. Suddenly, someone so young and so full of life had become someone wasting away to a certain, swift death. We hardly had time to absorb the reality of her dying before she was gone. Except for the death of JFK (on my thirteenth birthday in 1963) the reality of death had never penetrated my existence. While my sister and I dealt with it in our own personal way, my father’s devastation was instantaneous and complete.

Never dreaming that it might be connected to his love for her, he suffered one defeat after another. What had begun as an effort to supplement their income in the early years of their marriage had grown into a commitment to the US Army that required him to go wherever they sent him, and in 1949, the Army needed to understand how men would react to nuclear war. Trusting their beloved government and believing the constant fear hyped by the escalating Cold War, these men considered it their duty to answer their government’s call. They went willingly to witness this astounding spectacle, proud of their country’s leap into the Atomic Age, and they understood why it was surrounded by secrecy, code-named and not to be discussed.

What they didn’t know was that the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense were having a mini-war of their own over how much radiation exposure these men could suffer without catastrophic health effects. When the Tumbler-Snapper series of tests was begun, the department of Defense won the argument by promising to absolve the AEC of any responsibility for the health of these men. That meant that they would be moved in closer to what they called ground-zero, from seven miles to less than four. They were to be tested to see how soldiers managed maneuvers in these conditions, and were intentionally being used as test subjects. What they weren’t being told was how lethal all their activities were going to be.

Recently a new book has been published, a coffee-table sized volume full of beautiful photos of these tests. It’s called 100 Suns. The photos show magnificent billowing clouds of dust and debris, and in the case of the oceanic tests, water. Even for someone who knows what the photos represent, it’s an incredible sight to behold. Some of the photos are in black and white, and some are white and blue, with a tinge of pink. The most impressive are the ones that are in what my father described as “hell, hell red.” The photo of the actual shot he witnessed is in the book, and it is exactly like he described it. Hell on earth. Red and yellow as hell.

Like most GI’s, including some shown in these photos, my father was a very patriotic citizen. Youthful, eager and energetic, he always lived his life like he had been taught by the World War I generation he admired so much. He had been only seventeen when he enlisted in the Navy for WWII, and though he sat in the tail-gunner’s position of an airplane, he never saw combat. He always regretted that. When he became ill with bladder cancer, he became the most well-liked patient in the VA hospital. His regular visits for surgery to remove the tumors spanned a fifteen-year period. During that time, he became aware of the class-action lawsuits that were being instituted in regard to these tests, but he was reluctant to believe the truth even then. Only when he had no alternative and the cancer had spread to his kidneys did he begin to accept the idea that his own government could have brought on his death in this way. He became bitter, and resentful of the constant run-around that he received from the Veterans Administration. It took years for them to even acknowledge that he was in the Army, as if it was impossible to believe that a man could enlist in more than one branch of service in his lifetime.

The cocktail of elements that were unleashed on the world, and particularly the North American Continent, by these nuclear tests has only now begun to be understood. A series of books has been published that show us maps with overlays of the downwind fallout from each of these tests, and we are able to extrapolate from some data that we already have what actually rained down on the continental US after each of these tests. These same books also have map overlays that show the cancer incidence, county by county, for these same areas. The results speak for themselves. The only people denying the causal relationship between the epidemic of cancer and the atmospheric testing are the same people clamoring to start a new atomic arms race.

I worked for the nuclear utility industry, and I remember one particularly uncomfortable moment when my father looked at me and said, basically, “you’re one of THEM.” What he meant was that the Atomic Energy Commission had become, in essence, the nuclear power industry. He was right, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I started asking questions, and began to realize that there was, and is, a huge amount of secrecy and denial in that industry. I did my research quietly, but I did learn quite a bit by asking the right questions. One of our employees actually was on the Manhattan Project, and he was a dear friend of mine.

One of my first jobs there was a data entry clerk, whose job it was to enter what are called “incident reports” into a database on a mainframe computer. These incident reports were used to share information between all the nuclear power operators so that an incident such as Chernobyl or Three Mile Island couldn’t happen again. One of the most revealing reports was one in which some workers at a plant had had “hot particles” placed on them by some malicious person, as a sort of attempted “murder” it was thought. The incident was played down, as well it should have been, as the public didn’t need to become concerned about such things as “hot particles.” Just the idea of them sent me into an imaginary land of “what-if.”

If there is a such thing as a hot particle, which can be planted on someone, but not easily detected without special equipment that we only now have available, then what is the possibility men like my father, who had just returned from a 31 kiloton blast in the desert with no protection, and wearing the same clothes that he witnessed the blast in – what was the possibility that they had been carrying “hot particles.” Later I learned that the US Government did not, and still to this day does not, take into consideration the ingested, inhaled radioactive elements, of which there are many, that are a part of every nuclear test. The only exposure they acknowledge is external exposure.

These men have fathered deformed children, children who have developed leukemia and other blood disorders, and these are just the things that they actually admit are connected to their exposure. There is a long list of possible effects that have not been officially acknowledged, but which many countries are looking at as possibly connected to the years of atomic testing. There are at least 348,000 men and women classified as Atomic Veterans. The government is quietly paying the claims of those who live long enough to fight their way through the mazelike system to apply for benefits. There is growing evidence that the epidemic of breast cancer is directly related to these tests. Even more frightening, now we find that there are veterans from the first Gulf War whose wives are getting sick along with the servicemen themselves.

There was a time when I would have kept these crazy ideas to myself, but there are too many unanswered questions. Too many have died, and too many more will die before we stop this slow murder. Now there is talk of a new round of nuclear tests, and we are already using depleted uranium in those cluster bombs. The cancer incidence in Iraq from the first Gulf War has skyrocketed. So, until someone convinces me I’m wrong, I am going to believe that the government murdered both my parents, by slipping toxic substances into my father’s body without his knowledge.

This week will mark the 35^th anniversary of my mother’s death, and my father has been gone for over ten years. I wish they both could have lived to be a ripe old age. One thing though – I’m glad my father didn’t live long enough to figure out that his beloved wife may have died as a result of his own expression of love. That would have killed him for sure.