Gulf War Veterans Agree Enough-Time for Truth

After 20 years Gulf War Veterans that Are Ill Ask, America Have You Forgotten US?

Part 1 of a series on Gulf War illness and Funding For Veterans:

You remember us you sent us off to the Gulf War 1990 right in time for the Super Bowl. Will now we see Representative Bachman and Heritage Center is going to target Veterans Funding Again. Time to try and get pieces of the truth out there yet again. In lighting the flame of justice and concern for ill Desert Storm Veterans (Gulf War 1990-91) a bit of review of the history of gulf war illness is needed. It has been 20 years since we sent these veterans off to war and their anniversary has not received as much attention as one would expect. America does not seem to realize that this group of veterans truly need America’s full attention.

In 1998 a small book was written by Seymore M Hersch, but not much follow up was done and for sure now at the 20 year anniversary of that war it seemed relevant to review Mr Hersch’s book that was not on a best seller list although it should have been. It seems that America and its media has not adequately covered this group of veterans since 911 occured.

As the department of Veterans Affairs deals with new presumptions for the Vietnam Veterans that suffered Agent Orange Exposures. A situation that resulted in some amount of congressional attention concerning costs and also being the focus of more backlog at the VA Claims and the influx of huge numbers of our current force from OIF/OEF also trying to get thru the VA Claims process. The Gulf War Veterans are falling further behind.
There have been reports that the new congress are now considering having veterans benefits and medical research being targeted as a potential area for lawmakers to cut in order to cut federal spending. It seemed like a teachable moment for all newly elected US Representatives and Senators and a refresher course for everyone else to look at the group that served 20 years ago.

The background starts with an interview done some time ago on Seymore M Hersh. A portion of that interview that deals with gulf war illness and his book “Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government”.

INTERVIEW

How did you go from writing about John Kennedy’s sex life to writing about Gulf War disease?

So he was patriotic. Not the kind of guy to make waves with the military. Right. So he mailed me stuff and once I started reading it, I said, “Wait. It can’t be.” For the record, I never looked at this from an epidemiological, from a medical point of view. But whether Gulf War disease is psychological, as the Army has been saying for seven years, or whether it is some horrible complex syndrome we won’t find out about for 20 years, these guys are sick.

* Note for the record here….Major Michael Donnelly, USAF, F16 pilot, Falcon’s Cry- died several years ago and his father, Tom, Marine and former Connecticut legislator has also died

Why didn’t the public hear about Gulf War Syndrome immediately after the war was over?
Nobody wanted to pee on the parade. It was our first big victory since World War II. Colin Powell was a hero. They just didn’t want anything to diminish the victory.

In your book you write about what a poor job the press did to illuminate the horrors of it.
Every reporter was put on notice that they couldn’t do any independent interviews — whether you were working in the Pentagon, for a news service or working in the field in Saudi Arabia. And the press accepted the restrictions, with a little grumbling. Why did they accept it? Because we had Colin Powell and Norm Schwarzkopf, we had heroes. We could flood the network news with these wonderful guys who were articulate and bright and decent people. They figured out: Give the press something for the nightly news, and away they go.

You say a good investigative team on a newspaper or magazine should have written about the syndrome.
I am just sorry that Monica Lewinsky wasn’t a Gulf War veteran who was ill. You know what makes those stories work is they are simple. This isn’t a simple story. When I go to journalism schools to speak, kids say, “How do you do what you do?” And I say, “Read before you write.”

Well, this guy, a researcher for former Michigan Sen. Don Riegle named Jim Tuitt, read the U.N. reports. After the Gulf War ended, as part of the peace agreement, Saddam Hussein accepted U.N. sovereignty or stewardship over his weapons. They are still doing it — they call it the “unscom.” [The U.N.] put out a report within a year and a half after the war saying, “Oh, man, you Americans screwed up. Where you thought the nerve gas was, it wasn’t. There were 90 different facilities where nerve agents either were stored, manufactured or somewhere in the process that you didn’t know about.” Therefore, as Tuitt and Don Riegle said in reports which were generally ignored, too, the possibility exists that we bombed the hell out of a lot of nerve gas facilities, inadvertently, not deliberately.

How do we know there wasn’t a cover-up?
It would be wonderful to think that we covered it up because that would suggest that we had some brains. Basically, it was much worse than that. Nobody knew anything.

Why didn’t the Pentagon pay heed to what the U.N. was saying?
It is the notion of corrections. What happens in the Pentagon is, you are the head of a defense intelligence agency, or the head of a section or a new general officer, and you replace somebody who has gone on to a bigger job, and a year later, you learn that everything that your predecessor did was full of crap. Are you going to write a report saying that he did everything wrong? Are you going to say that about the man who could possibly be your next boss? There are no lessons learned. It is very sad but it is a bureaucracy.

