Interview with Zenna Mae (Schmid) Bridges, November 19, 2004

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas Interview with Zenna Mae and Eugene Bridges November 19, 2004 Las Vegas, Nevada Interview Conducted By Mary Palevsky © 2007 by UNLV Libraries Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews conducted by an interviewer/ researcher with an interviewee/ narrator who possesses firsthand knowledge of historically significant events. The goal is to create an archive which adds relevant material to the existing historical record. Oral history recordings and transcripts are primary source material and do not represent the final, verified, or complete narrative of the events under discussion. Rather, oral history is a spoken remembrance or dialogue, reflecting the interviewee’s memories, points of view and personal opinions about events in response to the interviewer’s specific questions. Oral history interviews document each interviewee’s personal engagement with the history in question. They are unique records, reflecting the particular meaning the interviewee draws from her/ his individual life experience. Produced by: The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Departments of History and Sociology University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 89154- 5020 Director and Editor Mary Palevsky Principal Investigators Robert Futrell, Dept. of Sociology Andrew Kirk, Dept. of History The material in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project archive is based upon work supported by the U. S. Dept. of Energy under award number DEFG52- 03NV99203 and the U. S. Dept. of Education under award number P116Z040093. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in these recordings and transcripts are those of project participants— oral history interviewees and/ or oral history interviewers— and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U. S. Department of Energy or the U. S. Department of Education. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Zenna Mae and Eugene Bridges November 19, 2004 Conducted by Mary Palevsky Table of Contents Introduction: Mr. and Mrs. Bridges recall losing their young son, Lonnie, to leukemia. Mrs. Bridges kept a personal journal to record her emotions and memories during the grieving process. 1 Forty years later, Mr. and Mrs. Bridges began to re- examine the circumstances surrounding Lonnie’s death. New research by Dr. Joseph Lyon and others suggested that radioactive fallout from the Nevada Test Site may have played a role in causing cancers and other illnesses among those who lived near the test site. 4 Mr. Bridges began to research the possible health effects of radioactive fallout and whether his son and other Utah residents developed illnesses as a result of exposure to radiation from nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site. 8 Mr. and Mrs. Bridges were frustrated and disappointed by the federal government’s official reaction to the plight of Downwinders. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act [ RECA] of 1990 was inadequate and too narrowly defined to alleviate the suffering of those affected by radioactive fallout. 14 Although atmospheric nuclear testing ceased many years ago, the effects of radioactive fallout are visible and dangerous to this day. 17 Mr. Bridges testified before a meeting of the National Academies of Science to voice his concerns over the exposure of civilians to radioactive fallout from military tests at the Nevada Test Site and the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. 19 Frustrated with the lethargic response from Congress and other government officials, Mr. Bridges wrote a letter to the president to urge more attention to the needs of Downwinders. 25 In 2002, Downwinders met with government officials in St. George, Utah to discuss the government’s compensation program for those exposed to radioactive fallout. Mrs. Bridges describes the meeting as tense and antagonistic as many Downwinders felt that the government was unsympathetic to their needs. 28 Mr. Bridges passionately studied the effects of radioactive fallout on civilian populations living near the Nevada Test Site. His research led to conclusions that frequently differed from the official statements made by the federal government. 31 Conclusion: Mr. Bridges discusses how his research has been part of the process of grieving for the death of his son, Lonnie. 35 UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 1 Interview with Zenna Mae and Eugene Bridges November 19, 2004 in Las Vegas, NV Conducted by Mary Palevsky [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 3, Disc 1. Mary Palevsky: Well, Zenna and Eugene, thank you for agreeing to talk to me again. I appreciate the first interview that you gave us, and I thought to start, maybe you could go back a little bit to the time at which you lost your son Lonnie in Salt Lake [ City, Utah]. And Zenna, you had talked about a journal that a doctor had suggested you keep at that time, and maybe we could start by having you go over that again. Zenna Bridges: OK. I had read an article in the Reader’s Digest very similar to what we were going through, and I cried a great deal. And I told the doctor about the article and he said, It’s a very good idea. You should keep a journal. You should write down the events. And so I didn’t do it right to begin with, but I