And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Credibilty Gulf"
Thousands of Gulf War veterans were ignored for years.
Has the Pentagon finally learned from their suffering?
Clark Brooks
STAFF WRITER
San Diego Union Tribune
Front Page
December 21, 1998
The Pentagon is finally preparing for the health problems that can afflict
men and women who escape combat without apparent injury.
Troops will have their blood tested when they leave for war and when they
return, the military says, to help scientists find causes and cures for
those who become ill. It's part of a new plan to safeguard the health of
America's armed forces, a lesson learned from the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
All military branches are required to store blood serum taken from ground
troops assigned for at least 30 days to places without military hospitals.
Many now on alert in the Persian Gulf have samples on file, according to a
Pentagon spokesman.
But there is much skepticism about the Pentagon's commitment to sick
veterans.
Thousands of Gulf War veterans still complain of symptoms such as aching
joints, chronic fatigue, memory lapses, headaches, rashes, abdominal pain
and frequent diarrhea. Five years passed before the Pentagon took the
illnesses seriously.
Many of those veterans haven't been helped, and they don't trust the
military to protect the health of other Americans in battle.
Even some of the government's own scientists say that the blood sampling
won't provide enough information for valid scientific studies in the
future.
Politicians who have tried to help sick veterans of the Vietnam and Persian
Gulf wars say the Pentagon has hindered more than helped.
"They don't want to admit that we put our own soldiers in danger, first
with Agent Orange and now with Persian Gulf illnesses," said Rep. Bob
Filner, D-San Diego, a member of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs.
"It's a cover-up of mistakes that have ended with the death of Americans."
Agent Orange was a powerful herbicide used to thin out jungle battlegrounds
and destroy enemy crops in Vietnam. It contained cancer-causing dioxin, yet
the Pentagon insisted for years that it didn't harm anyone. Thousands of
sick veterans filed Agent Orange compensation claims, but they couldn't
prove they had been exposed to the herbicide.
It took an act of Congress for Vietnam veterans to be compensated for some
cancers. The Senate passed the Agent Orange compensation bill Jan. 30,
1991, the same day Camp Pendleton Marines led the first major ground battle
of the Persian Gulf War.
Yet the military didn't keep track of exposures in the gulf, either, and
many veterans now suffer the unexplained symptoms that have come to be
called Gulf War Syndrome.
"The tragedy is that we haven't learned the lessons of Vietnam and Agent
Orange, and we're suffering many of the same consequences," said Senate
Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., who co-authored the compensation bill.
Gulf War veterans say their own stories support their contention that the
government won't embrace sick veterans who return home from future wars.
"I don't trust them now, and I don't trust them in the future," said Victor
Suell, a Gulf War vet who lives in Oceanside.
Late-developing symptoms
Suell's symptoms started about a year after he served in the Gulf War.
His hands and feet went numb. A rash broke out on his neck. His abdomen
hurt, and his back ached.
Suell, a former Marine sergeant and career military man, said medics at
Camp Pendleton told him it was all in his head.
He insisted on medical care and was diagnosed with irritable bowel
syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder and adjustment disorder with
depression, which Suell said led to an alcohol dependence he has since
overcome.
He gave a copy of his medical records to The San Diego Union-Tribune.
In 1994, a specialist found that Suell's left kidney was swollen to twice
its normal size. The doctor told him it would fail within 10 years.
Suell was placed on light duty -- no running, marching or physical
training. He gained 20 pounds, and his commander ordered him to do weight
training five days a week.
He was hospitalized in December 1996 for five days. His medical record
noted he was "pressured by command to lose weight," and had been "working
in the weight room daily, to (the) point of exhaustion."
Suell was court-martialed for allegedly missing three days of physical
training a week before he was admitted to the hospital. In spite of his
health problems, he was sentenced to 45 days of hard labor.
Beginning May 12, 1997, he performed his regular duties during the day,
then worked four hours each evening filling sandbags and carrying them to
an eroding berm.
On Saturdays, Suell hauled sandbags from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., with two
half-hour meal breaks.
Before he finished his hard labor, he was notified in a memo that his
commander intended to bust him to corporal. Suell was judged incompetent,
and lost his sergeant stripes.
