Vets Speak Out:
Living with Depleted Uranium and Gulf War Syndrome
April 5th, 2003
Last night, at the University Temple United Methodist Church in Seattle, Gulf War veterans discussed their experiences with "Gulf War Syndrome." There were so many emotions it is difficult to characterize the experience, but the overarching tone was one of outrage. The theme that drove this outrage was the convergence of four US policy decisions:
$20+ billion in VA budget cuts,
$300+ billion in tax breaks to the rich,
government abandonment of sick Gulf War vets,
and the commitment of another generation of vets to the same fate.
Upward of 500 people filled the pews of the large church, with perhaps another couple of hundred in the balcony. A large projector screen stood to the right of the podium. In the hall outside were four tables with literature of various sorts. I bought a copy of Takashi Morizumi's Children of the Gulf War: A Different Nuclear War. Morizumi has been documenting the children of Iraq since 1998, and this booklet is a collection of his photographs taken in various hospitals in Basra and Baghdad. Some are posted online here:
http://www.savewarchildren.org/exhibitPictures.html. Many of these photos are beautiful, but some are horrifying. Morizumi says:
Iraqi hospitals are filled with children suffering from leukemia, cancer and physical deformities. To treat the enormous increase in patients, the two pediatric hospitals in Baghdad had to build special wings for leukemia patients...Doctors are overwhelmed with the number of severely ill patients. Deaths from cancer in Basra...increased from 34 in <1991> before the war to 219 five years later in 1996. Since then, they have continued to soar. In 2000, the figure was 586 deaths, a 17-fold increase.
I paged through this photojournal as the veterans took the stage. Here, a photo of an 8-year-old girl in a white shawl, smiling because she's going home from the hospital; there, a photo of her bald head, denuded of hair because of her leukemia treatment. "She's going home because they've run out of medicine," says her mother. A few pages later is a shot of children playing in a children's cemetary, where the gravedigger says he digs four or five graves a day. Other pages have grim images of children born without skulls or with organs outside their bodies. Some of the severe birth defects remind me of Chernobyl aftermath photos I've seen (Chernobyl: Insight from the Inside, by V.M. Chernousenko).
The MC for the evening was Ellen Murphy, who was arrested on Veteran's Day for trespassing as she handed out leaflets about Depleted Uranium in front of the Bellingham Armed Forces Recruitment Center. Ellen was the MC for the evening, and she is a counselor who has worked with the vet speakers. She briefly described her experience of leafletting-as-civil-disobedience, and a man shouted from the audience, "Thank you, Ellen, we need you." She had him stand, and we saw that he was an older veteran, wearing his envelope cap, which was festooned with buttons.
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The four veterans spoke in turn about their experiences. The first was Alvin Clark, a soft-spoken Army transportation sergeant. In a Southern lilt, he told us that when he returned to the US after service in Gulf War I, he immediately became deathly ill with aplastic anemia. He was unable to work, and he accrued $25,000 in medical bills, because the VA took four years to process his disability claim. He was accused of malingering, his family was subjected to intrusive, accusatory interviews, and his wife left her job for eight months to take care of him, all as he lay near death in his hospital bed. A bone marrow transplant saved his life, and the VA refused to pay for it. It was only the intervention of Sen John McCain that made it happen. His message was that we should not believe what we see in the press and in official Pentagon statements; the reality is very different. He said if it were not for his wife, he would have ended up on dying in the street, as 250,000 other vets have.
The next speaker was ex-USAF Captain Dana Briggs, who is not a Gulf War vet, but he has seen combat operations in Central America and elsewhere around the world. He resigned his commission after participating in strategic planning meetings in which acceptable civilian losses were placed at 20-80 million people, depending on the scenario. He stressed that the job of any military is to "kill and destroy. It has no other purpose." Briggs is from a military family, and he said that at the AF Academy, he was taught a code: "I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do." This brought back nearly forgotten memories of my AFROTC education, where we received the same indoctrination. For him, the outrage is that the US is typically led by people who do lie, cheat, steal, and tolerate those who do. His bleak position is that we have all been prisoners of war since 1941, and that every president since then, including FDR, has been guilty of war crimes.
Next up was Brandi Mitchell, a petite blonde woman. She stood to the side of the podium and was accompanied by a man, which confused me for a moment. Then she started signing, and I realized what was going on: "Gulf War Syndrome" had made her deaf. She had been stationed in the Gulf on the USS Puget Sound in 1993 as a medic, when many people started becoming sick. She said 2/3 of the corpsmen fell ill, and then she contracted meningitis. Apparently nobody knew how the illnesses were spreading. She resigned when she returned to the US, and now her health is in continuous decline. She said she has recently started suffering from migraines and tremors, which are making it difficult to sign. Many tests have been performed, and the VA doctors repeatedly tell her they don't know what's wrong with her; instead they ask her why she's deaf, and she jokes, "You're the doctors, you tell me."