had kept a very good idea of the things that occurred, and did write down a few notes. But after Lon had been gone for about a month, I just came to the great realization that I couldn���t remember a lot of things that I wanted to remember. I could remember the things he had done and that we had done with him and things he liked and his toys and the TV shows— and then I realized I would never remember his voice because we didn’t record voices much at that time. So I started to write down his illness in the hospital, all the details that I could remember, and it was very, very clear with me at that point in time that I wanted to quit going through it daily and nightly, all these different events. And once you put it on paper, you do not have to keep remembering. And so that is what I did. And I kept it in a little black loose- leaf folder. And Gene never looked at it. He didn’t want to look at it. All of our children except maybe one read it— and some of our in- laws’s children as the years went by— and there were some that said, You really should send this in to Reader’s UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 2 Digest. You should do something with it. But having recorded it and it was down, then I could— it helped me in the grieving process, and I could not just think about it all the time. But I wrote down all the things that he did. And I was amazed at the number of things. Eventually when Gene did look at it he said, You know, I’d just forgotten a lot of those things. But you don’t forget them if you write them down early on and keep them. OK, thank you. [ 00: 03: 19] End Track 3, Disc 1. [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 4, Disc 1. [ 00: 01: 22] End Track 4, Disc 1. [ 00: 00: 00] Begin Track 5, Disc 1. So Eugene, from what Zenna just said, it took a while for you to be able to look at that journal. I guess my first question would actually be, did you consciously not look at it at the time? Eugene: Yes, I did not consciously look at it. I suppose it’s some of the difference between personalities or between men and women. For Zenna, her way of approaching the death of our son was to write about it, get it down on paper. For me, I had to shelve it. I had to literally put it out of my mind because I had to concentrate on my work. And shortly thereafter I started into my master’s program and there was school, there was family— and so I had to shelve it essentially. And I did that, I guess, literally for about forty years. And then I was able to address it on one Christmas Day. Tell me about that. What happened that made that change occur? Eugene: Well, our oldest daughter Julia, who had been very close to Lon, she borrowed Zenna’s notes and material that she had written. And her husband had written this up very beautifully and put it in a very beautiful binder for Christmas for her, and they brought it over to UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 3 show us on Christmas Day. We had the tradition of gathering the family together on Christmas Day for brunch and sharing what everybody got for Christmas. It was a time that after people had looked at the book and some of them had read parts of it, well, I started looking at it and I just decided that that was the time that I needed to go through it and reacquaint myself with the details, which I did for three or four hours to get through it. Zenna: Cried the whole time. Eugene: But I decided that I probably ought to record my thoughts about the event, which I did over the next few days. And [ with] my fastidiousness or whatever you would want to call it, I detected that there were a few areas that could stand to be edited a little bit, and— Zenna: Can you believe that? Eugene: — asked Zenna and our daughter if that would be all right to do that, and they consented to that. I didn’t alter any of the material facts. It just was for the sake of the good old English language. But that was at Christmas 1996. So that’s forty- one years after—? Eugene: He died in 1956. Fifty- six. Forty years exactly. Eugene: Forty years exactly. And as I recall, he died over Christmastime. Yes. Eugene: On the twenty- eighth of December. Zenna: Twenty- ninth. Eugene: Twenty- ninth. I’m sorry. Twenty- ninth. Anyway, at the time of his death— and this is going a little bit beyond your question— but at the time of his death, the autopsy that was done showed that in just less than a month he was all full of cancer again and all of his organs UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 4 had [ 00: 05: 00] disintegrated. The doctors said they had never seen anything like this. And as far as the diagnosis of what was happening to him or what diseases he had, it was lymphosarcoma, and that was a pretty sizeable growth which they removed from his bowel. Zenna: That is an adult disease. Eugene: And then he also had acute myologenous leukemia. And that just kind of stayed in the back of my mind and kind of came forward again after all those years. Another thing that had happened was in 1977 the office of Dr. Joseph Lyon at the University of Utah called to get approval to use Lon in a study they were doing on the relationship of the nuclear fallout from Nevada and leukemia in children in the state of Utah. They did a pretty comprehensive study. They divided it into southern Utah and northern Utah and provided statistics. And later when I started researching, I was able