SAN CARLOS APACHE RESERVATION, Ariz. _ The sound always came first, a low buzz that grew and grew until it roared through the valley. Then the olive-colored plane appeared overhead, flying low. In its wake was a thick shower of oily droplets making a long, slow fall to the forested gullies below.
Kids on the Apache reservation back then chased the planes over gem-laden hills, past the flame-yellow salt cedars lining the banks of the Gila River. If they arrived ahead of the planes, they stood under the mysterious, oily rain, waiting for rainbows.
"We just played in it, drank the water with it in there, ate the food we hung out to dry covered in it," said Mike Stevens, 62. "Didn't know what it was."
The planes were delivering a chemical cocktail with components similar to Agent Orange, the powerful herbicide that laid bare the jungles of Vietnam during the 1960s to allow American warplanes to peer into guerrilla encampments.
The compound, known as Silvex, was deployed as part of a little-known test effort from 1961 to 1972 to wipe out water-hungry vegetation on the San Carlos Apache Reservation, part of a larger effort by the federal government to protect scarce groundwater in the newly booming city of Phoenix.
The dioxin-laden herbicide was spread over a population of 10,000 for more than a decade. Half a century later, the federal Environmental Protection Agency sent investigators to the reservation last month to find out exactly what was sprayed and what lingering effects it may have on one of the nation's poorest Native American reservations.
"It's in our air, our streams, our livestock," said Charles Vargas, an activist on the reservation, 90 miles northeast of Phoenix. "This is fundamentally a crime, perpetrated on our people by the government, and no one's ever had to answer for it."
Tribal leaders declined to be interviewed, though they said the tribe had conducted its own extensive tests and found "no reason for concern."
A small group of tribal members is hoping EPA investigators will help make public the extent of the spraying program and uncover what contamination, if any, remains.
Stevens, a retired truck driver, drives the rutted roads of the reservation and points to crumbling, abandoned houses of families who died out. One branch of the Thinkas are all dead, he said, as are the Bendles and the Cassas.
"Something took all of them," Stevens said. "A couple people dying, OK. The whole family? You got to ask what they dropped on us."
The shy girl with smooth skin lived near the river, and her family lived off its bounty. When the planes flew overhead, the chemicals covered the roof of her tight, tiny four-walled home, which she shared with her mother, grandmother, aunt and sister. It stuck to the dried meat and berries they hung outside, coated the clothing on wash lines.
No one told them what was falling from the sky. Day after day, the planes flew southeast to northwest to dump their payload on a 15-mile stretch of the Gila River next to their small home.
"She would cross the river and pick mushrooms, berries. All of it had stuff on it," Stevens said, pointing to the river banks. "The flight path was right through here."
In 1969, the flights ended. A few years later, Stevens returned to the San Carlos reservation after college and found that the shy girl with smooth skin was now a strong-willed woman named Lizette Edwards. They married.
Then, people on the reservation started to get sick. First, Edwards' mother contracted breast cancer, as did her sister. Her aunt suffered from a central nervous system disorder that caused her to shake. All three died within a few years of each other in the 1980s and 1990s.
And it wasn't just their family. Full branches of longtime San Carlos families simply seemed to drift away. First one member of the household would take ill, Stevens said, and the others seemed to wither with them. Some houses became nothing more than four walls and a sickbed. Children left for the cities, the older family members died out, and the houses still sit today, stripped of their worthwhile metals and abandoned.