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Then we heard from Indira Rai-Choudhury, a Navy JAG (military attorney). Her disability claim was denied by the VA for ten years, and she has accumulated $18,000 in medical bills. It was only the intervention of Congressman Norm Dicks that got her claim approved. She addressed the current situation in legal terms: the US Constitution is being shredded before our eyes, and "the US is dying." She observed that we spend $5 million dollars a day on Israel, "with more violations of UN resolutions than any nation," but we cut VA funding by over $20 billion. People are being "disappeared," secret evidence is being used in secret trials, and roundups have begun. She said that "Patriot Act II" is a malevolent threat to our freedoms, which permits Ashcroft to declare any organization to be a "terrorist" group, and if you have supported any such organizations, you can be retroactively stripped of your citizenship, She inveighed against JINSA, PNAC, and the neo-con policy makers, painting a picture as bleak as that painted by Dana Briggs: fascism is taking root in the US, and ordinary citizens had better wake up.
All four veterans then sat together for a panel, which unfortunately lasted for only one question: "How do you feel about the coverage of the war?" Sgt. Clark reiterated that we should not believe what we're being told, and that he saw "no reason" for this war. Dana Briggs said he watched the first day, then turned off the television and hasn't watched since. (This drew loud applause.) Brandi Mitchell said she hasn't been following it at all, but she is very worried about her brother and father, who have been deployed to the Gulf. Indira Rai-Choudhury said she couldn't stand to watch the coverage, with its jingoistic, sanitized view of the war.
Next, we were treated to a videotaped address by Dr. Doug Rokke, former head of the Pentagon's Depleted Uranium Project, himself ill with Gulf War Syndrome. He detailed the Pentagon's denial of the disastrous effects of uranium-238 on personnel and on the environment. The recommendations of his Pentagon-sponsored study were: education, medical care, environmental cleanup. Two GAO reports and a separate Pentagon report echoed his recommendations, and to this day none of them has been implemented. He cited a new UNEP report on Bosnia-Herzegovina which shows that U-238 has contaminated local drinking water and can still be found in airborne dust. He also pointed out that "DU" is often contaminated with traces of plutonium, neptunium and americium, which are radioactive to some degree and chemically toxic. Dr. Rokke said that DU injuries are terrible and difficult to treat, and he mentioned the recent friendly fire incident in which a US A-10 attacked British soldiers. He expressed worry for the long-term effects on the survivors.
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108th CONGRESS
1st Session
H. R. 1483
To require certain studies regarding the health effects of exposure to depleted uranium munitions, to require the cleanup and mitigation of depleted uranium contamination at sites of depleted uranium munition use and production in the United States, and for other purposes.
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Following Dr. Rokke, we heard from Congressman Jim McDermott ("Baghdad Jim" to his detractors). He has just introduced legislation for health studies on DU and site cleanup (H.R. 1483,
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.1483: ). He described his trip to Iraq, focusing on the apparent effects of DU in and around Basra. He described alarming increases in severe birth defects, leukemias and child mortality rates. He emphasized that our troops are likely to suffer higher exposures this time, as they are lying on and digging in DU-contaminated dust.
Rep. McDermott also showed us a recent New York Times article purporting to explain possible causes for Gulf War Syndrome; it listed about 12 contaminants like pesticides and oil-well fires, but it omitted DU completely. It occurred to him that the obvious course of action was for the World Health Organization to undertake studies of the region, and he flatly accused the US of spiking attempts by WHO to study DU in Basra. He described his experience as a physician in Vietnam, and how he heard the same sorts of stories from sick soldiers every day for several years. He drew on the Agent Orange experience to put into context what we're seeing now.
He also cited the new UNEP report's finding that DU ordnance which misses its mark will slowly "degrade" and seep into the soil and groundwater. He expressed particular concern about the Navy practice rounds fired off the coast of Washington state; if Bosnia is contaminated by uranium 238, what's happening to our coast?
Rep. McDermott talked a bit about patriotism, saying it is patriotic to want the troops home now, and to want them to be cared for when they return. He had members of Veterans for Peace stand up, and about a half-dozen men rose from the audience, to resounding applause.
