Dying of cancer from Agent Orange, Prior Lake Vietnam vet reflects on service

The plane was silent when Prior Lake resident Dexter Sidney returned home from the Vietnam War.

A commercial plane had been contracted to take about 12 soldiers back to the United States, flying from Japan to San Francisco — about a 14-hour flight. Each soldier had an aisle to themselves.

“I never talked to anybody nor did anybody talk to anybody else,” Sidney said. “Everybody was by themselves trying to decompress in their own way and figure out what lay ahead. ... I didn’t feel like eating. I just sat there and I looked out the window.”

When he returned, Sidney threw himself into civilian life. He went to college, got married and had children. He became a state director for the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.

More than 50 years after the fact, Sidney will die as a result of his service in the Vietnam War — doctors with the Minneapolis VA Health Care System told him in February that he had six months or less to live.

The Vietnam War

Sidney joined the United States Marine Corps in 1961 after graduating from Dowling Catholic High School in Des Moines, Iowa. His father died when he was 15 years old and though he dreamed of going to the University of Notre Dame, there wasn’t enough money to attend.

He went through boot camp in San Diego before heading overseas to Okinawa Island, a Japanese island, and then back to the United States at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California. In 1965, Sidney had served four years and was due to be discharged.

But the rest of his unit was heading to Vietnam.

“It kind of bothered me they were going off to war and I was going off to the good life,” Sidney said. “I probably did kind of a stupid thing — I re-enlisted.”

The Vietnam War began in November 1955 and lasted until April 1975. The United States and members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization fought on the side of the Republic of South Vietnam against the communist forces of the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army were trying to unify North Vietnam and South Vietnam under a communist party.

In August 1965, Sidney boarded the U.S.S. Bayfield, from which he would become one of 5,500 Marines to take part in Operation Starlite, the first battle of the war fought only by Americans.

“None of us had ever seen war before and all of a sudden you land, and next thing you know, the ferociousness of bullets and whatnot,” Sidney said. “The ‘fog of war’ is really not knowing what’s going on a mile away from you. You really don’t know. You’re in your area, dealing with what you’re dealing with, whatever that might be.”

For six days, Marines fought the Viet Cong near Chu Lai, Vietnam with coordinated ground, air and naval units. Sidney was on the ground.

About 10 days after he landed in Chu Lai, Vietnam, Sidney was ambushed and shot in the stomach near the right hip after a night guarding an airstrip perimeter. He earned a Purple Heart. In 1966, he was discharged.

“After maybe the first week of planning and whatnot, really what you’re doing is waiting to see what each new day brings,” Sidney said. “That was certainly the case with us. We didn’t really know what each new day was going to bring us.”

The United States was in the war, but no one had told the soldiers why. At night, the Marines would sit around and speculate why they were fighting. Popular theories included that gold and oil lay in the dirt of Vietnam.

“Even then as we talked, we weren’t really sure why we were there,” Sidney said. “I knew why I was there — my unit was there. Others were there because they were still stuck, they still had time on their enlistment. Others got drafted. To a man, none of us knew why we were there.”

American troops left by March 1973. In 1975, North Vietnam captured the capital of South Vietnam, Saigon. In July 1976, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was formed. Around 300,000 South Vietnamese people were sent to re-education camps where they often were tortured, starved and forced to do hard labor.

“It ended so quickly,” Sidney said. “All the lives that were given up were for that real estate, only to have it go back over into the hands of the communists. Then, for the poor Vietnamese that were left behind, they had to live under that reign of terror afterward.”

Sidney’s wife, Karen, said the couple get teary-eyed when they see clips of children getting surprised by their active-duty parents, or clips where crowds welcome soldiers home.

“For Vietnam, there was nobody there,” Karen said. “It just wasn’t like that. It wasn’t an accepted war.”

In 1991, Sidney was on a flight to Minnesota from Washington D.C. that had soldiers returning from the Gulf War. When the plane landed, the pilot asked the passengers to acknowledge the soldiers and a crowd of families and friends had lined up outside with balloons and confetti to greet the soldiers.

“I walked down the ramp and got my bag and walked out to the parking ramp and I was fighting back the tears,” Sidney said. “I didn’t cry, but I was fighting them back. I just kept saying to myself, ‘Where was my balloon?’”

Coming home

Though Sidney came home, tens of thousands didn’t. More than 58,300 were recorded as killed in action. When he was abroad, he bunked with a man named Otha Thompson, who became one of his best friends.

“We were together for almost three years and he was killed over there,” Sidney said. “That was hard, when you start losing guys you’d been really close with and Otha was that for me. He was so smart, so, so smart and he was a gifted, gifted athlete. That was a hard one.”

When Sidney returned from the war, he met up with a high school friend named Ron Sweet. Sweet told Sidney he was joining the Marines, but Sidney told him not to, and to join the Air Force instead. Sweet, who had a mechanical engineering degree, joined the Marines and was charged with clearing land mines. Within a week of being overseas, Sweet was killed by a land mine.

“We still see his mom,” Sidney said. “She would ask, ‘Did Ron die in vain?’ It’s kind of hard for me to come up with an answer for that one. I always tried to reassure her, but it was hard.”

The Vietnam War was highly contentious. Protests and anti-war marches were held throughout the United States during the length of the conflict (the United States has not officially declared war since World War II).

