‘I Paid My Price:’ Chehalis Veteran Who Died This Week Slipped Through Cracks in the VA System

Before John Weston could legally buy a beer in the United States, he was stationed as a minesweeper in Vietnam near the Cambodian border during the height of the war in the late 1960s. 

Day after day, men with packs full of the infamous Agent Orange sprayed the edges of the Tay Ninh base well before its side effects were known.

After serving a tour in Vietnam, and another in Korea, John Weston returned home to learn some hard news. 

John Weston, formerly of Chehalis, was diagnosed with hepatitis C following his two deployments and exposure to the defoliant called Agent Orange and its inoculations, which saw widespread use by the American military during the conflict. 

He told his story to The Chronicle during an interview in recent weeks. He died Friday at the age of 66. 

Both John Weston and his son, Maxx, said long delays in receiving treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs may have cost him his life. 

There are an estimated 21.68 million veterans in America, of which nearly 9 million use resources provided by the federal Department of Veterans Affairs. 

Numerous news stories have emerged in recent years detailing how many veterans fall through the cracks of a system designed to help them navigate post-service obstacles. 

But countrywide, there are only 300 Veterans Affairs centers and 144 designated hospitals. 

Concerns over the quality of services prompted Congress to authorize an investigation by the Commission on Care, which released its report on June 30. 

In that report, the commission found that Veterans Affairs often lacked “capacity to avoid lengthy wait times and other access issues.” It also identified structural and procedural changes that should be made to reorient the agency to provide adequate care to veterans over the next two decades. 

Both John and Maxx Weston believed long wait times negatively affected John’s condition.

While his hepatitis wasn’t what ultimately took his life, John Weston said Agent Orange inoculations were given to groups of soldiers with the same injection gun, which is where he could have contracted the virus. When he was 20, he received the hepatitis diagnosis, a disease that affects the liver. 

“They said I had the liver of a lifetime alcoholic,” he said. “Heavy thing when you’re a 20-year-old kid and they tell you you’re gonna die by the time you’re 30.” 

But he pushed through and lived a healthy life, successfully fighting the disease until he was recently cured earlier this year. But during his treatment, doctors discovered a tumor in his liver. Medical studies have shown a correlation between hepatitis C and the development of liver cancer. 

“He had a walnut-sized tumor in July,” Maxx Weston said of his father. 

John Weston was diagnosed with cancer at the Seattle Veterans Affairs office early this summer, but chose to transfer down to the Portland office because they had family in the area and had previously used the Portland office when he lived in Castle Rock.

“Somewhere between Seattle and Portland the ball just got dropped and nobody just picked it up,” Maxx Weston said. 

John Weston called the Portland office to make an appointment after his diagnosis, but three months later, he hadn’t heard back from the office. 

Then, in October, he finally made an appointment for Oct. 18, but on the 11th, John Weston went for a walk. While making the rounds, he felt a searing pain. 

“I didn’t know it at the time, but that tumor exploded on me while I was out on that walk, and it was the absolute worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life,” he said.

He was taken to a local emergency room and later transferred to another civilian hospital in Vancouver since the VA said itshospital was full.

“One-hundred percent combat disabled veteran, and they didn’t have room for me,” John Weston said. 

Maxx Weston said there were no beds for his father at the VA hospital, so he spent three days in a general hospital in Vancouver, before Maxx Weston called U.S. Sen. Patty Murray’s office. 

Following the senator’s office’s involvement, Weston said Veterans Affairs acted almost instantaneously. 

“Once Congress got involved and contacted the VA, he got a bed in two minutes,” Maxx Weston said. 

After a few days in the VA hospital and the doctors thinking it was only liver bleeding which could be treated with a liver transplant, John Weston said they told him the tumor had grown to the size of a softball and exploded, sending cancer cells throughout his body. This meant that a liver replacement would clash with chemotherapy. 

John Weston’s diagnosis turned from a treatable disease into 6 months to a year to live, he said. 

“They told me it was a curable condition, and then they came in and told me I was going to die,” he said. 

John Weston said the medical staff at the Veterans Affairs hospital were professional and courteous, but said the bureaucracy of the agency prevented him from getting timely care.

“It just didn’t have to happen like this, and that’s the worst part of it for me, that we knew about this early enough,” he said. “Somebody dropped the ball somewhere, and I’m paying the price for it.” 

Maxx Weston said he’s trying to raise awareness about challenges that veterans face. 

“The VA are standoffish, they’re hostile, they have that tone that you’re one of those guys coming into the emergency room trying to score drugs,” he said. 

John Weston said the VA needs more federal funding to better serve veterans. In particular, he said a push against taxes beginning in the 1980s has hurt services like the VA. 

While he said the government is often perceived as misappropriating funds, it also provides valuable services. 

“We don’t view taxes as an investment in our country and our fellow citizens the way most of the world does,” he said. “...People need to understand that they want all these things, they want to fight all these wars, they got to pay the price. I paid my price.” 

A representative from the Portland VA office said they do not comment on specific veterans or their cases, but said sometimes veterans will be given local treatment options instead of getting into a VA hospital. 

The Commission on Care report found that access to healthcare was one of the largest issues facing veterans using VA systems, and while the agency had implemented a “Choice Program” which let veterans choose local doctors for care, it was underperforming. Instead, the report recommended establishing veteran-centered community health systems. 

“There’s far too many of us, that’s for sure, it’s kind of an embarrassment I think,” John Weston said. “We deal with the hand we’ve been dealt I suppose… I just don’t want to see this happen to anyone else.”