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Attorneys protest 'illegal' war
http://news.bellinghamherald.com/stories/20030327/LocalState/134282.shtmlFinally, attorney Joe Pemberton of Bellingham spoke about defending Ellen Murphy. He emphasized that during her trial, they used the term "uranium" instead of "depleted uranium" because "depleted" is misleading; DU is apparently quite pure uranium 238. Mr. Pemberton told us that Dr. Rokke had personally flown to Bellingham from the Midwest to be the expert witness at her trial, but the judge disallowed his testimony in front of the jury. Mr. Pemberton cited similarities between Germany's invasion of Poland and the US invasion of Iraq. He said it was perhaps more courageous for these soldiers to stand up and speak out in these dangerous times than it was for them to enlist. Admitting that he had never been particularly active politically, he urged us to direct our outrage into activism and said that we individually can make a difference. He recounted how he and 30 other Bellingham attorneys had shut their offices down for a week in protest of the invasion, and how this was covered by the New York Times. He closed by telling us not to succumb to depression: "Bush would like nothing better than for us to resort to alcohol, or to drugs sold by the friendly pharmaceutical companies."
Each speaker drew a standing ovation. We heard alarming numbers: 220,000 Gulf War vets on disability, out of 575,000 eligible; 140 Gulf War vets dying each month; over $20 billion dollars to be cut from the VA budget; 386 metric tons of uranium used in anti-tank weapons in Iraq and Kuwait; delays of years in VA disability requests. There were dark rumors of the children of veterans being born with birth defects, of uranium in the semen of vets. The repeated stories of VA denials reminded me of the Soviet Union's "rectifiers" -- the million or so people who cleaned up Chernobyl. As they fell ill by the thousands, the Soviet Union denied their deteriorating health was due to the cleanup effort, diagnosing them OI -- "Ordinary Illness, not related to ionizing radiation." Our military bureaucracy seems to be following a similar path, with the diagnosis of, ironically, DU -- "Diagnosis Uncertain".
The outrage was palpable at last night's presentation. It pervaded the atmosphere. There was outrage that our veterans and Iraq's civilians have been exposed to uranium 238 and then tossed aside in practiced, Soviet style. There was outrage that people who "lie, cheat, steal, and tolerate those who do," people who "have never smelled cordite" (in the words of Colin Powell), people who would use our troops as venture capital to feed their avarice, have sent another generation of soldiers to die on the uranium battlefield. Nobody knows how much DU will be used for the invasion if Iraq, but it seems certain to be a greater sum than what was used in 1991. Our troops are suffering much more direct exposure this time, and Iraq's people in densely populated cities may be on the receiving end of much more uranium ordnance.
How much DU will be deposited in the bodies of our troops and the Iraqi people this time? When will the bill come due? And how will we possibly pay it?
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Online Resources
Depleted Uranium Munitions Study Act of 2003 (H. R. 1483) To require certain studies regarding the health effects of exposure to depleted uranium munitions, to require the cleanup and mitigation of depleted uranium contamination at sites of depleted uranium munition use and production in the United States, and for other purposes.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c108:H.R.1483: (be sure to include the ending colon)
Gulf War Casualties and 'Depleted' Uranium: An Educational Campaign Providing Resources on Radioactive, Chemical and Biological Weapons
http://traprockpeace.org/depleteduranium.htmlChildren of the Gulf War Photo Exhibit
http://www.savewarchildren.org/exhibitPictures.htmlCampaign Against Depleted Uranium
http://www.cadu.org.uk/Low-level Radiation Campaign
http://www.llrc.org/Veterans for Peace
http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Veterans Against Iraq War
http://www.vaiw.orgVeterans for Common Sense
http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/Vietnam Veterans Against War
http://www.vvaw.org/Military Families Speak Out
http://www.mfso.org/Attorneys protest 'illegal' war
http://news.bellinghamherald.com/stories/20030327/LocalState/134282.shtmlMilitary Toxics Project: Depleted Uranium
http://www.miltoxproj.org/DU/DU_Titlepage/DU_Titlepage.htmTrial of Ellen Murphy for protesting military use of depleted uranium
February 11 -12 , 2003, Bellingham, Washington
http://www.bellinghampeace.org/album/2003/2003_02_11trial.htmlEllen Murphy's Pre-trial date
January 7, 2003, Bellingham, Washington
http://www.bellinghampeace.org/album/2003/2003_01_07ellen.htmlEllen Murphy's Court Appearance
http://www.bellinghampeace.org/album/2002/2002_12_17ellen.htmlWallingford Neighbors for Peace (WNFP)
http://groups.msn.com/wallingfordneighborsSNOW Coalition
http://www.snowcoalition.org/ 
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