Marine’s Widow Vows to Fight On Against Nuclear Tests

While Pat Broudy of Laguna Niguel was in Washington two weeks ago lobbying U.S. congressmen and senators for passage of a bill to compensate military radiation victims, she made her first visit to the Vietnam War Memorial.

Workers were carving some new names in the stone, and Broudy watched transfixed while individuals and whole families came, paid silent tribute for a few minutes and left.

“It was an overpowering experience,” Broudy says, “and I kept wondering over and over if we would ever stop this madness.”

Pat Broudy is convinced that her husband, Marine Corps Maj. Charles Broudy, who died of lymphona in 1977 after exposure to nuclear tests in the Nevada desert, is as surely a military casualty as any of the names on the Vietnam Memorial. And she has spent the last decade trying to prove it--and to make sure it won’t happen to anyone else.

On the surface, it appears to be a pretty uneven fight. In one corner, at 5 feet and 100 pounds (while holding a stack of legal depositions), is Pat Broudy, outraged widow. In the other corner are the Veterans Administration and the Marine Corps. But so far, Broudy insists she’s ahead on points.

“I started with nothing 10 years ago,” she says, sitting in the living room of her spacious home in a gated community, “and now we have legislation working with a good chance of passing that would compensate both victims and survivors. And we’ve won some landmark lawsuits, too.”

Charles Broudy was a career Marine pilot who flew combat in the South Pacific and was sent to radiological defense school in San Francisco after World War II. That’s where Pat met him. They courted for a year and married in January, 1949. By that time, he had already been exposed to the target vessels towed back from the Pacific nuclear tests.

Ten years later, Maj. Broudy was assigned to the Marine Corps command staff at the Nevada nuclear testing site. According to Pat Broudy, he was less than three miles from Ground Zero when the largest atomic test ever detonated in the United States was set off.

Shortly thereafter, Maj. Broudy spent two hours inspecting vehicles and other installations within 400 yards of the blast site. Pat Broudy considers it more than coincidence that many members of two movie companies--including Dick Powell, Susan Hayward and John Wayne--filming in the same area many months later died of cancer.

Maj. Broudy retired from the Marines in 1960, got a degree in business administration, joined an aerospace firm, did some moonlighting as a commercial pilot, then bought a bicycle shop in Huntington Beach, which he and his wife operated together.

In 1976, he began feeling ill and, later that year, his ailment was diagnosed as cancer of the lymph glands. He died a year later, but several months before his death, he saw a TV interview with another veteran who was dying of leukemia and blaming radiation exposure. That victim urged fellow veterans similarly exposed to file a claim with the Veterans Administration. That’s what started the chain of events that have occupied much of Broudy’s life since her husband’s death.

Although she continued to operate the bicycle shop with her teen-age son and work as a legal secretary, Broudy spent every spare moment researching radiation exposure. She convinced herself--and since then a lot of influential people--that her husband was a victim of radiation. Each time she compiled new evidence, she would file a claim with the VA.

Each time, it was rejected.

Then she met attorney Ron Bakal, who had argued the case for the natives who said their homes were contaminated by the nuclear testing in the South Pacific. That lawsuit was rejected, but Bakal got a compensation law through Congress. She called him for help, and he has represented her ever since.

“I was consumed with anger,” she says today. “My government had done this to my husband. We couldn’t even get his records. The VA said they were burned in a fire. I wanted desperately to vindicate my husband’s death and stop the testing so other people wouldn’t get hurt.”

Some of the ways she set about doing it turned out to be counter-productive. When she got license plates that said NO NUKES, “people tried to run me off the freeway. They’d pass me and give me the finger and scream obscenities. One day when my son went out to my car to get something, he found a note under the windshield so awful he wouldn’t even show it to me. That’s when he took my plates and exchanged them.”

But most of her efforts have been considerably more successful, despite overwhelming odds. When Broudy filed her first wrongful death suit against the VA in 1978, she was bucking two previously sacrosanct legal cornerstones: the 1950 Feres Doctrine establishing sovereign immunity for the government, and a Civil War law that prevents veterans from paying an attorney more than $10 if they want legal help regarding VA decisions.

The original suit was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Laughlin E. Waters on the ground of sovereign immunity. Broudy appealed and won the right to proceed.

“It was a landmark decision,” she says, “the first time a citizen successfully challenged sovereign immunity.”

It was also a pyrrhic victory because the suit was dismissed a second time by the same judge. An appeal was again successful, but in November, 1985, Judge Waters threw out the suit again.

This time, the appeal failed. On June 22, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supported Judge Waters’ decision that survivors of government employees who developed cancer after exposure to radiation from atmospheric nuclear testing cannot sue the government or its contractors for damage.

“What that means,” Broudy says, “is that the government can get away with murder if they can justify it as being in the best interests of the country.”

Broudy and her attorney plan to take the last legal recourse available: an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, all this legal maneuvering has established some important precedents:

- Federal attorneys have admitted in court that the government knew since the 1940s the dangers of radiation from testing but felt it was worth the sacrifice of a few men for the good of the country.

- The National Assn. of Radiation Survivors (NARS)--of which Broudy is an official--took the VA to court to get rid of the $10 limit on legal help for veterans. A decision is expected by the first of next year.

- Three bills are awaiting action in Congress that would provide compensation for atomic victims or their survivors.

“We paid the radiation victims in Japan,” she says. “We paid the Pacific natives for their injuries and the contamination of their land. We paid people who were injured at Three Mile Island. But we have consistently refused to compensate our veterans--the people who gave their lives for our country.”

Changing these priorities has become Broudy’s major mission in life. She sold the bicycle store in 1983, and much of her time since then has been devoted to her activities with NARS. What helps keep her in balance, she says, are her four children and seven grandchildren. Three of her children live nearby, and the fourth visits often from Las Vegas.

She stresses that what she’s doing “is a matter of principle with me,” that she doesn’t stand to gain financially because her husband took out a military annuity while he was still alive, so “I can’t double-dip.”

But the principle drives her very hard. “I feel strongly about testing. It should be stopped because I know what it does to people.”

Is she concerned about the possible genetic effects on her children or grandchildren?

“Of course I am. They all seem to be OK, and I’m grateful for that. But when we start screwing up our chromosomes, we have no idea how or when it is going to surface.”

Her parting shot would give little comfort to her adversaries.

“They think,” she says deliberately, “that if they keep dragging their heels, all these people will finally die off. But I’ll never give up.”