King Norris can still remember how it smelled when Agent Orange hit his nostrils while serving in Vietnam in the 1970s.
“Every night I went to work it was hard to breathe because of the fumes,” said Norris, who worked the night shift guarding the ammo dump with the 212th MP Company in Vietnam’s Long Bihn from 1970-1971. “I can’t describe it, it’s just unbelievable. It could knock a dragon out. I guess it was like sticking your head in a barrel of TNT.”
The Chaptico resident said he was officially diagnosed with having cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange — a chemical defoliant that U.S. troops sprayed to kill foliage and prevent the enemy from making surprise attacks — in 2015 and received nine weeks of radiation along with much-needed disability payments.
“I have friends who are Vietnam vets and one friend [known as] Lone Wolf tells of walking through the jungle and suddenly there was no jungle where they had sprayed Agent Orange, and they had to walk through that to get to where they were going,” said King’s brother, Joe Norris, who worked for The Enterprise and other local newspapers. “They were all affected by it. I’m grateful because King got to live a lot longer than most of them did. They’ve been gone, most of them, for 20, 25 years.”
King, 73, was also diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014, and a year later determined it had been caused by exposure to Agent Orange. The cancer returned with a vengeance in 2020.
“My [prostate-specific antigen] number was so high they weren’t sure there was any hope for me at all,” King said.
In April 2023 he went to MedStar St. Mary’s Hospital in Leonardtown where a CT scan revealed a tumor in his bladder. King was put on a medication that he said cost him $15,000 a month, but his white blood count fell from 896 to 6.
Just before Christmas of last year, his back started hurting and he was told his vertebrae was swollen and was crimping his spinal column. He was flown to Georgetown University Hospital and given 10 shots of radiation.
“King you’re dying,” King said he was told by his doctor. “’Quit going to the emergency room, quit getting stents in, quit seeing doctors. There’s nothing anybody can do for you. You just have to accept it. I said, ‘I don’t want to accept it. I want to see my little great-granddaughter grow up.’”
But through it all King was also thinking of others. He regularly brings pizzas to the nurses at the Leonardtown hospital to thank them for all they do. A card signed by many of them sits on a table next to his chair in his camper home.
“I thought, ‘Well, I can’t do anything about COVID,’” he said, “’but I can feed them. They appreciate the food.”
When he returned to St. Mary’s County following his 9-month tour in Vietnam, King became a sheetrock plasterer and was even requested by name, but in 1979 his health issues began in earnest.
“My knees started burning like crazy 24/7,” King said. “It went through my body like a worm. Every joint, everything. It felt like a million spiders were crawling over my body.”
“People were all like, ‘It’s all in his head, it’s all in his head,’ because there didn’t seem to be anything medically wrong with him,” Joe said while seated next to his brother. “I was the one who said, ‘Look, you don’t know what that man went through.’ The stress alone of what he went through could be causing this. No matter what it is we have to stop acting like it’s nothing and rally. ... It was hard.”
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