Leadership Quote by Jim McDermott

The line lands like an indictment delivered in plain clothes: not a scandal uncovered, but a scandal sustained. McDermott’s “we” is the tell. It’s collective, implicating Congress, the Pentagon, and a public happy to outsource responsibility once the war ended. “Pretended” is doing the moral heavy lifting here, framing denial not as bureaucratic error but as chosen performance - a national method of looking away.

The context is the long, ugly lag between battlefield exposure and institutional admission. Agent Orange wasn’t just a chemical; it became a stress test for how America treats the people it sends to fight. “After Vietnam” signals the cultural shift from wartime urgency to peacetime amnesia, when veterans were politically inconvenient and medical uncertainty made a perfect alibi. The Pentagon “recanted” reads as a reluctant confession, a word that evokes not policy revision but backpedaling under pressure, after evidence and advocacy made silence costly.

“Untold suffering” is both literal and rhetorical. Literally: illnesses, birth defects, and the bureaucratic maze of disability claims. Rhetorically: an accusation that even the counting was denied, that pain was kept off the books until it couldn’t be. McDermott’s intent is not merely to memorialize harm but to spotlight a familiar mechanism: institutions delay accountability until time itself becomes a shield. The subtext is harsher than the sentence sounds - that patriotism often ends where the paperwork begins, and the real fight for many veterans starts only once the shooting stops.