Troops have always returned from war with battle scars: bullet holes, missing limbs, emotions savaged by stress. But the most controversial Persian Gulf war casualties came not from enemy fire or shell shock.
The culprit, some say, may be more insidious-and harder to pin down.
Operation Desert Storm – a high-tech battle fought with radioactive weapons amid a witches’ brew of chemicals against a backdrop of burning oil wells – may have unleashed massive doses of poisons and carcinogens onto battlefields.
That toxic cocktail, some experts believe, is causing vets to suffer what has become known as the Gulf War Syndrome, an array of persistent and unexplained illnesses, from rashes to cancers.
Thousands of veterans have complained that contact with various poisons in the gulf region made them sick. They and other critics blame the military, which meticulously planned for every conceivable twist of conventional warfare, for being unprepared to fight this invisible foe.
“Technology has outstripped our capability to deal with the results,” said Victor Silvester, president of the Operation Desert Shield-Desert Storm Association, a support group for gulf war veterans.
“Uncle Sam spent millions teaching our troops how to fight a war with the ultimate weapons and chemicals. But how much time was spent on trying to figure out what the medical cost might be if there’s an accident or disaster? Now these veterans are fighting a war for their very lives.”
Some victims are tired, losing weight and spitting up blood. Others have severe, unexplained headaches or aching joints. A few are so sick that they can’t work or are hospitalized. A handful have died of heart attacks and cancer – health problems that survivors believe have their roots in the gulf region. Their widely reported plight has prompted a flurry of congressional measures to get immediate medical care and compensation.
But now others are asking a deeper question: What did the military know about the potential environmental dangers in the gulf region, and did it do enough to protect U.S. troops?
It’s an issue that has dogged the military for decades. In Vietnam, it was Agent Orange. In World War II, it was exposure to mustard gas in classified tests of protective equipment. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was secret Army experiments on veterans involving radiation and LSD.
Now, gulf war vets are testifying before Congress about a new array of wartime exposures. Their stories fill hundreds of pages in the Federal Register. Some are told time and again: being exposed to radioactivity released on impact by U.S. weapons, spraying carcinogenic paint without protection, choking on oil fires, becoming violently ill after being given experimental pills and vaccines, and possible contact with chemical or biological agents.
Taking these symptoms together, some advocates believe that many gulf war vets are suffering from so-called multiple chemical sensitivity, a controversial and still unproven ailment believed to be brought on by prolonged or intense exposure to poisons.
The Defense Department flatly says it did everything possible to prepare troops for exposure to poisons in the gulf region. It has also assembled several panels of scientists and other experts that have concluded that veterans’ problems are probably a coincidence or the result of stress, not exposure to chemicals.
“If responsibility is being doled out and we deserve it, we’ll certainly take it,” said Peter Esker, the chief of health-care strategy for the Army surgeon general.
“But nothing was done by us to intentionally harm our soldiers. We simply don’t know what to concede.”
But the controversy just won’t go away. Within recent weeks, for instance, a member of Congress forced the Defense Department to admit that it deliberately had kept secret a Czech report saying low levels of Iraqi nerve agent were detected in the air during the war.
But on Nov. 10, Defense Secretary Les Aspin said there was “no linkage” between the low levels of nerve and mustard gases detected during the gulf war and illnesses among veterans.
He discounted the possibility that the chemicals came from Iraqi attacks or allied bombing raids on Iraqi weapons sites. But he conceded that the actual source of the chemical releases remained unknown.
