Steamboat Springs – Death long ago closed the book on her husband’s nightmarish Vietnam flashbacks – the post-traumatic stress that fueled fear, anger and painful introspection.
But to Elisabeth McAlpin Dickson, sometimes it seemed the battle would never end.
The U.S. government denied that Lannis “Mac” McAlpin’s cancer, which killed the former Special Forces soldier at age 46, stemmed from his exposure to the chemical defoliant Agent Orange. The appeals process dragged on for nearly a decade.
Two years ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs conceded the connection to Agent Orange and awarded Dickson more than $100,000 in retroactive benefits. But then, in August, the VA asked her to return the money, which the recently divorced single mom already had sunk into a home.
It paid her monthly benefits. It notified her they would stop. It reinstated them.
More than 10 years after Mac’s death, the fluctuating financial details have played havoc with the family budget. Dickson – everyone knows her as Babette – is a part-time French teacher caring for two young sons from a second marriage.
But she never stopped pursuing Mac’s case.
Surrounded by loose-leaf binders in which she has meticulously organized the paperwork from her ongoing battle with bureaucracy, she explains that money was the last thing she was looking for when she took up this fight.
“I was looking for justice,” Babette says.
In 1971, Lannis McAlpin returned from his one-year Vietnam tour to a venomous anti-welcome as a damaged man with wounds to his lower right leg, his right ear and his psyche.
He drifted. He did drugs. He trained soldiers in Angola. He smuggled contraband. He fathered a son in Georgia, eventually drifting away from that situation.
Mac ended up in Hawaii, wrestling with intense PTSD that the VA would recognize as a service-connected disability – but not until 17 years after his tour.
In Hawaii, he finally began to stitch together a functional life. But in 1990, growing bored with the islands, he returned to the mainland and settled in San Francisco.
There, he met Babette.
The Paris native had come to the United States on sabbatical and found a year-long job with the French consulate. She and Mac went for coffee on a Sunday in November – it happened to be Veterans Day – and fell hopelessly and improbably in love.
Nothing matched: race, culture, language or even age. Mac, 41, stood a sinewy 6-foot-3 with a black and Cherokee heritage. He was still emotionally raw from his tour as an Army sniper.
Babette, 27, was a petite, 5-foot-2 white European. She was versed in the rituals of international diplomacy.
“When he was in the war,” says Babette, “I was a little girl playing in the garden.”
When her job at the consulate ended, she prepared to head back to Europe, where she landed a diplomatic position in Belgium. Babette asked Mac to join her. He didn’t hesitate.
On Jan. 28, 1994, they got married at the city hall in Brussels. But just days later, Mac suddenly announced that he needed to return to Hawaii.
His explanation made sense at the time, though now Babette suspects Mac kept to himself a mounting sense of his own mortality.
He told her he longed for English-speaking friends. The cool, damp European weather also played havoc with his injured leg. He suffered headaches, and PTSD-triggered flashbacks left him, and the bedclothes, soaked in night-sweat.
An inexplicable rash of white spots dotted his dark skin. When he and Babette tried and failed to have children, medical tests revealed a deterioration in the quality of his sperm.
He left for the islands that winter, and Babette wrapped up her job and followed him a few months later. But by December of ’94, Mac began having trouble digesting food. A subsequent ultrasound exam revealed a mass in his gastrointestinal tract.
They flew to Honolulu for a biopsy and then to San Antonio for surgery. Doctors took one look and closed him up.
They gave him three months to live.
In May, he died.
Mac had filed a claim with the VA to have his cancer recognized as a service-related condition, but the claim initially was denied.
Controversy over the long-term effects of Agent Orange on American soldiers had left one more jagged scar from the war. The U.S. government only slowly – and, it seemed to many veterans, reluctantly – acknowledged the health issues connected to about 20 million gallons of the herbicide dumped on Vietnam between 1962 and 1971 to strip away enemy cover.
The conflict festered amid charges by some veterans’ groups that the chemical manufacturers and the government covered up the effects of harmful dioxin, rigged or canceled studies and generally resisted the connection to avoid paying health benefits.
“Mac always said, ‘Never trust the government,”‘ Babette recalls. “They were denying his problems, always saying that it wasn’t true that Agent Orange had affected him. He was extremely suspicious.”
An Episcopal priest in Hawaii who knew the couple referred them to a pathologist, Rex Couch, who did a diagnostic study of Mac’s tumor – and later performed his autopsy.
He checked the cancers officially connected to Agent Orange exposure and noted that, indeed, Mac’s wasn’t on the list. But Couch reviewed hundreds of scientific papers for evidence implicating the chemical defoliant and ultimately found a study that helped sway the appeals board.
Although the VA had listed certain tumors originating in the pancreas and liver among those that qualified as service-related, Mac’s appeared to have started in his gall bladder.
But Couch presented clinical research showing that African-American men were uniquely vulnerable to the effects of Agent Orange, including primary tumors in the gall bladder.
In the summer of 2004 – nine years after Mac’s death – Babette opened the notice of the appeals board decision and realized that she’d won.
The letter vaguely mentioned benefits, but Babette assumed that the point was moot, since she had been a French citizen at the time of Mac’s death and hadn’t been granted American citizenship until 2001.
One thing mattered: “They admitted they killed him,” she says.
Couch felt a keen admiration for Mac’s widow, whose sheer persistence swept him along.
“They would’ve worn down 99 of 100 people,” says Couch, now retired and living near Seattle. “(Mac) was the man of her life. When that was taken away from her, it was a philosophical and emotional thing that she never could have let go of.
“And she didn’t.”
When a check from the government arrived, dated Dec. 15, 2004, she found the timing “mind-boggling.” Before he died, Mac promised that he’d always look out for her.
She had remarried after Mac’s death, but that relationship had broken up. She was on the verge of divorce and wondering where she and the boys would live.
By government calculations, she was entitled to $100,452 in back benefits. Six months later, she used the money as a down payment on half of a modest duplex.
Then, in August, she received another letter, saying she had been overpaid by more than $92,000 and would have to repay the money. Although the original appeals ruling in her favor clearly notes that she’d remarried after Mac’s death, the VA now claimed that her marital status made her ineligible for benefits during her second marriage.
The VA also cut off her monthly benefit of $1,033. Four months later, taking note of her 2005 divorce, the VA reinstated the benefit.
Several weeks ago, after fielding inquiries about the case, the VA finally ruled that Babette doesn’t have to repay the back benefits.
“Veterans have appeal rights, and she was very persistent – and good for her – to use those appeal rights,” says Rebecca Sawyer Smith, public affairs officer for the VA’s regional office in Lakewood. “And that went in her favor. I think she had in her mind how it should end, and she wasn’t going to give up.”
Jon Price of the Disabled American Veterans, an advocate in her case, adds that many in her situation would have been worn down.
“This lady had the guts to keep fighting,” he says. “And when someone wins a case like this, it’s always helpful to other veterans down the road.”
Although she never pursued an Agent Orange ruling with the idea that financial benefits would fall to her, she has come to view them as much-deserved. The money is the only tangible consequence for what she considers deceitful government action during the Vietnam War that eventually took away the love of her life.
“Nobody can go to jail for it,” she says. “Mac can’t come back. But accountability has to materialize, one way or the other.”
Now – finally – Babette says that maybe she can be done with the paper chase.
“I think I can put everything back in the box and put it back in the attic,” she says. “I think it’s resolved, and resolved fairly.”
