A Legacy Comes Home
In the fall of 1946—a year after the atomic bombings of Japan—Lyman Quigley settled down in Portland,
Oregon, where he went to work for the city transit company operating streetcars and buses. Very soon he began
suffering acute abdominal attacks. "I’d wake up and be doubled up in pain at night. It kept getting more and more
severe. I got haggard-looking. I can’t describe it to you. You’d have to go through it to know what it is.
Excruciating."21 In December 1951 doctors removed Quigley’s appendix. The severe stomach pains, however,
persisted. He later developed stomach tumors.
One day, in March 1953, Quigley’s lungs hemorrhaged suddenly, bleeding for over a week. A scar formed on a
lung. He was thirty-one by then—married, and a father. "The doctors told me they couldn’t figure out what was
going on. This is when I first got a suspicion." More than twenty-five years later his memory was vivid about the
day in the summer of 1953 when he spoke to his doctor about the bulldozer work in Nagasaki’s radioactive rubble.
"The doctor starts to diagram on the blackboard about the atom and the half-life and all this stuff. And all of a
sudden he turns to me and says, ‘I wish you wouldn’t come see me anymore.’"22
In the late 1950s a painful lump grew out of Quigley’s head. Surgery removed the tumor, diagnosed as a lipoma
(tumor of fatty tissue). Later doctors took out "a tumor about the size of a hen egg"23 from the back of his knee.
Pain and weakness in his legs persisted. By this time Quigley was having trouble breathing; he was diagnosed as
having "chronic obstructive lung disease." At the age of forty-three, he suffered a heart attack—the first of five.
Missed work and medical bills outstripped insurance coverage by many thousands of dollars. "We borrowed on
the house, borrowed money on the car, borrowed money on the insurance policies we had," Quigley recounted.24 In
the early 1970s worsening health problems forced him into retirement. Monthly Social Security disability payments
of about $300 and a Teamsters union pension of $140 did little to ease the financial strain. His wife of a quarter
century, Bernice, started working in hospitals to counter the awesome financial toll.
In the autumn of 1978 Lyman Quigley received visitors at his house in northeast Portland. Pain-racked but
determined, he sat next to a kitchen table piled high with correspondence from the Defense Department, Veterans
Administration, and nongovernmental scientists. Thirty-three years after going ashore in Nagasaki, for Quigley,
atomic and personal histories had become inextricably meshed.
He was a quintessential American man, raised in the Depression era, proud of his military service. His political
views were mainstream; his favorite magazine, Reader’s Digest. What set him apart was his belief that an
unreported part of history had been telescoped into his own body, his organs and cells—and, he feared, perhaps into
the genetic heritage passed on to his children, Ron and Linda, now in their twenties.
"When my father first started putting facts together and came to the realization that his illnesses might stem from
exposure to radiation, we found that this was more frightening than the unknown," Ron remembered. "It was not
only frightening but also it was financially and emotionally draining for me and my family. . . . I can remember
times my father would isolate himself in another part of the house for two or three days at a time, he had such pains
in his heart, his legs, his chest, and shortness of breath, so much so that he was unable to participate in family
activities or even simple things such as getting the mail or sitting outside for a short time."25
For a score of years, with increasing intensity, Lyman Quigley had read everything he could get his hands on
about atomic fallout and radiation effects. In Radiation, an authoritative book by Ralph E. Lapp and Jack Schubert,
he found documentation that the Nagasaki reservoir water he and fellow Marines had drunk so freely was probably
radioactive. About a mile from Nagasaki’s nuclear blast center, "there was a fall-out at the Nishiyama reservoir area,
where a total dosage of as much as 100 roentgens may have been delivered"26—a serious dose of radiation if
absorbed into the human body.
Quigley had attempted to file a claim for service-connected benefits with the Veterans Administration in the fall
of 1973, contending that his severe health deterioration resulted from radiation exposure while a Marine in Nagasaki.
The VA official he spoke with dissuaded Quigley from filing a claim, saying there was no chance of approval. Two
years later Quigley went back and insisted on filing a claim. In January 1976 the VA issued a denial.
