He was Agent Orange's worst enemy

At the age of 81, Dick Phenneger died in the service of his country.

True, Phenneger had long ago relinquished his seat in the cockpit as an Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War era. But the man went down fighting on July 18, and it’s appropriate that he be remembered in heroic terms.

At an age when most guys are satisfied playing with grandchildren, traveling a bit, gardening or tempting fish from fresh waters, Phenneger worked relentlessly on behalf of people whose lives have been impaired or destroyed by Agent Orange. Though we haven’t been able to confirm his cause of death, we know Dick contracted a form of hepatitis while visiting orphanages last spring in Vietnam. Once Phenneger had gotten a thorough understanding of the scope of Agent Orange’s devastating effects on GIs and their offspring, his net of compassion spread eastward to include Vietnamese victims.

“Our own government caused it,” Phenneger told our reporter, Brian Walker, for a story published April 21 after his return from Vietnam. “Our leadership knew Agent Orange was dangerous to man, but the Vietnamese and our soldiers were told that it wasn’t dangerous.”

In that story, Phenneger related the very moving experience of meeting a little blind boy who learned about his visitor by feeling all over Phenneger’s face. Looking back, Phenneger couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps that’s when he contracted Hepatitis A.

Phenneger’s last career began in earnest five years ago, when he and this newspaper teamed to survey Kootenai County Vietnam vets. The goal was to learn how seriously Agent Orange had impacted them. The answer after Phenneger had interviewed 123 of them: Devastatingly serious. But what he also learned was that 20 percent of the veterans’ children were deformed, ostensibly as a result of their fathers’ exposure to the herbicide that had been billed as a harmless defoliant of Vietnam’s jungles. The goal behind Agent Orange was to deprive enemy guerrillas of cover. Instead, it has seriously hurt countless soldiers on both sides, as well as some civilians.

At the risk of sounding paranoid and anti-federal government, we agree after numerous discussions with Phenneger and analysis of his research that this is a terrible problem our government is mostly just waiting to go away. Given enough time, the victims will be ghosts. Ghosts don’t file insurance claims or lawsuits.

With the passing of our friend, it’s our hope that his fight will live on.

These old soldiers are due much more than our admiration. As a nation, we owe them full medical support and other considerations.