Camp Pendleton spokesman Lt. Eric Dent said he lacked information to
comment specifically about Suell's treatment. But he felt bad about Suell's
medical problems, he said, and hoped that the mystery of Gulf War symptoms
will be solved.
"We owe these veterans a lot," he said. "One thing we owe them is to follow
up on their illnesses."
Troops were vaccinated
Before the United States sent troops to the Persian Gulf in 1991, the
military studied diseases of the region and vaccinated personnel who were
sent there. But the government did not keep track of individual exposures
to chemicals and other battlefield poisons.
Cassandra Garner, a Gulf War vet who lives in Berkeley, said she raised the
issue of sick Vietnam veterans during her orientation when she joined the
National Guard in 1990. She said she was told such a thing wouldn't happen
again.
"I bought it," she said, "and later I learned that it wasn't true."
Garner, healthy and athletic before the war, can no longer work. She
experiences frequent headaches. Her joints ache. She has endometriosis, a
painful disease of the female reproductive organs that causes internal
bleeding. Four surgeries in two years have failed to correct the condition,
she said.
She receives compensation from the VA, but she had to fight for it. She
can't picture the military ever going out of its way to help sick veterans.
"I wouldn't trust them," Garner said. "I wouldn't believe anything they
have to say."
Bernard Rostker, who took over in 1996 as head of the Pentagon's
investigation of Gulf War illnesses, acknowledged in an interview that his
predecessors did a poor job. When the studies finally began, it was too
late.
Whatever had made Gulf War veterans sick -- perhaps a combination of
poisons including nerve agents, insecticides, radioactive dust from
depleted uranium anti-tank rounds and smoke from burning oil wells -- had
been out of their systems for years. Because researchers don't know who was
exposed to what, they have a slim chance of figuring out why people are
sick.
"With great precision, we will never know," Rostker said.
Timothy Gerrity, a researcher for the Department of Veterans Affairs, said
the only certainty is that a substantial number of Gulf War veterans are
ill.
"It's a fair statement to say Gulf War veterans came back with a different
state of health than when they went," he said. "But our ability to quantify
that is lacking."
Blood tests ordered
The new plan to collect blood for health studies didn't come from the
Pentagon, but from a committee President Clinton appointed in May 1995 to
investigate the health concerns of Gulf War veterans.
In its December 1996 final report, the Presidential Advisory Committee on
Gulf War Veterans Illnesses said the government should anticipate and
prepare for unexplained symptoms following future conflicts.
The assistant secretary of defense ordered the blood tests two months ago
in a letter to the Army, Navy and Air Force surgeons general.
Navy Capt. Michael E. Kilpatrick, the chief medical officer under Rostker,
said blood tests before and after deployments will yield information about
viral, bacterial and parasitic infections, but not chemical exposures.
"This is not going to provide the total answer," he said, "but I think it's
a starting point."
Han Kang, who heads the VA environmental epidemiology office, said more
data are needed for comprehensive statistical studies.
"You would have to have testing in-theater," he said. "It's too late if you
wait until they get home."
But the Pentagon seems unwilling to collect blood during deployments.
"It's not in the protocol," Rostker said. "You can't stop the war and take
blood samples."
Kilpatrick, however, favors testing a random segment of troops in combat
areas to provide more information for statistical studies. He said the
government is working hard to maintain records on people after they leave
the military.
The Pentagon sincerely wants to help veterans who develop health problems,
Kilpatrick said. But he acknowledged that some people -- Gulf War and
Vietnam veterans in particular -- might not believe that.
Poison gas was released
For five years the military insisted that U.S. troops weren't exposed to
chemical weapons in the Persian Gulf. Then, in July 1996, the Pentagon
acknowledged that a huge plume of poison gas was released when the Army's
37th Engineer Battalion blew up an enemy ammunition depot near Khamisiyah,
in southern Iraq.
At first, the Pentagon said only a few hundred troops were exposed.
But over the next 13 months, that estimate grew to 99,000 -- one of every
seven Americans who served in the Gulf War.
Clinton's advisory committee on Gulf War illnesses wrote in its 1996 report
that the Pentagon "conducted a superficial investigation of possible
chemical warfare agent exposures that is unlikely to provide credible
answers to veterans' and the public's concerns."
