Danielle Stevens (née Pitcher) Life experience 17/9/26
⚠️ Warning: If you just want to go about your life & not learn the documented facts, please don’t read my story. I am extremely blunt and do not sugar-coat anything.
This is my life experience. My name is Danielle Stevens, and I am the daughter of a Vietnam Veteran.
My dad served in Vietnam with the 17th Construction Squadron from December 1969 to December 1970.
He was a Plant Operator, working on the ground in Vietnam.
My family’s military story began long before the Vietnam War.
It goes back to John Daly, who served with the Irish Guards during the First World War.
Like many Irishmen of his generation, he enlisted believing that Ireland would be granted independence after the war.
John Daly never came home.
He died at Ypres, Belgium, in October 1914.
More than a century later, I can find his name there — on Panel 11 via Google Earth.
He left behind his 2-year-old daughter, Peggy.
Governments make promises.
Governments break promises.
And governments lie about war.
And then, decades later, governments apologise.
Then came the Second World War.
My grandfather, William Thomas Pitcher, served as a Merchant Seaman.
During the war, his ship was bombed in the Mediterranean Sea. He survived & went on to become a Senior Captain with the Blue Star Line Shipping Company.
His long maritime career is commemorated with plaques in both Melbourne and Auckland.
Then came my dad, William Christopher Pitcher.
He first completed National Service in New Zealand.
After his mother, Peggy, died, Dad moved to Melbourne with his dad.
There, he made the decision to enlist in the Australian Army.
Dad was 21, his new mates called him Kiwi.
During his 356 days in Vietnam, Dad was “covered in that shit” — direct quote from my dad — but the science for Agent Orange says it was TCDD dioxin, a highly toxic, persistent chemical linked to cancer, reproductive and developmental harm, immune and endocrine disruption, neurological effects, metabolic disease, liver damage and chloracne.
After Dad’s tour of Vietnam, he returned to Enoggera in Brisbane. He was still serving in the Australian Army.
But coming home did not mean the war was simply over.
Tensions were high.
Dad was beaten so badly that he had his face reconstructed with metal plates in a Queensland Health hospital.
He had survived Vietnam, returned to Australia, and was still a serving soldier — but what happened after he came home would stay with him & me for the rest of our lives.
Dad married my mum & adopted my brother. They had an Army wedding in Brisbane.
I was born in a Queensland Health hospital on 14 November 1974. Five months later, in April 1975, my mum had a miscarriage. My dad left the Army, then the fall of Saigon happened, which is the official end of the Vietnam War.
This isn’t family folklore.
It is recorded in Dad’s military records.
And on my Queensland birth certificate, my father’s occupation is recorded simply as:
Soldier.
My parents decided to move to New Zealand when I was 2. I lived across the road from an Air Force base. The sound of my childhood was the Huey chopper they used in the Vietnam War.
I wasn’t a part of that “Military Family”. I was on the outside, so I never associated with the term “Military Family” that DVA uses.
A lot went wrong with my family when I was 14. Hindsight has taught me that terrible things were happening inside my dad with his health because of the Vietnam War. The reason I know now is because they have happened to me.
Peripheral Neuropathy feels like Agent Orange burning me on the inside.
My parents split & my mum wanted to move back to Australia, so on 23 January 1991, I hopped on a plane by myself at age 16 and went to boarding school while I waited for my mum to sell the house in NZ & move back.
1991 was the same year Australia ratified the Geneva Convention Protocol I, Article 77 — special protection for children affected by war, I was still a minor.
In the 90s, I watched a TV show called “Sons & Daughters”, so when DVA established the “Sons & Daughters program” in 2001, yeah, that term doesn’t resonate with me either.
Kinda weird how Centrelink didn’t notice “Soldier” written on my birth certificate when I registered with them after moving countries and didn’t refer me to DVA.
I had always known about Agent Orange — but for most of my life, Dad was the only person saying it to me.
In October 2010, when I was 35 years old, my back collapsed.
The same thing had happened to Dad.
But I was built different. I was born with structural abnormalities in my spine and pelvis — an extra vertebra, transitional anatomy, an abnormally formed sacrum and hip dysplasia. My body was literally built differently from birth.
In 2011, Dad reiterated to me that it was “Agent Orange” — the same year the United Nations started warning countries about Agent Orange children.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with the Agent Orange information. So I filed it away in the back of my mind.
Over the next 15 years, I would ask doctors about it, particularly within Queensland Health.
My questions made doctors uncomfortable. I never seemed to get an answer, and I would leave with the same questions I had walked in with.
But my experience with WorkCover in 2011, the same year it was mentioned in Parliament how badly affected Agent Orange children were, had taught me something important:
Keep your records.
So I did.
I kept copies of my medical imaging reports, not doctor’s opinions, & notes denying the science & biology.
Then, in December 2024, I was reading a White House briefing on Twitter when I saw words that stopped me:
“Second Generation Agent Orange.”
Agent Orange had been hanging over my head my entire life.
By February 2025, while we were watching my ex-Air Force engineer father-in-law die a terrible death from asbestosis, I had accumulated 15 years of medical imaging records documenting my birth defects and degeneration.
And that was when I started asking very different questions.
I started researching.
And the more I found, the more I realised I needed somewhere to put it all.
So I built a website and called it Agent Orange Child.
It became a record of my journey through Australian and international institutions — the questions I asked, the answers I received, the documents I found, and the doors I knocked on.
I had already come to one important conclusion:
There must have been thousands of children of Australian Vietnam veterans before me who had tried to get the Australian Government to listen.
They hadn’t failed because they didn’t try.
