Fmr Congressman Roe discusses passage of Blue Water Navy Act for Agent Orange effects
JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Phil Roe spent six terms as the congressman for the First District of Tennessee. He served on the Veterans Affairs Committee and passed several bills to benefit veterans and servicemembers.
'I went to Leader [John] Boehner, and I said, 'Look, I need to be on the Veterans Affairs Committee,'' the former congressman recalled. 'And he said, 'Why?' I said, I'm a physician. I'm a veteran. I did some of my training in a [Veterans Affairs] hospital, and I've seen VA patients. I said, I need to be on that committee.'
Roe was one of the last people drafted in the Vietnam War. He was in medical school, and his orders to go to Da Nang were deferred, so he ended up in Korea instead. He was the captain of the medical battalion in the 2nd Infantry Division.
'There were three of us young doctors that were in charge of taking the healthcare of an infantry division with 10,000 men in it.'
He got out of the Army in 1975 and continued with medical school. Roe became one of the region's most well-known OB-GYNs. He spent some time in local government before heading to the nation's capital.
'When we put our folks at risk like that, then I think as a country, we're obligated to take care of any potential problems that they have in the future,' he said.
Those who were boots on the ground and part of the brown water navy in Vietnam were already presumed to have exposure to Agent Orange.
'It turned out that the Blue Water people, the people were on ships that serviced the aircraft and so forth, drank the water they desalinated, were not included. And that was the Blue Water Navy bill.'
The bill also included those in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, near where Roe was.
'We should have figured out something. When you spray it on a leaf and it wilts- that's probably not going to be good for you if you're attached to it. But we didn't have all that,' he said. 'It just took time to realize this. And then we had to appropriate the money. It's very expensive.'
The road to the bill's passage was not easy. The former doctor spent hours going through studies while working on it.
'There were two studies that were done, one a Russian study, and one was an Australian study. I'm probably the only guy to ever read both of them,' he said. 'I couldn't come to a conclusion about whether it was presumptive or actually helped cause something or not. And I said, okay, if I've looked at this, the only evidence we have, and I can't determine scientifically whether it does or doesn't, I'm going on the side of the serviceman and woman. That's what I'm going to do.'
It took 10 years to get the bill passed. And when it finally went through in 2019, there were fewer than 90,000 blue water navy service members left.
'You have to be pretty bullheaded to stay with something that long and what people don't realize is that every congress you have to start all over again,' Roe said. 'So every two years I had to restart this process and try to convince people it took that long to get it done. But we got it done.'
Join News Channel 11 on Friday at 5 p.m. as we continue our series on The Vietnam War: 50 Years Later. And this Saturday, you can watch Vietnam War: A Lost Generation at noon.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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