When someone dies, we’re left to mull over the memories and details again and again. So, I guess I was trying to make my dad feel more alive when nine years later, in 2022, I began looking for information about his time in the Navy. That’s when I learned about the PACT Act, and about Blue Water Navy veterans; about health conditions with links to Agent Orange; and birth defects in children of exposed veterans. It was the most surreal thing I have ever experienced.

I texted a Navy SEAL friend, asking how much time my dad would have served on his ship during his whole tour of duty or “were there shifts or something?”

I thought that my dad may have visited his mom for her birthday when the ship docked in Da Nang. Or maybe he’d just been working in San Diego, but was still considered deployed. Then again, he said he was just sunbathing in the South Pacific. Suddenly, everything that had seemed so strange with my dad’s and my health made sense.

In 2020, I moved from Idaho to Montana. Leaving the small town and the tight community I’d lived in for nearly twenty years was difficult. But I needed to be somewhere with more medical resources, so I moved a few hours north to a city in Montana. I had no idea that the U.S. Senator at the helm of the PACT Act, and who chaired the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, was from Montana.

After submitting my forms to the VA, it was time to send another letter. This time I wrote to my Senator, Jon Tester. I submitted a letter through his website, but as the weeks passed, it increasingly felt inadequate.

As I worked to learn more about Agent Orange exposure in veterans, stories kept surfacing about families whose children born before they went to Vietnam were healthy. Meanwhile, too many of those born after were dealing with birth defects and health conditions that no one else in the family had. The despair and hopelessness expressed again and again by those children is heartbreaking.

Earlier in the year, I’d read about a proposed bill sponsored by Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Corey Booker (D-N.J.), and Maggie Haasan (D-N.H.) calling for a commitment to better support Agent Orange “kids” with spina bifida. It seemed miraculous that forty-plus years later, there was still momentum and consideration for a generation of people affected by war.

Children are easy to rally support for when they’re cute and cuddly, but Agent Orange “kids” are firmly set in middle age. Reading post after post by adult children like me, it seems the tactic of “waiting for an army to die” could just as easily be applied to the kids affected by dioxin.

If the door had been opened, even a crack, by the PACT Act to allow legislation to evolve based on the latest and best science, then why shouldn’t a similarly new one apply to the list of birth defects? Instead of just thanking Sen. Tester, I started asking how I could help.