Too little, too late, for too few

Agent Orange was one of a rainbow of defoliants used in Vietnam.

The Welcome Home parade can't come soon enough for our Vietnam veterans. It's not so much the three-decade wait for the Crown to say thanks - and to apologise - which is tentatively scheduled for next June. It's just that by June, says Brian Wilson, "another 30 of us will be dead".

If the parade goes ahead, it's likely to turn into a rout, such is the uprising over the compensation package announced last week. The war which veterans hoped was finally won has still some distance to run.

On both sides of the Tasman (about 20 per cent of the New Zealand veterans live in Australia) phones and emails are crackling with fiery exchanges as physically and psychologically scarred veterans mobilise. The Government, RSA and Ex-Vietnam Services Association (EVSA) are in retreat a week after signing a memorandum of understanding and hailing the successful conclusion of negotiations. Some veterans are eyeing a legal challenge.

"If this was a 100-yard sprint, they've got about two yards," says veteran Bruce Weir, who lives on the Gold Coast.

What hurts most is the feeling that the vets are still being lied to - the Government claims the package is worth $30 million but much of that will accrue from interest earned over 30 years on a $7 million trust fund.

"I keep being congratulated by mates in the RSA and non-servicemen acquaintances and I have to tell them, 'there's no money'," says Wilson.

These are soldiers whose bonds were forged not just in conflict but by its aftermath - a battle for recognition which so far stretches 35 years. The Vietnam veterans were treated like pariahs when they came home to a post-60s society. Shunned by the RSA, they were ignored by the Government. Then, when debilitating illnesses and cancers began to show up, in the veterans and in their children and grandchildren, they were lied to about their exposure to Agent Orange, the defoliant laced with 2,4,5-T and dioxin, and other dioxin-contaminated herbicides. There were cover-ups, whitewashes and inaction.

Now aged in their 50s and 60s, their loyalty to comrades and those who led them is matched by their mistrust of officialdom. But after 35 years, their expectations were finally raised.

They thought the tide had turned in 2004 when a Parliamentary select committee finally admitted our soldiers were exposed to a toxic environment. Last year, Prime Minister Helen Clark announced the formation of a working group led by ex-State Services Commission head Michael Wintringham to hear the veterans' concerns. They were buoyed when the working group reported back, recommending compensation be paid for a range of conditions affecting them and their offspring.