After a hearing in Portland the following year the VA sent him a ruling dated March 10, 1978, reaffirming the
rejection. "Service-connection for residuals of radiation exposure involving the heart, lung, stomach, head and knee
is not warranted," the VA decision declared. "His present disabilities have been determined to be of nonserviceconnected
origin."27
In Nagasaki "radioactivity decayed very fast and was all gone within five weeks of the blast," said a scrawled VA
memo in Quigley’s claim file.28 In a 1976 letter, Dr. John D. Chase, then chief medical director of the VA, wrote:
"Navy records indicate that ships did not approach Nagasaki until so long after the atomic blast that any residual
radiation which might have existed would have been negligible."29
But by now Quigley understood that the Nagasaki bomb exploded with plutonium, known to lodge in human
lungs and other internal soft tissue; plutonium diminishes so slowly that it will take twenty-four thousand years for
half of its deadly alpha radiation to decay. Other radioactive isotopes left by an atomic bomb include strontium 90, a
"bone-seeking" form of radioactivity remaining highly toxic for many decades, and cesium 137—which is
assimilated by muscles.
Lyman Quigley pursued a hunch. He suspected that his was not an unusual case among veterans, now scattered
throughout the United States, who had traveled up that Nagasaki hill with him as part of Company C, 2nd Pioneer
Battalion, 2nd Marine Division.
After three decades it was not easy to track down Marine buddies from the Nagasaki cleanup days. Adding to the
logistical obstacles for Lyman Quigley, life had long since become almost steady pain. Utilizing old address books,
yellowed letters, and telephone directory assistance, by the end of 1978 he had located five men of the Company C
Marines.
In the small town of Sparta in the eastern Tennessee mountains, Junior Hodge—who was with Quigley on the
bulldozers in Nagasaki—had been living with chronic anemia for the past twenty years. "Seems like all my strength
is going out of me," Hodge told us. One of his testes had become enlarged, while the other, with a small growth on
it, had almost disappeared. "I ain’t got much money, and I can’t afford to go to doctors," he drawled mournfully.
Hodge’s chronology of stomach and lung afflictions was virtually identical to Lyman Quigley’s.30
In Pittsburgh, Quigley tracked down John Zotter; in Toledo, Ohio, Willard Good; in Berwyn, Illinois, Philip
Leschina; across town in Portland, William Gender. In addition Quigley located the mother of Floyd Crews, who
had been part of the Company C bulldozing detail; he had died in 1972.
Quigley took extensive notes and accumulated medical records and affidavits. A pattern was emerging, with
some strikingly similar ailments among the seven of them. Hodge, Good, Gender, Crews, and Quigley suffered
severe lung difficulties, at times requiring surgery and in all cases causing chronic breathing problems for decades.
Consistent intestinal attacks, often within a few months after leaving Nagasaki, became long-term realities of life for
Hodge, Zotter, Gender, Crews, and Quigley; each of those men also experienced persisting painful conditions in
their legs. And a pronounced chronic infestation of unusual weeping skin sores or ulcerations had been suffered by
Hodge, Zotter, Good, Gender, and Quigley.31
Willard Good had begun treatments in the mid-1960s for polycythemia vera, an excess of red blood cells found in
one out of every 250,000 Americans per year.32 In 1976, at age fifty-three, Good went on early retirement from his
job as a shipping clerk in Toledo.
Most of the men spoke of feeling run down by the time they reached middle age—as though they were much
older than their chronological years. Time after time medical specialists had been puzzled about their afflictions.