So I decided I wasn’t going to keep knocking on the same door.
I started looking for other doors.
I had already been learning about the international institutions — the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the OECD.
So I submitted my case to all three institutions, simultaneously.
But I didn’t just do it once.
I kept going.
With every piece of government denial, I kept building the record, with the Governments own words fully published & my website, the analytics recorded them looking, The Hague looks too.
I took that record through 17 government departments, through oversight bodies, regulators, Ombudsmen and the NACC.
And I didn’t just do it in Australia.
I followed the record across three Rome Statute countries — Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
🇦🇺 🇳🇿 🇨🇦
Because Agent Orange was never just an Australian story.
And neither are its children.
Then something significant happened.
Just 16 days after I submitted my case to the International Criminal Court, UN Special Rapporteur Dr Marcos Orellana published his report on the toxic remnants of war.
And there it was.
Dioxin.
The toxic contaminant associated with Agent Orange — placed in an international report alongside other examples of toxic harm arising from war.
And I want to be very clear about the science.
This isn’t new science.
In 1997, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified TCDD as a Group 1 carcinogen — carcinogenic to humans.
Australia also became a Party to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, an international treaty specifically addressing chemicals including dioxins, with obligations aimed at protecting human health, but Australia doesn’t fully apply international treaties domestically so Agent Orange children were not included here either.
So by the time I started asking these questions, the world wasn’t waiting to discover whether dioxin was dangerous.
That argument was decades old.
The question I was asking was different:
What happened to the children of the people who were exposed?
Then we come to Australia’s own research.
In 2007, the Australian Government commissioned the Vietnam Veterans Family Study.
That study collected information about both the physical and mental health of veterans’ sons and daughters.
The research process involved specialists across numerous areas, including expertise relevant to birth defects and physical health.
But by the time the final report was released in 2014, the emphasis had shifted overwhelmingly to mental health.
The physical-health information that had been collected did not receive the same analysis and prominence, and the specialist involvement visible earlier in the research process was no longer reflected in the same way in the final report.
So I find it extremely difficult to accept that, in 2026, we are still talking as though the science surrounding Agent Orange children isn’t settled.
I found another report Dr O, UN Special Rapporteur on Toxics, wrote about conflicts of interest & scientifically manufactured doubt.
I researched further & found an ABC radio interview regarding how world-renowned scientist Sir Richard Doll was on the payroll of Monsanto (manufacturer of Agent Orange).
I uncovered that he was being paid since 1976 & IMO to manufacture scientific doubt because this was a conflict of interest.
When I tried to obtain my Dad’s military records, Defence required me to prove that he was dead.
I had to Google Earth my dad’s grave & send them a photograph.
For the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, I found that requirement extraordinarily cruel & still cry about the institutional abuse I have endured from the Australian Government system over the course of my life.
The Australian Government could have found me if they wanted to. I’m not an undocumented child trying to reconstruct a family story 50 years later.
My dad’s Australian military records document his Vietnam service, his work as a Plant Operator on 14 November 1974, the Army literally recorded “DAUGHTER BORN” in his Record of Service.
My birth certificate says Soldier.
The same hospital system that put metal plates in my dad’s face. Same hospital system I was born in. Same hospital system when my back collapsed. Same hospital system where doctors never answered my Agent Orange questions. Same hospital system WorkCover used when they sent me to the exact same spine specialist.
Then the Director-General of that same hospital system wrote down the science and sent it to me on Queensland Health letterhead, July 2025 saying they were not liable.
I didn’t start this journey distrusting the Australian Government. I started with blind faith in the system. The system cured me of that.
Military service didn’t end with my dad.
My eldest daughter’s paternal grandparents both served in the Royal Australian Air Force. They were based at Butterworth in Malaysia when her father was born.
Her grandfather passed away in February 2026, her Grandmother only received a DVA Gold card after her husband had passed away.
My ex-Army brother, who was also raised by an angry Vietnam Veteran, took his own life while applying for Disability in July 2025.
After Robodebt, they should have fixed the system like they said they would.
The Australian Government has been collecting information about our military families for decades & has done nothing but shuffle paperwork & in 2026 we are the only OECD country not to have a federal Human Rights Act.
Every Royal Commission is another example of Human Rights atrocities the Government is committing against its own citizens.
Then in June 2026, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs changed the history presented on its own website.
The new account acknowledges things veterans and their families have been saying for decades about Agent Orange, chemical exposure, the controversy over health effects, and concerns about effects on their children.
For me, that change matters.
Because after decades of families being told that the evidence was uncertain, the Government’s own historical account is now substantially closer to what many of our families have been saying all along.
Our lived experience didn’t suddenly change in June 2026.
The official record did.
So now my question to the Australian Government is this:
Are you going to fully account for what happened to Australian troops exposed to Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals during the Vietnam War?
And are you finally going to listen to their children and investigate and remedy the intergenerational toxic remnants of war?
Because I am still here.
I am still documenting the paper shuffling.
I am still building the record.
And I have receipts from the International Criminal Court, an email from the United Nations Human Rights Council & an international OECD report with my name on it.
And until there is meaningful investigation and remedy, I will keep taking the record I have built through every available Australian and international door — including The Hague.
Remember at the beginning when I said:
Governments make promises.
Governments break promises.
And governments lie about war.
And then, decades later, governments apologise.
We are not there yet.
AGENT ORANGE CHILD WEBSITE ⬇️
WHAT THE DVA ARE SAYING NOW ⬇️
FAMILY STUDY ANALYSIS ⬇️
INTERNATIONAL OECD REPORT⬇️
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