Life in a Nuclear Rage : Pat Broudy Digs Ferociously for the Truth About Her Husband and Other Atomic Vets

They call her Tiger Lady.

Pat Broudy takes it as a compliment. It comes from folks who have seen her change from an unquestioning military man’s wife to a well-known Washington nuisance with one goal in mind: to make the federal government pay for the thing she believes killed her husband and gave thousands of other U.S. veterans deadly diseases.

The five-foot, soft-spoken Monarch Beach woman calls it the big lie. She learned of it, she said, from her husband on his deathbed in 1977.

Maj. Charles Broudy, dying of lymphatic cancer at age 57, finally hinted to his wife that he had been exposed to atomic radiation several times during his 20 years of military service, once in the Nevada desert in 1957, near ground zero of the largest atomic bomb detonation ever in the U.S. atmosphere.

“They were sworn to secrecy,” Broudy said. “He never talked about it. He was a good Marine, quote unquote.”

Broudy said she filed for service-related disability benefits, but the Veterans Administration initially denied the request, saying they had no record of ever sending him on the missions she alleged. Broudy decided to fight.

“When he died it was like my life ended,” Broudy said. “I was very angry for a very, very long time. For 10 years after he died it didn’t take much to set me off. Now I use that anger constructively.”

Using some skills she learned as a former legal secretary and improvising the rest, Broudy sent out numerous Freedom of Information Act requests clawing at the military’s secretive bureaucracy.

When, to her surprise, Reynolds Electrical and Engineering Co. sent her the radiation measuring badge issued to her husband during his service in Nevada, she learned definitively that he had been among the men ordered to stand by as the giant atomic mushroom cloud filled the Nevada sky. The company had kept files on the badges worn by participants on those missions.

“They dug trenches, about 4,000 yards from ground zero,” Broudy said. The blast looked like a “huge rapid sunrise” from her Santa Ana home at the time.

“After they detonated the bomb, his company marched (toward ground zero) in 130-degree weather. They had no protective clothing. They had only their battle gear on. They maneuvered in the area for about four hours,” Broudy said, adding, “I’ve got proof for everything I say.”

In 1978, Broudy filed her first suit against the U.S. government alleging wrongful death, thinking, she said, “Damn it, somebody’s going to have to pay for this.”

Between raising four school-age children and trying to run a failing bicycle business by herself, she succeeded in digging up information from the government’s own studies that indicated the dangers of radiation since the inception of the nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, news of her litigation attracted national attention from other veterans with the same experience. In the 1970s, Broudy co-founded the National Assn. of Radiation Survivors and later became legislative director of the National Assn. of Atomic Veterans, each with about 5,000 members.

“She made up her mind she wasn’t going to quit until she got her widow’s benefits to raise her children, said Oscar Rosen, 73, a Massachusetts veteran who has worked with Broudy for four years at the National Assn. of Atomic Veterans. “Then she was determined to get to the truth that the government exposed (veterans) to radiation without telling them what it was all about.”

Rosen, who contends he became sterile because he served near an underground testing site in the Bikini Islands, said, “It’s really scary. We were exposed to the same radiation they were planning to spread over enemy territory. We had a heck of a time convincing the government we were used as Guinea pigs. Mrs. Broudy had a lot to do” with persuading the government to study the issue “by giving them documents she’s collected over the years and by her testimonies. She really knows her stuff.”

The office of Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota has cited Broudy’s 15 congressional testimonies many times in his own lobbying for studies on atomic veterans’ genetic disorders. “They call her (Tiger Lady) for her tenacity at digging out information,” said Marty Gensler, an aide to Wellstone.

When Broudy’s lawsuit failed in Los Angeles District Court, she took it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Her case was dismissed in 1985 based on the sovereign immunity theory, which protected the government from prosecution.

But the work that came out of those cases, along with pressure from people across the country fighting the same battle, persuaded the government to pass a law in 1988 that would compensate atomic veterans and widows for 13 types of cancer. Intense lobbying added two more types to the list a couple of years later. Because of that 1988 law, Broudy received disability benefits.

“There’s no question there were nuclear weapons tests during the ‘50s in which service members were participants,” said Don Smith, a VA spokesman. “Most believed the precautions taken were adequate. Looking at it in a historic perspective years later, there are those individuals who were exposed more than others.”

So far, more than 17,000 radiation-related claims for benefits have been filed with the VA, most from veterans who claim they were exposed at atmospheric testing sites in the United States or at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, as part of the postwar occupation force. About 5,000 have received compensation, ranging from about $87 to $1,700 a month, according to the Veterans Administration.

The Defense Nuclear Agency said about 200,000 people participated in ground testing in Nevada and the Pacific Ocean and another 200,000 were exposed to nuclear fallout in post-war Japan.

Both the VA and the Defense Nuclear Agency deny withholding information from veterans who have sought to prove their radiation exposure. In 1978, the Defense Nuclear Agency declassified thousands of pages of documents to help the veterans reconstruct possible exposure during their service, said spokeswoman Cheri Abdelnour. So far, more than 60,000 inquiries have been made.

Acknowledging that the bureaucratic bottleneck has loosened, Broudy, who will not give her age, continues working. Over the years she hasn’t had much of a personal life, she said, outside of stumping through congressional lobbies, testifying in courthouses, summoning government documents and drafting communiques.

Her current task is to expand that list of radiation-related ailments and make it less difficult for veterans and their descendants to prove their afflictions. Recently, the government agreed to conduct a first-ever feasibility study linking genetic disabilities of the children and grandchildren of “atomic veterans” to their services.

“I do this 24 hours a day,” she said. “After 18 years you can reach total burnout. Sometimes you have to sit back and regroup. It’s depressing that’s all I do. I probably will be doing it until the day I die.”

Broudy said many atomic veterans are either in their 60s and 70s or already dead. According to one poll from her organization, the average age of death for atomic veterans is 58.

“My husband was taken from me in the prime of life,” Broudy said. “You really can’t compensate a death. But it sure helps if you can live a little comfortably and be able to pay your bills.”