By mid-1979 Quigley had reached a total of fifteen men—or their next of kin—who had been stationed with him
at that roofless Nagasaki schoolhouse. Dispersed all over the United States and unaware of each other’s postwar
medical woes, most of the men experienced agonizing health problems at an unusually early age. Six suffered heart
attacks, four of them fatal, before the age of fifty. Serious lung ailments, ongoing acute stomach pains, bizarre skin
afflictions, aching weakness in leg bones—each of these physical difficulties, occurring at young ages, was reported
for about half of the fifteen Company C veterans tracked down.33
Little more than an hour’s drive from Quigley’s Portland home, in the southern Willamette Valley town of
Lebanon, lived Company C veteran William Hoover. "Bill had been lucky, or so he thought," Juanita Hoover
reflected a year after Quigley had located her husband. But rapid-fire events ended the Hoovers’ feelings of good
fortune. In quick succession, Bill Hoover’s wife recalled, "he had a tumor removed from his hip and a skin cancer
from his ear—also a testicle operation. Then on October 15, 1979, he discovered he had lung cancer. He had
surgery immediately. It had grown so rapidly it had attached itself to the sac around the heart. They removed two
thirds of his right lung." Hoover nearly died on the operating table.34
The fifteen former Marines’ health histories that Quigley documented represented about a tenth of the total
number of Company C servicemen who had been with him in Nagasaki. The fifteen had been a fairly random
sampling, and had turned up a conspicuous pattern of early onset of particular diseases. What’s more, Quigley
pointed out, he had begun to do what the U.S. Government had always been in a far better position to accomplish,
with its resources and access to records; but the government had never tried, refusing even to lend a hand to
Quigley’s efforts.
For Lyman Eugene Quigley—a veteran of Tarawa, Okinawa, and other bloody battles in the Pacific during World
War II—the most tenacious foes turned out to be severe health impairment teaming up with a recalcitrant U.S.
Government. The new evidence he had uncovered didn’t seem to make any difference to the Veterans
Administration, which turned down his claim again. "I got a willpower to live," Quigley said as he leafed through
stacks of negative replies under official United States Government letterheads. "I ain’t giving up yet. I’m not
ready."35 He continued his research work, until a fifth heart attack killed him in spring 1980 at the age of fifty-eight.
A few hours after the funeral Bernice Quigley drove across Portland to meet a group of Japanese atomic bomb
survivors who were visiting the city as part of a speaking tour. As she talked to them, she learned that a number of
her late husband’s ailments, including odd purple spots that would come and go and reappear on his legs, were quite
familiar to the Japanese visitors who had lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the atom bombs fell.36 For Bernice
Quigley, newly widowed, an insidious irony had completed a painful full circle.
Fifty miles east of Portland along the Columbia River, former U.S. Marine Ralph Sheridan Clapp settled down to
raise a family after the Second World War. But ever since the autumn of 1945 his life had never been the same.
"Before I was in Nagasaki, I had a friend who said I was more like a gazelle than a human being."37 By the end of
his few weeks of Nagasaki cleanup duties, according to Clapp and affidavits from ex-Marines who had been in that
city with him, severe breathing problems began. As the years passed, Clapp spent more time in hospitals for oxygen
and diagnostic tests.
In early spring 1979 we visited Sheridan Clapp at the Barnes VA Hospital in Vancouver, Washington. Clapp sat
up in bed, his voice wheezing but resolute. "It’s kind of ironic to go through a war like that with no scratches, hell in
a half-acre, and then wind up like this," he said. Clapp had seen combat in Okinawa, but it was another legacy that
preoccupied him at age fifty-seven. "I think, really and truly, the American public needs to be told. We went in
there green as grass. We were just kind of cleaning up in Nagasaki, one thing or another. You’re drinking water and
all that, why hell it’s all contaminated; it’d have to be."38
Turned down for Veterans Administration service-connected benefits, Clapp had developed a thick VA claim file
containing the same official assurances—often word for word—as those received by Lyman Quigley.39 "Why?"
Clapp asked during an interview; looking around the noisy hospital wing, he responded to his own question: "It
must be all the big money behind nuclear."40
Chronic respiratory illness was not the only reason for Sheridan Clapp’s hospitalization in the first months of
1979. Doctors had discovered a perplexing blood condition, requiring extensive tests as one after another of the most
common blood diseases were ruled out. During the spring a medical verdict finally came in: Clapp was afflicted
with a life-threatening lack of blood coagulant "factor VIII"—a condition so rare that no more than one hundred
cases had been reported worldwide in the previous three decades, according to the hematologist treating Clapp, Dr.