to get a copy of that study and did some numerical analysis of it. And it was, quite frankly, very revealing. There had been studies done previously in the early 1960s but those studies had been pretty well squelched— by AEC [ Atomic Energy Commission] people primarily but some political people, too— and did not get disseminated to the public. Dr. Lyon’s study, in a sense it was kind of forced upon the AEC and became a little more public, but still we had no idea what came out of the study. It wasn’t until 1997, ’ 98 when I got a copy of the study that I really found out what it—. So it was twenty years until you saw the study. Eugene: Yes. And that was only because I went after it. We’ll get it there on the time line, but when you say it was “ forced upon” the government, what do you mean by that? Eugene: Well, the government at that point was not in a position where they could squelch it and just make it disappear like they did the earlier studies. The earlier studies, they just UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 5 disappeared for a long period of time because they had not come up with what the government wanted, and you had a gentleman by the name of Gordon Dunning, who was called the protector of the Nevada Test Site, and he more than anyone would not let anything interfere or threaten in any way the continuation of the tests in Nevada. There were others involved, too, but he was the prime person. So you get the call from Dr. Lyon and this helps you or makes you begin to think or? Explain that to me. Eugene: Well, it did start us wondering if there was possibly a connection. Now we skip from there down to 1997. Our daughter Julia was taking a university class and the assignment was related to the Nevada fallout. After she had completed this assignment, she came to us. There were a lot of questions that she had about Lonnie and some about us. But she asked us, she said, Did you know that there’s a very good possibility that Lonnie’s [ 00: 10: 00] illnesses are attributable to the fallout? And we said, Well, yes, we are aware that there could be a possible link, but we had never heard, been advised, nor read anything that indicated that. The newspapers periodically would come out with some question as to the safety of the fallout, but there was always a countermand, if you will, of somebody from the AEC or the government saying Well, it’s not of enough quantity or enough intensity that it’s dangerous to people. Subsequently, though, we found that simply was not true. Now Zenna, Julia comes to you, and Julia’s the daughter that was close to Lonnie, right? Zenna: Yes. How many years younger was she? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 6 Zenna: Well, she was just thirteen months younger, and they were just like twins. When we brought Julia home from the hospital, he just hovered over her constantly. He always had his arm around her or holding her hand, and he didn’t really like to play a lot with other children. He just loved Julia. And so when Julia came to us she says, You know, Mom and Dad, I didn’t just lose Lon. I lost you and Dad. And this was a great shock to us because we had not felt that way, but we found that if we told our children that everything was OK with Lon— that he was back in heaven with Heavenly Father and we would see him again some day and that we didn’t need to cry a lot— then if we did cry they would say Well, you don’t need to cry, everything’s OK, he’ll be fine. So we quit hugging them and kissing them and holding them because if we did, we’d cry. And we felt the only way we could deal with this was to just kind of set it all aside. And it was very interesting because I’m sure we didn’t do that with the next three children that came. We were able to hug and hold. But the three that were left after he went, we were not able to do that. And we didn’t know that it was causing a great deal of trouble, but it does. And there was nobody in those days to help you go through a grieving process. We thought you just quit crying, shape up, and move on with your life. But we neglected the very important part of letting these other children know how much we loved them. We did everything that we could for them. We were good parents, I think. Their father was always great with them. But it’s just that intimate part that we just pulled away from, and it was very painful to them, and especially to Julia. And so then she asked if she could go through his things. And we had a box of his things that we had put away, and so she went through them. She went through them for three days and laughed and cried, and it helped her a great deal. And we tried to help her understand that we had not loved them less. We just didn’t have the skills to be the kind of parents that they needed. We realized that Eugene’s mother’s mother lost six out of eleven UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 7 children by the time they were between one and two years of age. And her mother could never show love to her other children. We should have learned from that. But she just could not show love. I mean you can not bury that many children and not be afraid that you’re going to love something and lose it again. So we had a lot to learn and we always tried hard to be good parents. We did things with our children nearly every Saturday for part of the day, and we were the kind [ 00: 15: 00] of people that had breakfast