It's been more than four decades since his ephemeral stint with the United States Navy, and exactly 45 years this April since he stood on the deck of the USS Chipola, off the coast of Christmas Island, witnessing the spectacle of a nuclear mushroom cloud spurt thousands of feet into the air. He recalls that early spring evening in 1962 with great murkiness, for he was fresh into the service at the time, and his superiors, he says, did not make the test bombing out to be a major event. Plus, he says, "you go on to see a lot of shit when you're in the service"—and he's right, you do, according to the myriad old vets at the regional VA hospital on Rancho Lane, awaiting with historic patience treatment for their myriad afflictions.
Eights months earlier the Soviets had violated the moratorium on nuclear testing, and America responded with a series of trial explosions themselves, both underground and air-dropped. Operation Dominic I, in the Southwest Pacific Islands, where dozens of air-dropped bombs were spread over several months, was part of this. Lieutenant Parkinson was there for the first test, and he and his shipmates were given the sole preamble to remain under the deck while the bomb was being dropped by a B-52 jet. He was invited back on deck 15 minutes later, wearing a film badge dosimetry, and without foreboding he watched the mushroom cloud stand in the subequatorial sky. "Sir," the lieutenant now says, anxious to depart the recollection: "I was 18 then, and to tell you the truth I didn't give a shit."
He would return to America the following day, earn an honorable discharge in 1965 and continue on with his civilian life unperturbed until the pivotal year of 1996, when after two doctors could not determine the source of his intermittent and instantaneous blackouts, a third asked him if he'd ever been exposed to ionized radiation. To which he answered, Yes, I have, and was told he possessed a disorder of the bone marrow common in atomic vets called myeloproliferative syndrome.
Two other doctors confirmed this diagnosis, a form of leukemia. Then, his two remaining comrades from his time in the service told him he could—and should—seek compensation for his medical bills from the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. And so that's what Lieutenant Parkinson attempted to do, acquiring the advocacy of a veterans service officer in Vegas and presenting his case before the Veterans Benefits Administration, as hundreds of thousands of disabled veterans had done before him. The VBA denied his claim.
The lieutenant then appealed to the Board of Veterans Appeals. He was denied again. And so he appealed that decision, but to no greater success. And that's how the vain cycle in which he has been denied medical compensation on eight separate attempts began.
"At first they said I wasn't even there, at Christmas Island," the lieutenant says. "They told me I was full of shit."
The lieutenant wrote a letter to then-Gov. Kenny Guinn, and it went unreturned. "So you see, sir," he says, his voice gruff and forlorn, "I'm a little cynical."
Then a lawyer from Seal Beach, California, called the lieutenant up one day, and told him he'd work his case pro bono. And did. And got the lieutenant a hearing before a veterans administrative law judge here in Las Vegas, during which Lieutenant Parkinson testified to his story on the record. The judge told him he would send his case to Washington, D.C. And did. Soon thereafter the lieutenant received a letter in the mail from Washington, stating that he needed to substantiate his claim by providing evidence to the inimical dosage of radiation to which he was exposed aboard the USS Chipola. "How I'm supposed to do that, I'll never know," he says. "They say we wore some kind of badges back then, but I don't know what happened to it."
The U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency does, however, and that's why the letter encouraged the lieutenant to seek their assistance. The DTRA has helped develop claims for more than 113,00 veterans, conducted several studies on nuclear testing throughout the United States' military history and offers thorough data pertaining to the blasts of Operation Dominic I and the potential biological effects the ionizing radiation had on its 25,000 participants. "About 95 percent of them," a spokesperson from the DTRA states, "had a film badge dose well within the standards that were established for the operation, as well as the current federal occupational exposure limit for radiation workers."
Moreover, the DTRA says, national scientific studies have found no definite links between participants of Dominic I and cancer- or (more specifically) leukemia-related health outcomes, such as the lieutenant's.
"I don't give a shit anymore," says the lieutenant. "I'm gonna be dead sometime anyway. I just feel bad for the other guys, the ones in wheelchairs at the VA, the helpless ones who are still hoping for the government to help them. Have you been down there, seen them?"
They are many. And most of them are drudging through the thicket of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the federal government's largest bureaucracy, enduring with blank stares the interminable wait for the monthly medical compensation stipends they believe are due to them after their service in the Middle East, in Vietnam, in World War II, or in any other of the assortment of military operations of the past 75 years. A small portion of them, says one veterans service officer here in Las Vegas, are atomic veterans like Parkinson. According to Commander R.J. Ritter, executive director of the National Association of Atomic Veterans, there are more than 500,000 atomic veterans nationwide, 25,000 of whom have filed claims with the VA. Less than 500 have received even half compensation, Ritter says.
"Everyone in this world wants to screw everyone else," says the lieutenant. "These rich politicians with nice ranches send kids off to war, just average Joes. And what happens to them? They join the service because they believe in something, and then they get squashed."
And then, with no less rancor: "Life's a joke if you ask me."