The Pentagon repeatedly said that Gulf War Syndrome was the result of stress. It seems to me though you don’t need to be an M.D. to know that there are physiological things going on. It seems like the stress explanation was not only insulting to the vets, but it seems so unsound, medically.
They [the government] didn’t want to soil the war. The feeling was, maybe we didn’t do so well in Grenada, Somalia or Panama, but we are back now. By 1994-95 a number of VA doctors were starting to say, “This is not stress. We are seeing chromosomal damage, we’re seeing DNA damage, we’re seeing brain stem damage. There is something else at work here besides stress. Four doctors were told to stop saying those things, but they refused to stop — they either resigned or were fired. In general it was understood among the physicians within the VA that if you decided to criticize the notion of stress, you were jeopardizing your career.

Is it too strong to say that there was a conspiracy at the top levels of government to hide this disease? I know that word is loaded.
The good guys in the military are really ashamed of what happened. Let’s just say there was a shared, political perception. The factual underpinning is this: The first group to complain about symptoms were National Guards and reservists. The fact is, and I quote an assistant secretary of the Army as saying this, reservists and National Guardsmen are basically thought of as the “Christmas help.” The first complaints came from them, so there was much contempt. The attitude was, “Oh, they are just a bunch of cowards. They want a handout.” In the first couple of years, the regular Army guys didn’t come forward for two reasons: One, real men don’t cry. Two, the Army was being cut from a million to under half a million in 1991-92, and reporting symptoms might get you kicked out.

You are very critical of Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf.
My complaint about men like Powell and Schwarzkopf, who I sort of get along with, and who spoke to me on the record, is that after they retired — Powell left in ’93, Schwarzkopf in ’91 — that was it for them. They are not going to start criticizing the lack of treatment for the vets because the people that replaced them would view that as Monday morning quarterbacking and they’d rather just have peace in the family. The vets’ interpretation is that they don’t give a damn.

When I told Powell that the vets were angry he got mad at me. He said, “You tell the vets that once I retired, my obligation was done, as far as I am concerned.” My wife said, “He retired to a bestselling book, and $60,000 speech fees, and these guys retired to a life full of a disease that they were told was in their head.”

You say Gulf War disease is a case of “criminal negligence.” Who do you think is ultimately responsible?
I thought a lot about what I said. The failure of the intelligence community to know what was out there, and to understand it, that is negligence. To send boys into harm’s way, without really knowing everything about [the nerve agents]? As a journalist, I have my one-man crusade. I am going to hold these guys to the highest possible standard, whether it is George Bush or Colin Powell or Henry Kissinger. No mercy for those guys. I don’t care if Colin Powell is everybody’s pin-up hero. I don’t care if he’s retired. He owed those kids. He was out there and was a hero because of what they did, not because of what he did. If the public won’t hold leaders to the highest standard, then the press should. But they aren’t and it is a terrible failing.
I got this series of phone calls from a guy named Tom Donnelly, a dad whose son was a Gulf War vet. I returned the call and I got this man, a Catholic, upper-middle-class guy from Connecticut, and I heard something in his voice that I hadn’t heard since Vietnam; he was radicalized. He had a son who had been in Little League, Boy Scouts and the Marines — officer training school and flight school. By 1991, he was a major flying as an Air Force pilot. He flew in 44 missions during the Gulf War and three or four years later, he got sick. The Pentagon, the military doctors initially told him it was flu. When he kept on insisting that he was ill, that something was wrong, they took him off flight status, discharged him from the military and denied him benefits. Tom Donnelly’s son was dying. And he thought there was a connection between his [Gulf War service] and his son’s illness. [Donnelly] was a guy — I am telling you — if he’d lived in Montana, he would have been in the militia.

Then reviewing the dog eared copy of his book to pick out more segments that those who have forgotten or never knew more of what the gulf war veterans became recipients of when they chose to serve their country.

From Seymour M Hersh’s “Against All Enemies: Gulf War Syndrome: The War Between America’s Ailing Veterans and Their Government”,

Page 12:

“Seaquist, a navy captain on duty at the Pentagon, was not alone in his fears. He had been at work for months on a specially assembled team that had been pulled together by Richard Cheney, the secretary of defense, and told to find a way to neutralize a possible Iraqi biological warfare attack with anthrax, or the even more deadly botulinum toxin. Worry that Saddam Hussen would resort to such drastic means had ricocheted all fall through the White House and at the top of the Defense Department. The fear was compounded, Seaquist told me in a series of interviews, by a lack of intelligence. No one in Washington knew precisely what virulent materials had been developed in Iraq.

