John Baenen was exposed to massive radiation at a nuclear bomb test site. 40 years later, a medal

NEW FRANKEN - You’d almost think at this stage John Baenen would just tell them to stick it.

Forty years of nobody listening, or people in high places pretending not to listen because they didn’t want to hear, and all the while, his friends were dying and Baenen felt his own health slipping away.

Photo: John Baenen of New Franken will receive a national award on Saturday for his work on cleanup crews at Enewetak Atoll, one of the U.S. military's nuclear test sites in the Pacific. (Photo: Adam Wesley/USA Today Network-Wisconsin)

And so now they want to give him a medal, to pin a medal on the chest of a 60-year-old man with the fragile bones of a 96-year-old, a man who as a U.S. Army soldier risked his life not on the battlefield but on cleanup detail — cleaning up the largest nuclear bomb test site the world had ever seen.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Green Bay, will present the medal to Baenen on Saturday, in a ceremony at the Green Bay Yacht Club — the Humanitarian Medal, for soldiers, sailors and airmen who risked their lives not on the battlefield but through humanitarian efforts to help others.

Baenen spent six months in the Marshall Islands back in the late 1970s, part of a four-year mission the U.S. undertook as a humanitarian gesture after poisoning the islands with 10 years of nuclear weapons testing.

Baenen didn’t volunteer for the job. He made the mistake of having expertise in mobile power generators, and the military needed that expertise to run a power plant for the 500 other men who were part of the cleanup detail.

“The first thing they were supposed to do when we got on the main island was give us a safety briefing,” Baenen recalled. “I remember some kind of briefing, but the only thing I remember is ‘watch out for sharks.’

“We were supposed to be in yellow suits, and they said so, but it was 132-degree daytime temperatures and guys were falling over,” Baenen said. “You don’t get the job done with people dropping over, so everybody wore jungle fatigues cut off into shorts, T-shirts, combat boots, sunglasses and maybe boonie hats — that was basically our safety equipment.”

The Army, Navy and Air Force crews that were in the cleanup detail pitched their tents and camped on one island while they spent their days cleaning up surrounding islands in the 42-island Enewetak Atoll. But they found even the ground under their tents was contaminated, Baenen said.

Crews spent days blasting channels, digging pits for nuclear deposits, stripping islands of topsoil and otherwise raising a poisonous dust that more than 4,000 people were exposed to in the four-year mission.

They had defective radiation-measuring equipment, they were washing their clothes in water that was estimated to be more than 30 times more contaminated than the crater in which they were dumping contaminated dredgings, Baenen said.

In the end, the islands are still contaminated, he said. The native populations who had been moved off for the testing have not been allowed to return. Efforts to re-establish coconut, breadfruit, lemon, and limes as a cash crop were abandoned when it was learned they wouldn’t be free of contamination for at least 900 years.

“There are 47 countries that have done research there since we left, and all 47 of them want us to go back and clean it up and seal it off,” Baenen said.

Upon discharge, individual soldiers, sailors and airmen who worked on the project were given radiation testing showing them at relatively low levels. Other documents that until recently were kept classified showed levels were in fact much higher, with one man showing levels more than 30,000 times the level recorded, Baenen said.

Photo: The United States successfully detonated its first hydrogen bomb, a second generation thermonuclear device, in the Marshall Islands in 1952 as part of Operation Ivy, one of a series of nuclear bomb tests. (Photo: Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons)

“He should have been sent home immediately, but he’s dead now anyway,” Baenen said.

Most of the people who did the cleanup work in the late 1970s are gone or in poor health, he said.

“Of the 4,033 that worked there, we can only account for 344,” Baenen said. “One passed away just last week. Maybe with you printing this, we can find one or two more, but I know of only two others in the state, one in Stevens Point and one in Sturgeon Bay.

“I have a friend in Maine that’s on his fifth bout of cancer — four different kinds, each due to radiation, but the VA denies it.”

Baenen himself has a number of health issues, including loss of bone density.

“I’ve broken so many bones over the years,” he said.

Baenen and some of his fellow soldiers have been battling for recognition for the last few years. They started making some headway finally in just these last couple years. Most of the information proving their case was classified until recently, and without that in hand, Baenen said, he spent a lifetime trying to persuade potential employers, anybody else, of what he went through and why he was the way he was, with too much radiation in his system to get a job at the Kewaunee nuclear power plant, or too fragile in bone for certain kinds of tasks, or why he suffered from post-traumatic stress.

But as documentation became declassified through the years, and as he and his fellow soldiers persevered, they began to make their case.

“I went down to Washington, D.C. in September, I and three other veterans who were invited to a congressional veterans subcommittee for a roundtable discussion,” Baenen said. “It was apparently the first ever, so I kind of made history.”

It was his fourth time in D.C. trying to raise congressional awareness of the plight of the veterans of the cleanup mission.

Photo: In this 1956 photo, the stem of a hydrogen bomb, the first such nuclear device dropped from a U.S. aircraft, moves upward through a heavy cloud and comes through the top of the cloud, after the bomb was detonated over Namu Island in the Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. (Photo: AP)

Finally, people are starting to listen.

“I think he did a great job drawing attention to this issue,” Gallagher said.

Gallagher, himself a Marine Iraq War veteran, acknowledged sometimes dangerous military missions like the Enewetak Atoll cleanup don’t get the attention they deserve, and veterans suffering medical ailments as a result of those missions end up falling through the cracks.

That’s why Gallagher is a co-sponsor of H.R. 6342, the Mark Takai Atomic Veterans Healthcare Parity Act that attempts to provide funding for disabilities suffered by veterans like Baenen who participated in the cleanup. It remains tied up in committee — “It has a long way to go,” Gallagher says — but, in the meantime, the U.S. government has agreed to present survivors like Baenen with the Humanitarian Medal, which Gallagher says is a start.

“It’s fair to say this is a long-overdue recognition of John’s service and what he went through,” Gallagher said. “I just hope it draws attention to the bigger issue of what our servicemen have been exposed to and how we should deal with it.

“Over 42 years ago, John left New Franken to serve honorably,” Gallagher said. “It’s an inspiration for me and a source of inspiration for all the young kids in New Franken and across Wisconsin, who see how to serve their country. It’s not easy work, and it can be dangerous, but it can be gratifying. It’s guys like John who inspired me to serve.”

Now, after 40 years, you could hardly blame Baenen for rejecting a medal and instead telling the government to stick it. But he won’t. He sees it as a start, a sign that maybe the government is going to do the right thing after all.

“This medal proves they sent me in harm’s way,” he said. “We’ve been fighting for six years to get our bill passed. … Getting this medal is just to prove to everybody, ‘yeah, I was in such a place, and you all thought I was crazy.’”