Taking after my father

I fear I have my father's disease.

My father recently was diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes, which means that he'll drip blood into a glucose counter every morning until he dies. It doesn't mean he will die any sooner, as long as he eats well, sleeps well and exercises — all the things he has pretty much been ignoring for 40 years.

Diabetes is not the disease I fear. Nobody else in my father's family has diabetes, and he likely does not carry the diabetes gene. A study released by the U.S. Air Force last week suggests that my father got diabetes not from faulty genes, but from Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used generously during the Vietnam War. The Ranch Hand Study — as the project was called — explores the results of 1997 physical examinations of 2,300 Vietnam veterans. It finds that dioxin, the main contaminant in Agent Orange, increases the incidence and severity of adult-onset diabetes, as well as shortening the time to onset. Those veterans with the highest levels of dioxin exposure are 47 percent more likely to develop a form of diabetes.

My father served in Tay Ninh in 1968, the place and time of the U.S. government's heaviest use of Agent Orange during the course of the entire Vietnam War.

I've spent long moments wondering how much Agent Orange permeated the air my father breathed — how much settled into the food he ate and the clothes he wore. I find my father suddenly fascinating.

I trust that a part of my fascination is a real concern for his health. At the same time, I know he is at no immediate risk, and his chances for a long and reasonably normal life are entirely in his own hands. I suspect that a larger component of my fascination is the lurid human attraction to catastrophe. The notion that a wound is somehow legitimating, that crisis is somehow superior to calm, is everywhere in art and literature. The notion is especially compelling against the backdrop of a tedious academic semester.

At a university where charges of irreality enjoy a permanent validity, the will to catastrophe can become a perverse avoidance mentality opposing work that could easily, if dully, be accomplished. I first encountered this mentality a few months ago when I overheard the tail end of a conversation between two seniors.

"Goodbye," said one. "Drive safely."

"I will," said the other, getting into his car. "But if I crash — no thesis."

My father first encountered this mentality, I imagine, in 1966, when he dropped out of college and signed up to go fight in Vietnam. I fear that I have my father's disease. I am convinced I could live better in more interesting times and have long felt the dull, generational yearning for a good war to fight. My startling desire to combat my father's condition is, at root, a desire to fight my own war by un-fighting his.

My father never really speaks about Vietnam and has not officially told me about his diabetes. I rely instead on e-mail updates from my mother. My father is a proud man and a smart one, who wants to glorify neither war nor his part in it. He only ever had one struggle in mind for me: to do my best in all my classes.

"Hey kiddo, how are your studies?"

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Fine, Dad. How's your diabetes?

Writing now is a different form of fighting than the one he anticipated for me, and I hope sincerely he never sees this column. He'll think that he has failed, passed on a disease he had hoped would die with him. He'll know, even if I've forgotten, that I have work to do.

Jeremy Weissman '01 is a comparative literature major from Randolph, N.J.