What was known was politically exposlosive. IN THE MID 1980’S a privately owned laboratory in suburban Washington, the American Type Culture Collection, began exporting dozens of batches of deadly anthrax cultures and other pathogens, with licensing from the Department of Commerce, to the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies in Iraq. The shipments came at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, when the Reagan administration’s foreign policy covertly tilted toward Iraq. The Bush administration continued the tilt, and military materiel from Washington to Iraq was in the pipeline as late as JANUARY 1991, when the tilt had completely reversed and the air war against Iraq had begun.

The American press, caught up in enthusiasm for the war, did not report on those shipments at the time, although many were in the public record.”

The Operation Desert Storm Veterans have every right to be upset, angry, and every other emotion toward the leaders that did this and even to this day do not acknowledge what has really happened.

The media has done a poor job of real investigation on Gulf war illnesses.

This group of veterans were posioned! A number of toxins were there and the troops were exposed to including Nerve Agent Chemicals(sarin), radiological substance(Depleted Uranium), and biologically thru alot of methods of exposures. There was also environmental exposures that you could hardly ever imagine…oil fires that in civilian life would have forced community evacuations. Sand inhalation that is then more of a hazard with all the war toxins that would have been mixed in the sand. There was also use of pyridostigmine bromide(as a protective agent against Sarin which was never licensed for that use and was only to be used if soman exposure occurred) and vaccines that contained adjuvants and glycoproteins.

This group of veterans have fought with all layers of elected representatives, the media, the DOD, the VA, social security, administration, etc etc. The veterans have fought to get doctors to provide the right lab and diagnostic testing and to find which tests are useful and which are not. There was and is a huge need for new medical research to fund studies to find better diagnostic testing, to find biomarkers to identify their illnesses, and to find and fund potential treatments. In the course of 20 years doctors and researchers have been outright blackballed and hurt professionally while trying to do their moral and ethical duty for the Desert Storm Veterans(Gulf War 1990-91)!

The veterans have fought against this being written off as stress-ptsd- because that would not take care of their physical physiological problems. Turfing them off to the psychologist got them isolated and did not get these veterans referrals to internal medicine, cardiology, renal, and the other specialties. It does however minimalize cost factor and keeps this group of veterans isolated!

Now the elected representatives are again looking to make cuts to Veterans in order to help with the deficits . This group of veterans want all to be educated and understand the depth of betrayal. At a recent function at President Bush Library at Texas A and M, to recognize the Gulf War anniversary no mention was even made of the Gulf War illness.

Returning yet again to a different section of Mr Hersh’s book:

Page 90:

” Finally what about the responsibility of Generals Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf? In their interview with me, both men expressed support for their troops and dismay at the failure of the American government to provide unstinting medical care. “The first time I heard about Gulf War Syndrome was through the press at the end of 1993,” Schwarzkopf said. “I thought the Defense Department handled it very cavalierly. They blew these guys off. “My GOD!” he added. “Anybody’s who’s sick deserves to be treated.”

Like Powell, Schwarzkopf also emphasized the fact that he retired in mid-1991 from the army. “The minute you are retired,” the general told me, You’re cut off from the flow of events. When you leave, someone else is promoted, and the last thing thet want is some old general coming back.”

” Those answers aren’t good enough for the leaders of the Gulf War veterans’ movement.”…..Retired Major General Don Edwards of the National Guard….believes that Powell’s and Schwarzkopf’s detachment reflects a widespread disconnect at the top of the officer’s corps. “Its almost like they had brain surgery.” Edwards told me. “When they get to be three star (lieutenant general) and above(full general) they seem to lose touch with the field troops and the reality that the important combat requirement is people. It’s all about ego, self success, and playing the game. “How Could true military leaders, he said of Powell and Schwarkopf, allow their soldiers to be treated the way these soldiers were treated.?”

” Former Senator Don Riegle believes the two generals had “a precious obligation to protect those who fight the war before, during, and after. If they get sick in your war, I don’t know how this concern cann’t take up most of every day. How about setting up a foundation? Do speeches? Set up a trust fund to help the vets? I’m not trying to be spiteful.” Reigle added, “but how do you retire from your responsibility? If you lead people in battle, do you leave your own wounded? I’ve seen thousands of them and these people were badly wounded.”

So what happens when the Republican President that sent the veterans to war and the Congress that voted to affirm that action? No one wants to stand up and do the right thing for the Veterans! The cost of wars holds with it the cost of caring for our veterans long after any given war. This is a moral, ethical, required expenditure of funds and the veterans will stand together to guard against any attempt to cut earned benefits. But yet we can spend spend spend for foreign aid and to build more machines of war. This is the beginning of a series of reports on the Gulf War Veterans 1990-91.