Doug MacEachern

columnist | azcentral.com

"Not everyone who lost his life in Vietnam died there. Not everyone who came home ever left there. Freedom is not free." — Anonymous

"It amazes me how a tour in Vietnam, which is a matter of months, can define each of us the rest of our lives." — Mike Suckow, 88th Transport, U.S. Army, Vietnam

Even the best of choices we make can have malignant consequences that their well-meaning sponsors never pondered. And even the worst can have hidden virtues. Nearly every choice made by mortals falls one way or another. That is why they are called choices.

The use of Agent Orange in Vietnam never fell into either category.

The toxic herbicide was sprayed for 10 years starting in 1961, eventually coating more than 8,600 square miles of jungle, in order to deny cover to the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. It has left a trail of horror that kills to this day.

Its cruelty to American servicemen who survived the war is continuing even now, compounded by a Department of Veterans Affairs that chronically leaves vets to suffer and die undiagnosed and untreated. Of 500,000 vets who died between 2000 and 2007, 58 percent were younger than 60. The veterans of Vietnam are dying young. It is not hard to figure out one big reason why.

Agent Orange was an unmitigated evil, I had firmly believed.

Until Wednesday morning. Now? Agent Orange, still, is a monstrous evil, perpetrated upon Americans and Vietnamese alike. Just not an entirely unmitigated one.

My friend, Dick Roney, is dying. When I saw him Wednesday, it was clear it may end for him before you read this.

A combat veteran of Vietnam, Dick is firmly convinced that Agent Orange is killing him. In four years of painful, debilitating treatment at some of the country's finest hospitals, no one has convinced him otherwise.

It is a terrible thing to see what Agent Orange and the cancers it has spawned have done to him, to say nothing of the cruelties they have visited on his family.

At 6-foot-4, Dick Roney is — was — a bolt-upright brick house. An imposing, all-American figure who made the most of his all-too-brief life. I admire him more than anyone I know.

He and a partner built a successful high-tech company, MEGA Systems & Chemicals, a work of life that earned him high-tech entrepreneur of the year honors in 1997.

After selling MEGA Systems in 1999, he and his wife, Mary, created the Roney Family Foundation that, through 2013, donated $500,000 to education, bio-tech research and to poor Catholic parishes.

Dick and Mary built a great life, with two great kids, that they have had too little time chance to enjoy.

If anyone has a right to be bitter about his country's use of Agent Orange, it is Dick Roney. Incredibly, he's not. One reason is that bitterness is, simply, alien to Dick, even now. But also because he firmly believes it saved the lives of the men under his command in war.

"Fifty to 60 percent of my men survived the experience over there because of that (clearing of jungle from the roadside)," he said. "Because you could see them and they could see you and because we had serious firepower."

"I wouldn't have survived it. I would have died 45 years ago."

In 1970 and 1971, Capt. Dick Roney commanded two U.S. Army transport companies. One, the 541st Transport, resupplied artillery batteries near the Cambodian and Laotian borders.

The other, the 88th Transport, resupplied troops along the entire Central Highlands war front. Some of the fiercest battles of the war were being waged there then against North Vietnamese regulars in places like Pleiku, Dak To and Ben Het.

To get there with their vital loads of resupply and reinforcement, re-enforcement, the 88th had to traverse the highway between Qui Nhon on the coast of the China Sea and Pleiku at the southern base of the front — QL 19, as it was known.

It was the world's most deadly highway at the time. The opening scene of the 2002 Mel Gibson film, "We Were Soldiers," depicting a 1954 ambush that nearly wiped out an entire French column, actually happened just off QL 19 near An Khe. A lot of U.S. soldiers died on that terrible road.

Among those who survived it, Dick Roney is a hero.

His first priority as a commander may have been the delivery of reinforcements to the war zone. But just as important to him was the survival of his troops. Soldiers do not forget leaders like that.

Last week, the ranking NCO of the 88th Transport, Mike Suckow, sent his ailing commander a message that he wrote "after consultation with those 88th soldiers on my e-mail list."

Wrote Sgt. Suckow, in a message titled, "The Last Convoy":

"It was a pleasure and an honor to serve under your command. There will be no change of command ceremony. Regardless of your change of status or duty station, you will continue to be recognized as our commanding officer. There were other C.O.'s of the 88th Trans, but you set the standard.

"You will be the convoy commander until the last of your men makes that final trip on QL 19."