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The first and only time I met Pat Broudy was in a dark airless American Legion hall choked with stale cigarette smoke. That was 23 years ago, in Melbourne, back when lighting up indoors wasn’t so skull and crossbones.The place was packed with old soldiers who’d been on the front lines of America’s experiments with radiation superbombs. A lot of the guys were hobbled with various ailments and cancers and the VA was telling them to get lost. Pat was telling them to stand up and raise hell.
Pat’s late husband, Marine major Charles Broudy, had died of lymphoma 10 years earlier, at 57. He’d been exposed to fallout three times, at the ruins of Nagasaki, in the Nevada desert, and at the Pacific Proving Grounds. The VA was fighting her on widow’s benefits. Maj. Broudy’s two postwar missions were classified, but he applied for service-connected disability less than a year before he died. The VA called him a liar and said he was never there. Then they conceded he’d been exposed — to a harmless 13 millirads. Pat went on to discover through a film badge contractor he’d absorbed 5,000 times that amount.
It’s hard to know how many variations of Maj. Broudy’s disgraceful treatment played out across the U.S. Roughly a quarter million American military personnel, most of whom were sworn to security oaths, were exposed to fallout during the atomic age. But Broudy’s widow refused to be intimidated by the ridiculous odds stacked against her.
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