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Vietnam veteran exposed to Agent Orange honored: Today's tribute in Washington comes posthumously(Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Apr. 17--The Vietnam War is still killing people. Neal Richard Dixon died in 2004, 34 years after he repaired and drove tanks in Hoi An. He came back to Gahanna, married, had a daughter and divorced. He worked in construction and hotel management. "I thought I was home free," said his mother, Jean Dixon, who is 77. "My son came home from Vietnam, and then it took him." His doctors decided that Agent Orange, a chemical used to strip foliage from trees during the war, caused the cancer that killed him. If a Vietnam veteran develops certain kinds of illnesses, and that veteran served in an area of Agent Orange spraying, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs assumes the chemical was a factor, even decades after the exposure. But those war casualties don't qualify for a spot on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The Department of Defense allows only the names of people who died of combat wounds to be inscribed on the wall. So in 1993, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund created a way to honor people who died because of the war but don't qualify for the wall. The names of Neal Dixon and 85 other veterans will be read today as part of the "In Memory" program at the National Mall in Washington. Tributes to those veterans -- in Dixon's case a short biography and some family pictures -- will be laid at the wall and then collected and stored in the archives of the National Park Service. The veterans' names will be kept on a special roll. More than 1,500 veterans have been honored this way. Dixon is the seventh central Ohioan honored, but there are almost certainly more who would qualify, said Lisa Gough, a spokeswoman for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. The fund promotes the In Memory program on its Web site and through word-ofmouth, which means a lot of people still don't know about it, she said. Most of the veterans who qualify died of an illness brought on by chemical exposure or committed suicide after their post-traumatic stress disorder was diagnosed, Gough said. The dates of death are spread from the earliest days of the war until now. In Dixon's class, one man died in 1962; several others lived until 2005. Neal Dixon spent most of his life in Gahanna but enlisted during the few years that his family lived in Rockford, Ill. He was 17 and went behind his mother's back. "He didn't like school, for one thing," his mother said. "He skipped a lot. And his father was a Marine. We are a Marine Corps family." Dixon spent a little more than a year in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970, then came home and went into the Marine Reserves for a few years. He was mostly happy and healthy until early 2004 when he became so weak that he needed two hands to lift a glass of water to his mouth. On Feb. 2, 2004, doctors told him he had a rare cancer that started in his prostate and spread quickly. His initial prognosis was three to five months. He lived almost 10 and died Nov. 29 at the age of 53. A family member read about the In Memory program, and Dixon's mother decided her son deserved some appreciation for what he had done, because "(the veterans) weren't exactly cheered when they got home." Jean Dixon learned a few months ago that her son qualified for the honor. Her two surviving children, along with two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, are all in Washington for the ceremony. Neal's 24-year-old daughter, Nicki, will read her father's name, and his mother will lay his tribute at the wall. For more information on the In Memory program, visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Web site at www.vvmf.org. [email protected] |