The Department of Defense had investigated its own wartime conduct, just as
it had studied its own use of Agent Orange.
Last month, a story in The San Diego Union-Tribune found serious flaws in
an Air Force health study of Vietnam War-era airmen exposed to the
herbicide Agent Orange during a series of spraying missions called
Operation Ranch Hand.
The Air Force withheld information about birth defects in children fathered
by airmen who participated in Agent Orange spraying missions. A progress
report expressing concerns about cancer and other health problems was
altered.
The government ignored a National Academy of Sciences recommendation that
the Ranch Hand study be done by scientists outside the military.
High-ranking Air Force officers interfered with the study's data analysis,
undermining its scientific integrity.
Clinton's advisory committee recommended that the investigation of chemical
exposures during the Gulf War be turned over to independent scientists.
"With the failures that have been admitted to, it seems you'd want someone
outside in charge, with authority," said Arthur Caplan, one of 12 members
of the advisory committee, which disbanded last year.
But rather than remove the Pentagon from the investigation, Clinton
appointed a new panel, headed by former Sen. Warren Rudman, to provide
temporary oversight.
"No one took seriously that the DOD was going to give up (the
investigation) in the sense that we have the expertise and we have the
responsibility to know what happened on the battlefield," Rostker said.
But that was true all those years the Pentagon failed to report that troops
might have been exposed to nerve agents. At best, the investigation of
Khamisiyah was incompetent. At worst, the facts were covered up.
Rostker, who once worked at RAND Corp., chose the former.
"Nothing was withheld about Khamisiyah," he said. "We didn't understand
what the hell we were looking at. We didn't know about Khamisiyah."
However, Caplan said he still believes the investigation should be led by
an objective organization, such as the National Academy of Sciences.
The Pentagon would have to take part in the investigation, said Caplan, a
professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. But turning over
unclassified data to scientists outside the government would improve
credibility.
"To shed more light on what happened, that is going to require somebody
besides the people who brought you the first show."
One suspect is eliminated
In its self-investigation of Gulf War illnesses, the military immediately
dropped depleted uranium from the list of possible causes.
Depleted uranium is radioactive waste produced by enriching uranium ore for
use in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Depleted uranium is 60 percent
as radioactive as natural uranium. It is a dense metal that makes superior
anti-tank rounds and tank armor.
It ignites on impact and punches holes in tanks, leaving layers of
radioactive, heavy-metal dust. It was used extensively during the Gulf War
and remains an important military weapon.
The Pentagon now acknowledges that the heavy-metal properties of depleted
uranium can damage the kidneys. A 1990 study by Science Applications
International Corp. for the U.S. Army found that depleted uranium is
"linked to cancer when exposures are internal."
And the Army Surgeon General acknowledged in a 1993 memo that "when
soldiers inhale or ingest DU dust, they incur a potential increase in
cancer risk."
The Pentagon has admitted that Gulf War troops weren't trained in the
proper handling of depleted uranium.
But earlier this year, the Pentagon published a report that concluded what
it has said all along: Depleted uranium has not contributed to the medical
problems of Gulf War veterans. Rostker repeated that view in a March speech
to the American Legion in Washington, D.C.
"Let me be precise," he told the Legionnaires. "To date, DU exposure has
not produced any medically detectable effects."
Rostker often cites a VA examination of Gulf War veterans who have
fragments in their bodies as evidence that no one has been harmed. But that
isn't a scientific study, said Melissa McDiarmid, who heads that
examination.
With fewer than 40 people under what McDiarmid calls "clinical
surveillance," it isn't possible to draw scientific conclusions about
anyone outside that group, she said.
McDiarmid does not support Rostker's belief that no one is sick from
depleted uranium.
"Those aren't my words," she said. "It sends the wrong message. A number of
folks are still recovering from very serious traumatic injuries, so when
they read that nothing is wrong with them, it doesn't sit very well with
them."
A spokesman for a consortium of veterans groups in Washington, D.C., put it
more bluntly.
"Rostker is lying through his teeth on depleted uranium," said Paul
Sullivan of the National Gulf War Resource Center.
No one is sure how many U.S. troops have been exposed to depleted uranium.
