Some Vietnam Veterans Lack Agent Orange Coverage

MYFOXNY.COM EXCLUSIVE - Some Vietnam veterans are only just getting sick from exposure to Agent Orange decades ago. if a veteran was on the ground, and qualifies, the Department of Veterans Affairs will pay for health coverage.

But for veterans who were on ships, working on the planes that flew through the affected areas, it's a different story.

Fox 5 News met one vet by the ship where he fought the war -- the Intrepid.

Bobby Condon was 17 years old when he got on the USS Intrepid. A lifetime later he is paying the price. He was really still a boy, but Bobby Condon was in the thick of battle, servicing bombers after their runs over Vietnam, crawling all over them, so they could fly again.

From 1962 to 1971, the U.S. military dropped Agent Orange to clear foliage so they could better see the enemy, but over the decades it became clear that many soldiers became sick.

Condon has CLL leukemia, one of the illnesses that the V.A. covers, but his coverage was denied because of where he served.

"They say you have to have boots on the ground," Condon said.

Veterans have turned to Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who has vowed to pass legislation to change the loophole that denies the coverage. She said she hopes to get it through committee and onto the Senate floor soon.

Condon recently visited the place as he put it, that "made him a man."

"When you're seventeen you see things differently," he said as he stood along the West Side Highway, near the Intrepid. "Yeah, you don't think you can die, but I'm from Brooklyn, thought you could live forever."

Condon said his NYPD retirement coverage will save him. Sen. Gillibrand has said some 13,000 people are affected in New York alone, and some 800,000 nationwide.