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Bill and Dana’s Story — And the Truth They Never Saw Coming
Nearly three million American families sent someone to Vietnam. Most of those veterans came home to a country that didn’t want to talk about what had happened — so they didn’t talk about it either. They reassimilated. They built lives. They chased the American Dream they’d been fighting for. And for decades, many of them quietly carried health consequences they couldn’t explain and couldn’t connect to anything — because nobody told them they should.
This is our story. But if your family has any connection to Vietnam, there’s a good chance it’s also yours.
The Silent Impact of Vietnam on American Families
Bill was one of the lucky ones, he came home. At the end of his first tour he was transferred to Frankfurt, Germany — a brief assignment he expected to last until he was sent back into the fight. Destiny had other plans. In the summer of 1970, he met Dana Serfas, the woman he would marry. They have now been together 55 years and still counting.
The war wound down, and in 1972 Bill left the military and moved to Washington State with his young bride. Together they built a good life. Bill built a successful travel agency. Dana built a medical marketing agency. They pursued the American Dream with everything they had, and they found their piece of it.
After eleven years of marriage, they decided to start their family but experienced two miscarriages over two years due to birth defects, before welcoming healthy identical twin girls in 1983. They made no association to Agent Orange and the birth defects.
Fifty-Five Years, One Love Story… and a Hidden War
Bill Fox was drafted on Friday, May 13th, 1966. He was 23 years old: a wholesome, good-looking, sharp-minded midwestern boy with good values but no budding career he was married to. The Army wasn’t his first choice to remedy this, but Bill had never been the kind of man to do anything halfway. He made the most of the Army.
After basic training he qualified for Officer Candidate School, then Flight School — and found himself in Vietnam shortly after one of the war’s defining moments: the Tet Offensive. Like most young men of his generation, he believed he was invincible. He had many harrowing encounters that we still don’t talk about easily. He was respected and liked by his crew and fellow officers, and how he wasn’t killed is anyone’s guess — the Army lost 5,607 helicopters in that war, nearly half of every aircraft that served. Two thousand, two hundred and two helicopter pilots never came home. Over 10 percent of all Vietnam casualties were helicopter crew members. The average lifespan of a door gunner on a Huey was two weeks.
For decades, there were health issues for Bill — things that appeared and were managed and mostly explained away. Like so many of the families reading this website, we never connected any of it to Agent Orange.
Not until Bill was in his eighties and Dana in her late seventies, when a dedicated, observant VA physician noticed something in Bill’s symptoms and the pieces finally clicked into place. Decades of health history suddenly had a name. What they learned in the months that followed — about the research, the science, the intergenerational effects, and the staggering number of families living with these consequences without knowing where to look — was not something they could stay quiet about.
This website is for every family whose paternal and maternal ancestors served in Vietnam. For everyone who has been quietly carrying health issues with no idea they might be connected to a war that ended fifty years ago. For daughters and granddaughters who deserve answers. For the families who don’t yet know that this information exists — and that it could change everything.
“I am not a veteran. I am a spouse. And I believe that perspective may be exactly what gives this work its urgency. I watched what Agent Orange did to Bill for forty years before we had language for it. I watched it move through our daughters and granddaughters. Now I intend to make sure that every family affected has the science, the resources, and the recognition they deserve.”
— Dana Fox, Founder & Executive Director, Inherited Wounds Foundation
Dana Fox
Co-Founder, Inherited Wounds Foundation
Dana Fox spent four decades working inside the medical system — not as a clinician, but as someone who learned how it communicates, how it makes decisions, and too often, how it fails the people who need it most. That experience became the foundation for the work she believes matters most: making sure that the estimated 18 million Americans affected directly and indirectly by Agent Orange (Dioxin )exposure have the information they need to understand what may be happening to their health, and why.
Dana built and led Strategic Edge Partners, a consulting agency that worked across plastic surgery and dermatology practices, hospitals, medical schools, and healthcare institutions. That work gave her an unusual vantage point: a deep understanding of how medicine operates from the inside, and a clear-eyed view of where patients — especially those with complex, under-recognized conditions — tend to fall through the cracks.
Dana’s role at the Foundation is rooted in the same skill she honed over 40 years: taking complicated medical and institutional information and making it understandable and actionable for the people who need it. Because knowing what questions to ask — and feeling equipped to ask them — can change everything about how you navigate a system that was not designed with you in mind.
You deserve answers. This Foundation exists to help you find them.
Explore the Science Behind Generational Trauma