and dinner together, and we visited and talked a lot. And I think that Julia really felt his loss so much that I wish we could have done better. When you say “ his things,” what kinds of things were in this box that Julia was looking through? Zenna: Well, he had a little yellow horse that his father had bought him when he was born. He had all of the letters from people that wrote to him when he was ill. He had the top of the cake of his seventh birthday that he spent in the hospital. And then he came home that night, and then he died just a few days later. He had gone back to the hospital. We had, did I say the shirt? No. Zenna: OK, he had a beautiful yellow cowboy shirt that he loved so much. And it was a little big for him and so we didn’t let him wear it really often, but he loved that yellow cowboy shirt. We had little pictures that he had done with the, oh, the iron point. What do you call it? Eugene: Well, these were pictures that you’d have a hot- pointed tool and you’d draw pictures by burning it onto a piece of plywood or something like that. Yes. I know what you’re saying now. Yes. Zenna: He had his little doll that he had always loved. He had one little doll that he liked. And it’s just in a box about this big [ indicating size] and holds pictures of things that the school sent to him and a few— when he wrote his name the first time and, you know, just a few of those UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 8 treasures. And she just went through them, and we also did, then, too, and it was helpful to us, I guess if crying is helpful it was helpful. Yes. So then Julia is saying from the class that there might be some connection. Does this then spur you to research that more? Explain a little bit to me how that progressed. Eugene: Well, that brought back the recollection of our suspicions at the time the Lyon study was commenced. At that same time, the National Cancer Institute came out with a report, a little bit unwillingly but the— well, the existence of the report was leaked and the Downwinder organization— which we didn’t belong to and we still don’t— but it picked up the laboring oar to get a copy of that report. And so finally the National Cancer Institute did publish a report, and we requested a copy of it and received a summarized version of the report. It indicated unequivocally that there was heavy fallout that had come over Salt Lake. And the thing that it did— it was relating it to the one radionuclide, iodine 131 [ I131], which was a very dangerous radionuclide, particularly as it related to children because it has the propensity of settling in the thyroid. With children, for some reason, they are much more susceptible to this concentration. And you could take an exposure that was a relatively small external exposure, but by the time it [ 00: 20: 00] gets concentrated in the thyroid, then it’s at a very dangerous level. There are other ramifications going through the food chain as it relates to that one in particular. But at any rate, when we got a copy of that, then that convinced me that there was dangerous fallout that came over Salt Lake, in spite of everything that had been said previously, and I just decided that why keep wondering about this? Let’s do something about it and start researching and see what we can find out. Well, it was a much more comprehensive project, a much larger project than what I had ever contemplated. And quite honestly, to begin with, I didn’t want to get involved in what I knew had to be done. I really didn’t. And I had read in a UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 9 couple of the books that Julia had used as a reference for her class work, which was very upsetting to me, quite frankly. Zenna: How upsetting? Eugene: Well— Which book did you read first, do you remember? Eugene: It was [ John Grant] Fuller’s book which basically covered the death of about 4,200 head of sheep in southern Utah [ The Day We Bombed Utah: America’s Most Lethal Secret ( New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984)]. Initially the ranchers and the local veterinarians and two government veterinarians had concluded that these sheep deaths and the aborted births— and they’re not only aborted births but grotesque embryos that were evident— they had come through an area on the drive back from the winter range, or summer range I guess it was, they’d come through an area that had been heavily inundated with fallout from shot Nancy. The result was these deaths and that’s what all of these people concluded. Well, the government was not willing to accept that, so they pulled the two government vets. They sent out another team, and these people, quite frankly, the absolute arrogance and manner in which they treated these sheep ranchers was unconscionable, in my estimation. There’s even some indication there was one rancher that, after an encounter with those people— because what they did, they said There’s no radiation that had contributed to the deaths of these sheep. It was malnutrition. And, you know, they’re talking to ranchers that have been in the business all of their life, and their fathers before them, and they’re trying to shove this kind of story down their throats. But one rancher, after his encounter with them, went home and proceeded to have a heart attack and die. It was that severe. UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 10 So it was very