Scott H. Goodnight, Jr., of the Oregon Health Sciences Center.41
For Clapp the agony was intense—all the more because he was weary of hospitals, and what he perceived as
political motives for VA rejections of claims by American veterans exposed to radiation while in military service.
"This country had better get itself in gear if we’re going to survive, that’s all I’ve got to say," he told us during a
hospital visit in March 1979. "All the doggone money in developing those nuclear plants. I can’t understand what
they’re thinking about. I’m against any further development of it at all. Absolutely none."42 On April 20, 1979,
Sheridan Clapp picked up a blunt pencil and wrote a letter mentioning plutonium and ending with the words: "Stop
these people. Sincerely, Sheridan Clapp."43 He died five weeks later.
Sheridan Clapp left behind a widow whose grief combined with outspoken anger. Two years after her husband’s
death there was a little less audible pain in Delores Clapp’s voice, but the outrage had grown stronger. "Sheridan lost
his life for his country just as sure as if he had died on a battlefield," she said, sitting in the living room of the house
their family had shared in Hood River, Oregon. "If he hadn’t been in Nagasaki, he’d be here today to enjoy his
grandson. I feel so strongly about this. If it were just a matter of money, the government’s refusal to admit the truth
wouldn’t be so important. But it’s the principle of the thing."44
19. Interviews with several dozen American veterans of Nagasaki cleanup. Also, U.S. DOD, Hiroshima and Nagasaki Occupation Forces (Washington, D.C.:
Defense Nuclear Agency, 1980); U.S. DOD, Radiation Dose Reconstruction U.S. Occupation Forces in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan 1945-1946
(Washington, D.C.: Defense Nuclear Agency, 1981).
In some respects the U.S. servicemen’s atomic cleanup experiences in Japan resembled events more than thirty years later in the South Pacific. In the late
1970s, about three thousand American GIs—some wearing surgical protective masks—obeyed orders to clean up Eniwetok atoll radioactivity left by scores of
nuclear tests at those islands. The three-year, $100 million cleanup project was backed by Defense Nuclear Agency officials eager to show that islands in the
radiation-covered atoll could be made habitable. (See Steve Rees, "84th Eng Bn Exposed to Cancer Causing Elements on Clean-up Mission: But Why?"
Enlisted Times, August 1979, pp. 5, 19.)
20. White House Domestic Policy Staff Assistant Director Ellen L. Goldstein to Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, December 18, 1979;
available from Committee, P.O. Box 14424, Portland, OR 97214.
21. Quigley interviews.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ron Quigley, Newsletter, Committee for U.S. Veterans of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, summer 1979, p. 5.
26. Jack Schubert and Ralph E. Lapp, Radiation: What It Is and How It Affects You (New York: The Viking Press, 1957), p. 219.
27. VA claim determination letter to Lyman Quigley, March 10, 1978.
28. VA "Report of Contact," October 26, 1978, Quigley file, No. C-20-303-320.
29. VA Chief Medical Director John D. Chase, M.D., to Congressman Robert B. Duncan, December 27, 1976.
30. Junior Hodge, interviews, December 1978.
31. Quigley, John Zotter, Willard Good, Philip Leschina, and William Gender, interviews, November 1978 to June 1979.
32. Stephen Chandler, M.D., Portland hematologist, interviews, April 1979.
33. Quigley and other fifteen Company C Marines he located, interviews, November 1978 to June 1979; plus correspondence and medical records.
34. Atomic Veterans’ Newsletter (National Association of Atomic Veterans, 1109 Franklin St., Burlington, IA 52601), fall 1980, p. 6.
35. Quigley interviews.
36. Bernice Quigley, interviews, July 1980.
37. Ralph Sheridan Clapp, interview, March 1979.
38. Ibid.
39. Authors obtained both Quigley’s and Clapp’s complete claim files of record at the VA regional office in Portland.
40. Clapp interview.
41. Scott Goodnight, interview, April 1979. Dr. Goodnight said Clapp’s "factor VIII" inhibitor condition had been diagnosed as being a noninherited type, which
greatly accentuated its rarity.
42. Clapp interview.
43. Clapp to authors, April 20, 1979.
44. Delores Clapp, interviews, May 1981.