Word: viets
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...seemed for much of his life unaffected by the world around him, that may have been an advantage, considering the world he lived in. He avoided the Viet Nam War, but he also ignored much that led to Viet Nam. Inattentiveness is sometimes a survival skill. Quayle's pugnacious father did not always agree with Quayle's more famous grandfather, Eugene Pulliam, and among Pulliams it matters from which wife of Eugene one is descended (he had three). When the 17-year-old Quayle thought of siding with his father against his grandfather on behalf of family friend Barry Goldwater...
There had not been much war protest on the DePauw campus by the time Quayle graduated in 1969. Quayle's father was writing editorials backing the war in Viet Nam, but his son was not paying attention. As graduation approached, Quayle had to do some shopping around to find an opening in the National Guard. (In 1988 he said he meant to go to law school, but he had not applied to one.) He asked people he knew about the Guard, whom to call, but it is unlikely they did or could rig things for him. His grandfather was semiretired...
During the 1988 campaign, people wondered about Quayle's actions (and even his whereabouts) in the Viet Nam War. But the startling thing is that, if he inherited the Oval Office tomorrow, Quayle would be the first President since World War II who did not serve in the military during that war. Even Jimmy Carter, the U.S. President of most recent birth (1924), was a Navy cadet during the war. Not only was Quayle born after the war -- the first baby boomer so near the top -- he is also the first man to have grown up entirely within the confines...
That still leaves some 33,000 Agent Orange claimants who will get nothing, at least for now. They continue to maintain that the chemical is responsible for a jump in cancer among veterans and an increase in birth defects in their children. Julio Gonzales, 42, who served in Viet Nam for six months in 1969, feels sure that the series of disorders he has suffered since 1971, which include cancer of the bladder and problems with his kidneys and liver, was caused by Agent Orange. "The CDC can't see the forest for the trees," he says...
...will not make a final decision on the issue until two more reviews of the scientific literature being prepared for his department are completed this May. But unless that search uncovers compelling evidence that eluded the CDC, most of the veterans seem unlikely to get Government relief from their Viet Nam nightmare...