disturbing to read how calloused the government was, how focused they were on national security. And then you have to say “ national security” for whom, is it for everybody or just for certain people? Anyway, after reading those books, and I guess there were about three or four books that I went through and read, and the one, Fuller’s book, dealt with the sheep people. Zenna: Carole Gallagher. Eugene: Carole Gallagher had spent seven years interviewing people throughout the area. [ 00: 25: 00] She did an absolutely excellent treatise on what happened to those people [ American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War ( New York: Random House, 1994)]. As I looked through that book, there were two people that I personally knew. I knew they were having health problems but I didn’t know what the nature of it was. Were these people also in Salt Lake or—? Eugene: Yes. Actually, the one fellow, he had been with a group of other fellows that had gone hunting, and they were up north of Logan in the Cache Valley area when a fallout cloud came over as they were eating lunch. And it had the effect eventually of— well, he lost most of his tongue, lost a lot of his mouth, gums, because it settled in his teeth. And it ultimately killed him, but a very tortuous type of death, which most radiation death is. It was with our son. It was very tortuous. Anyway, that kind of helped me to make the decision to research it, and it became something that I couldn’t let go of. Zenna: He would get up at two or three in the morning, or four, day after day after day because he was so— he had to do it. He just had to do it. Eugene: Does that provide a little background on it? UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 11 It does. It does. Let me go back to something you said because I just think it’s such an interesting human question. You said you didn’t want to do it but you had to do it. So was there a moment where you said, I know I have to do it, that you remember where you crossed that line, or was it gradual? Eugene: There’s probably two aspects of that, Mary. After reading these first two books, the first on the sheep deaths and the other on primarily the Allen trial [ Irene Allen et al. v. United States, 1979]; I don’t remember the name of the authors on those and I should. [ The Day We Bombed Utah: America’s Most Lethal Secret by John G. Fuller and An American Nuclear Tragedy by Philip L. Fradkin] We have that. Eugene: Anyway, after reading those, I wrote up about a dozen pages of material that was livid reactionary material. I was coming off the wall, quite frankly. And we had gone back to visit a daughter in Florida, and the more I looked at that, the more I realized that that was venting emotions, that it was useless as far as doing anything constructive or being anything constructive. So that kind of got me onto the right track of dealing with facts— and verifiable facts, not just anything— because throughout the history of this whole thing, well, there had been a lot of facts and a lot of surmises and that kind of approach, which doesn’t really give you anything concrete. So at that point, I decided well, if I’m going to write about it, then I’d better do it right. And so there was a decision to try to do something, but it was a difficult thing just simply because I was starting from square one, and I didn’t know all that much about it. I’ve always [ 00: 30: 00] been interested in science. In fact, in high school I had thought that’s what I would go into was chemistry, but it didn’t work out that way. Anyway, I had always stayed in touch with science to some extent, and still do. But I knew that I had to have concrete things, and so I UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 12 started searching. And it seemed like an insurmountable mountain to climb, quite frankly, but I persisted with it. It seemed like I’d find a little bit of something here and a little bit of something there, and I found a few more books that had information about various aspects of the fallout, and news articles, and then there were some news people that had done some special reporting on all of this. And so over the years, bit by bit and piece by piece, there were a lot of things from a lot of different sources, and eventually I was able to start building or bringing this together. And the more I did it, the more I felt compelled to do it. I don’t know whether we shared with you before, I don’t think we did, but I’d pretty well got everything together, we had done a lot of proofing— in fact, I bet we’ve proofed that book one hundred times or more— but it was in 2002 in Idaho. I had finished doing some indexing on the book. For all practical purposes, it was done, if you ever get a book done. I don’t know that you do. That night I had a dream, and the dream was how to reorganize that book and what the chapters ought to be. And when I got up the next morning, it was still with me just as clear as clear. I wrote it down and I looked at the book because you question yourself. As I looked at it, I realized that it was absolutely the way it needed to be. So I spent another year revising the book and finally got it completed for the second time in 2003 [ The Forgotten Patriots: The Abuse of Power During the Cold War, Unpublished]. And you know, I don’t know what it is that causes you to have feelings or dreams or impressions, but the book, the research part