Sullivan's group estimates that at least half of America's 700,000 Gulf War
veterans came into contact with it, either in combat or from inhaling
particles in the wind.
Or, like Cassandra Garner, on sight-seeing tours.
Garner was a cook in the National Guard. She was activated for the Persian
Gulf War and wound up guarding Iraqi prisoners crowded inside a big circle
of barbed wire.
She was gung-ho when she arrived, ready to take on Saddam Hussein's army.
But the closest she got to the fighting was a tour of the Highway of Death
-- the road from Kuwait to Basra, a city in southern Iraq.
"The Iraqis got their butts whipped on that road, and I wanted to check it
out," Garner said. "Everybody did."
More than 60 members of her company climbed into vehicles she said were
covered with depleted-uranium dust.
"We were like little kids out on the playground," Garner said. "We were
there for six hours messing around with that stuff."
No one told her it might be dangerous, she said.
Garner also was exposed to pesticides, smoke from oil well fires and a
variety of other poisons. After about a week, she complained of an aching
back. The medics guessed she had strained it, but Garner didn't think so.
She was strong, an athlete who had pondered a pro basketball career. She
could tolerate pain.
After she was released from the service in late 1993, the VA gave Garner 10
percent disability for her aching joints and back. She said she was told
the problem with her reproductive organs wasn't service-related. Neither
were her headaches.
Garner persisted, and gradually received more. In December 1997, she
reached 100 percent. She collects $1,964 per month.
"Rest assured, I would rather work," she said. "I tried to go to school,
but I can barely sit down sometimes. I can't even get comfortable in my bed
sometimes."
A basketball career is out of the question.
"I can't get my shooting range. I've tried, but I feel like my arm is
detaching. I can't even dribble a basketball without pain."
Re-enlistment request denied
In spite of what he regarded as harassment by his superiors, Victor Suell
tried to re-enlist in the Marines. He had been in the military more than 18
years, and was nearing retirement.
Suell said his re-enlistment request was denied for medical reasons. Yet he
received an honorable discharge last year, not a medical one.
He still has pain in his lower back. His rash comes and goes. His kidney is
still swollen.
"There is nothing wrong with me," Suell said sarcastically. He held up a
bag crammed with pill bottles. "But here is all the medicine they're giving
me."
He receives 20 percent disability from the VA for hypertension and
post-traumatic stress disorder. He attends Mira Costa College in Oceanside
and wants to work in human resources.
Suell doesn't regret serving in the Persian Gulf War. But he is bitterly
disappointed with the way he was treated afterward.
"I took an oath to defend my country," he said. "I was willing to do it.
But you come back sick, and you get no help.
"There's a problem there."
Kilpatrick, the medical officer under Rostker, can understand why Suell and
other veterans are bitter about their treatment and don't believe the
Pentagon will follow through with its plan to help sick veterans in the
future.
"I don't blame them for being skeptical."
But he said the Pentagon is determined to regain the public's trust.
`REVOLUTIONARY' PLAN
The Clinton administration announced a plan in June 1994 for the Department
of Veterans Affairs to compensate sick Persian Gulf War veterans without
direct evidence their illnesses were related to service in the Middle East.
"This legislation is revolutionary. We have never before provided payment
for something we're not even certain exists," said Jesse Brown, VA
secretary at the time.
The VA began issuing compensation checks in April 1995. But a report by the
U.S. General Accounting Office, published in May 1996, said nearly 95
percent of the first 4,144 claims were rejected for lack of evidence.
More claims were approved after that. As of November, Gulf War veterans had
filed 9,721 claims for undiagnosed illnesses, and 2,429 of them are
receiving compensation or a pension.
Depending on the level of disability, veterans receive compensation ranging
from $95 to $1,964 per month.
=========================================================
Comments:
The Pentagon buys its weapons from places like Oak Ridge run by the DOE
and they all know the huge numbers of sick workers and residents here that
have all the same symptoms as in Gulf War illness. They also know the
uranium releases from here were huge and also huge in the gulf war. It
affected the entire area here and in the gulf. It is real simple to
observe and the Govt is intentionally confusing this issue to hide its and Oak
Ridge's mistakes.
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