Happy Veterans Day!
- Thread starter bigredfish
- Start date
mat200
IPCT Contributor
- Jan 17, 2017
- 17,249
- 29,105
Happy Veterans Day !
USA Merchant Marine are veterans !
( got status in 1988 .. update: see Tony's reply below )
How the US Merchant Marine Saved Hawaii in December 1941 | Veteran's Day 2025 Episode
What's Going on With Shipping?
USA Merchant Marine are veterans !
( got status in 1988 .. update: see Tony's reply below )
How the US Merchant Marine Saved Hawaii in December 1941 | Veteran's Day 2025 Episode
What's Going on With Shipping?
Last edited:
^^^ But not all "USA Merchant Marines" are considered veterans.....
Thanks to all the veterans on this forum. This very serious article came out this past week from the Submariners Advocacy Group. The very nature of being a veteran means we were exposed to a large number of hazards. Submariners are exposed and continuously re-exposed time and time again because they cannot adequately vent the toxins overboard. There are names of fallen shipmates and currently ill shipmates. I recognize two names one that I have worked with very recently. A lot of this forum is American but we have others that may have supported their country and been exposed to similar hazards. I’m not on the list but pray for those that are.
Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat
Ssayer
BIT Beta Team
Heh, my duty had me 8+ hours a day, five days a week, in buildings that used asbestos for insulation. We also used Trichloroethylene as a staple for cleaning electronics in timers and transmitters. I feel pretty lucky at this point considering my age.
I was in Naval Air but attached to an aircraft carrier '70 to '72 in the Tonkin Gulf and the South China Sea in the Vietnam War. Like most ships of that time, asbestos was everywhere, as steam spun the turbines to propel the ship.
Being a carrier, it was afloating fuel farm with avgas for propeller-driven airplanes, JP-4 for the jets and fuel oil (Bunker C) for the ship....the fumes were in the air constantly. My berthing compartment where I slept was atop tanks containing thousands of gallons of all 3.
Vietnam-era aircraft carriers primarily used Aqueous Film-Forming Foam (AFFF) for firefighting, particularly for dangerous liquid fuel fires on the flight deck and in engineering spaces. I took my turns during flight ops dumping the bright red cans (that had a skull and crossbones insignia on it) of the liquid into a fog
I got out in '72 then starting the very next year in '73 I spent the next 31 years in traffic signals and facility maintenance and the neon transformers for the older "WALK/DON'T WALK" signals for pedestrians and the fluorescent lighting ballasts in the facility lighting and most stepdown transformers were filled with PCB's (Polychlorinated biphenyl) oil as a coolant. I've had the smelly, sticky oil smeared up to my elbows for hours as it would leak out when the equipment that contained it overheated.
All of the aforementioned things...asbestos, hydrocarbon-based fuels, Aqueous Film-Forming Foam and PCB's....are known to either be carcenogenic and/or impose other serious health issues after prolonged exposure.
And then I smoked 22 years from '65 to '87 and my colorectal cancer was discovered in Dec. '24. I cannot imagine how I contracted cancer.
</end sarcasm>
After 30 radiation treatments, 8 chemotherapy IV's and about 300 chemotherapy oral pills between Feb. and Aug. of this year ('25), and by God's boundless mercy and grace, all the scans and blood tests look good.
I'm hangin' in there, like a hair in a biscuit.
Last edited:
I just talked to a guy that knew 6 guys on that list. I would go through 5 gallons of trichlo a week. We ripped out the asbestos but still found piles in the crannies after the shipyard certified us as clean. The advantage of a surface ship is that we could turn over so much air an hour that these fumes did not build up in concentration. Another guy here just got a cancerous kidney removed. When the doctor found out he was a submariner the doctor asked how many other cancers he had. With this article, I guess his doctor was not kidding.