of it, was a compulsion. I was compelled to do it. Zenna: It needed to be done and it was divine intervention. Because the book needed to be written, whether anything ever happens, because it needs to be written. Eugene: And we have found that with people that we’ve talked with who have been involved with the testing program and even people that have not been involved with the testing UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 13 program, you run into a number of different reactions. It’s somewhat like what you were saying with some of the people we have encountered that they’ve been involved with the program. It’s like we talked with a fellow that was the meteorologist that was involved with determining when [ 00: 35: 00] atmospheric conditions were all right for detonations, and he wanted to know why we were— this was out at the Bechtel, is it? Out at the library that they have out north here. Have you been to that? Yes. That’s moved now. It used to be out in North Las Vegas. Eugene: Yes, it’s off of Losee Road. Right. Off Losee Road. Right. Yes, I’ve been to where it is now. Eugene: Anyway, he was very irate that we would even think that there was any problem from the fallout. He said, I was involved with that directly. I know that there was nothing that was dangerous with that. And that’s fine. You met him at the library? Eugene: At the library. He was a volunteer there. And we have met with our political representatives, it’s been a very offish relationship. “ Offish”? Eugene: Yes. The first encounter I had was when they were having the ��� 79 hearings in Salt Lake. I went over and I was able to talk with Senator [ Orrin] Hatch, and he informed me very curtly that the hearing was not for anybody in Salt Lake. It was for the southern Utah area, which— so be it. This was the hearing on the downwind phenomenon and its impacts? Eugene: Well, it was from those hearings that he and Senator [ Edward] Kennedy were able to put together legislation, and ultimately it came out under Senator Hatch and became the UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 14 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act [ RECA] of 1990. It went from ’ 79 to ’ 90 before anything was enacted. And I don’t know how familiar you are with that. The downside of that was that it covered people that had lived or worked in the area up to a two- hundred- mile radius from the test site, and then it covered a very limited number of types of cancer and leukemia. If you were one inch over two hundred miles, you were out. If you didn’t have exactly the type of cancer or leukemia that was stated, you were out. So in the book I’ve called it— all it was, was a damage control measure. It wasn’t really to provide any great amount of benefit to anybody. There were a few people that received benefits from it, but very few people. And you had to have a lot of medical backup on your claims, and that doesn’t sound too bad to begin with. It sounds very logical, but when you consider that a lot of these people died in the early- to- mid- fifties, and here we are down to 1990, in that period of time medical records can get lost and destroyed. And so it was almost a no- win situation for people that were victims of the fallout. In a little while, I want to get into the more of the detail of some of the research that you did that goes into the book, but I wanted to ask you, Zenna— I’m going back a little bit here now— you’re revisiting the journals and Lonnie’s death and what you described about Julia in the [ 00: 40: 00] nineties, and then Julia comes with the class, and Eugene. Why don’t you talk a little bit about what happened when Eugene read those books, from what you were seeing, and then I just want you to tell me a little bit about your observing this pretty— from where I’m sitting— a real shift, sort of a major turning point, in both your lives, but in Eugene’s decision to really pursue this, what’s your perspective on these things as this is going forward? Zenna: Eugene was very angry when he first started reading those books, and he threw one of them across the room. He didn’t hit me or anything, but he— he wasn’t trying to. He was so angry to think this was happening. And as we gathered more books and he read more and he UNLV Nevada Test Site Oral History Project 15 made the decision to write down his feelings that he was having concerning the books— not as memoirs but his feelings concerning these books— he became very, very absorbed. And I think for, I say five years but maybe it was three or four years, as I said, he slept very little during that period of time. He became ill quite a number of times, and we just felt like that the anger that he had—. Eugene: Let me interject one thing here. I was angry, but the reason I was angry was these books documented from AEC records the absolute outright lying and misrepresentation that government people foisted upon the public. First of all, in order to get the test site here in the United States, they were told things that were so untrue. And then after they started the testing, how they just hid— anything that was adverse to the testing, they killed it. And here you had people that were suffering— and I mean really suffering— from all the effects of this radiation, and they were being totally ignored and lied to. And that was— it still angers me. Sorry. Zenna: No, that’s fine. But I think that the family,