For the first four days of his first college class, the professor would take roll and ask Sidney how many women and children he had killed in the war.

“He and I had a friendly talk after the fourth day and set things clear and he never did that again,” Sidney said.

Agent Orange

Between 1962 and 1971, the United States sprayed about 20,000,000 gallons of herbicides and defoliants chemicals in Vietnam, eastern Laos and Cambodia to destroy crops and clear the jungles that made combat difficult.

The majority of the chemicals used was Agent Orange, which contained dioxin. Dioxin was classified as a carcinogen for humans in 1997 by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. The chemical was later linked to increased rates of cancer as well as nerve, digestive, skin and respiratory disorders.

Any veterans who served in the Vietnam War between January 1962 and May 1975 are presumed to have been exposed, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs website.

Sidney is one of those veterans.

“I knew they were spraying stuff,” Sidney said. “Everything was so new. Napalm was dangerous. The other stuff was kind of like Roundup, Weed-B-Gon. Nobody gave any thought to it.”

Sidney was routinely checked to see if he was developing cancer or other diseases due to Agent Orange exposure. In 2015, when he was 72 years old, doctors told him that they found cancer in his lungs.

“He had no symptoms or anything at that time,” Karen said. “Without that study, who knows what might have been.”

Sidney underwent surgery to remove a portion of his left lung as well as chemotherapy. Karen said Sidney decided at the time that if the cancer came back, he would not go through chemotherapy again as it was too difficult.

“That kind of reopened some things in my dark days (lying) there in bed after surgery, making me question not why I went into the Marines but why did I volunteer to go to Vietnam,” Sidney said. “I questioned that. But the thing is, I knew what I was doing. That’s the reality of it. It’s not like somebody talked me into it ... I talked myself into it.”

Then, the cancer came back.

In February, he was told he had six months or less left to live and he was placed in in-home hospice care.

“It is what is is,” Sidney said. “I just put it in the good Lord’s hands and deal with it as it comes. (Karen has) just been incredible, she really has been. She’s been my soulmate. I’m so blessed, I really am.”

Since his diagnosis, Sidney said he’s worked through his time in the Vietnam War, through groups and through his newfound friendship with fellow Vietnam War veteran Floyd Nagler, who also enlisted in the Marines after he graduated high school.

“I worked for the VA for 35 years and Dex is a prime example of 95 percent of the Marines that returned back to the United States and blended back into society and managed to produce incredibly productive lives,” Nagler said. “They were pretty much coming to grips with what they had witnessed in Vietnam, but using that re-entry into the civilian world to occupy their time so they didn’t have to think so much about that.”

Nagler said he often saw veterans use this method then deal with episodes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder later on in life when they retired and no longer had the diversions.

“The rubber bands they had wrapped all that information in had kind of frayed and come apart,” Nagler said.

He also saw a number of veterans who had come down with Agent Orange-related illness and said some were angry they would eventually be a casualty of a war to keep the communists out of South Vietnam when communists took over, anyway.

At the time, however, the reason for the war didn’t matter to most soldiers, Nagler said. They just wanted to take care of the people around them.

“It was never a concern of where you are or what you’re doing, it was trying to make sure you’re saving the guys around you,” he said. “The big thing was always protecting the people around us.”

Nagler and Sidney met a few times through bumping into each other at the VA and became fast friends.

“Vietnam veterans in particular, because of the hardships they experienced, tend to congregate and talk,” Nagler said. “The phrase that is always used ... is there’s a handshake and you always say ‘welcome home’ to try and fill in for the loss of what you didn’t have at the time.”

The pair have gone to Marine and Vietnam veteran groups together and they often get together to play cards, though they usually don’t end up playing cards.

“We start talking and two to three hours later, we still are talking,” Nagler said.

Before he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Sidney and Karen went to the Fort Snelling National Cemetery to inquire about being buried there. At one point, Sidney said he saw a worker there and rolled down his window to talk to him.

“I said ‘we’re apartment hunting’ and he about died,” Sidney said. “He started laughing.”

Sidney will be cremated and buried at the cemetery. Nagler and other friends from the Marine Corps League will attend the ceremony in dress blues.

“Dexter and I have this very quick, short-term relationship which we have maximized because we know the time is short,” Nagler said. “We have managed to get in an awful lot. It’s been a really neat, meaningful relationship. Had I known him in the Marines, he’d probably have been my bunkmate.”

Sidney said Nagler has been “wonderful.”

“God puts people in your life that you least expect and I think that was the case with Floyd and me,” Sidney said. “I really believe that. The good Lord put him in my life because he’s been so wonderful and it’s good to be around him. That’s very helpful to me. We understand each other. We know where we’re both coming from.”

Once he learned traveling was not recommended due to his need for oxygen tanks, friends from all over have come to visit Sidney before he dies, Karen said.

“We’ve had a really wonderful time just having them come here since we can’t do too much traveling,” Karen said. “Laughter is a wonderful medicine and we sit around and laugh a lot, and it’s good for both of us.”

Sidney said he is putting his faith in God.

“If there’s a heaven up there, I hope I make it,” he said. “If not, I tried. That’s about it. The most important thing is how you live here. I’m not going to worry and fret about heaven. I once said that I didn’t really think I needed to worry and wonder about heaven — after I got married to (Karen), she was the closest thing to heaven I’d ever need.”