Gulf War Vets can't Escape Diseases, Nightmares
By Christopher Cook and Nancy Ann Jeffrey
Chris Heath was chasing a prisoner of war who escaped into
the Iraqi desert. Heath had run him down, grabbed him by the
hair and pulled him to the ground when he was awakened by his
wife's yelling.
''I had grabbed her by the neck and was choking her in an
arm lock,'' Heath said. ''I almost killed my wife. It really
scared me. I didn't go back to sleep the rest of the night."
That was three weeks ago. The Persian Gulf War was two
years ago. But for Heath and many other veterans of the short,
one-sided conflict, the nightmares are enduring.
Heath has a recurring rash. He gets ill easily and came
down with chicken pox last year for the second time in his
life.
He has lapses of short-term memory. He has become
quick-tempered. And most nights, he sleeps poorly.
Heath, 28, who has a desk job with Ford Motor Co. in
Dearborn, Mich., was in good health when he went to war for
his country. Now he wonders if his troubles are due to
something the Army gave him to counteract Iraq's arsenal of
chemical and biological weapons, or exposure to such weapons
plus the constant smoke from oil well fires set by Iraqi
soldiers.
Nationwide, according to a congressional study, more than
4,000 Persian Gulf War veterans have complained of illnesses
since returning home.
Heath is among Detroit-area vets examined at the Veterans
Affairs Hospital in Allen Park, Mich. There, two doctors --
noting similar symptoms in so many patients -- began a study
more than a year ago that has produced the most comprehensive
findings to date on what has been labeled Gulf War Syndrome.
While other VA hospitals are only beginning studies,
Drs. B. Milner and Brad Axelrod have seen 250 Gulf veterans
from all kinds of units and found:
- --59 percent had joint pain;
- --56 percent had skin rashes;
- --38 percent had experienced
shortness of breath;
- --37 percent had insomnia;
- --35 percent attention and memory
problems;
- --33 percent had
chronic fatigue;
- --30 percent had persistent
diarrhea;
- --24 percent had nightmares, while
14 percent had night sweats;
- --19 percent had lost hair.
The doctors found nearly 75 percent of the problems
occurred in soldiers who, like Heath, either had contact with
prisoners or were near oil fires.
The only thing they have ruled out as a source of the
maladies is Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome, which other doctors
have raised as a possibility in the suffering Gulf vets.
The syndrome of mental and physical ailments that plague
survivors of a tense, horrendous event such as war often was
cited as an explanation for the erratic or violent behavior of
some Vietnam War veterans.
Axelrod administered neuropsychological examinations and
personality tests to 30 soldiers from Heath's unit, the
Taylor, Mich.-based 1776th Military Police, and found only two
with signs of acute emotional problems. ''Which tells us that
it's not posttraumatic stress disorder,'' Axelrod said. ''At
most, what we're seeing are adjustment reactions.''
As researchers, Axelrod and Milner also find it interesting
that no problems have been reported among the 1775th MP unit,
which shares the Taylor Army Reserve armory with the 1776th
and underwent the same training but was never sent to the
Gulf.
''I haven't heard of any serious illnesses,'' said Capt.
Keith Redmond, commander of the 1775th. ''Just hair loss from
old age.''
Ailments have been reported by 90 members of the 160-member
1776th, 51 of the 189 members of the 1073rd from Greenville,
Mich., and 20 to 40 members of the now-disbanded 301st
Military Police, an Army Reserve Unit based in Inkster, Mich.
While the VA researchers are hampered by time, money and
bureaucracy, the veterans are haunted by Agent Orange, the
defoliant used in Vietnam that was determined 20 years later
to be a cause of cancer in veterans.
''Whatever all of it is,'' said 1st Lt. Mike Stone,
commander of the 1776th and himself afflicted with several
ailments, ''these men need help and answers badly.''
The Pentagon doesn't deny that the Gulf veterans genuinely
are ill. But Defense Secretary Les Aspin said in a recent
report that there is no evidence the Iraqis used chemical or
biological warfare in amounts significant enough to cause the
problems.
Sen. Don Riegle Jr., D-Mich., is among those in Washington
who are demanding better explanations and accelerated
research. Congressional outcries were heightened last month by
a VA doctor from Alabama who said he is treating members of a
Gulf War unit he's convinced were caught in an unreported
Iraqi gas attack.
A Czech army chemical detection unit that served in Desert
Storm has told Sen. Richard Shelby, D-Ala., that it found
evidence of chemical weapons being used at least five times
during the war.
Chief Warrant Officer Joseph Cottrell of Jackson, Mich.,
testified at a congressional hearing that his Fox detection
vehicle picked up significant levels of a blister agent called
Lewisite in a Saudi coastal area where Scud missiles were
intercepted. Cottrell said he sent the data back up the chain
of command but heard nothing more.
Riegle is convinced there is ''reason to believe Saddam
Hussein cooked up chemical cocktails and used them on our
troops.''
He wants to know if Pentagon brass knew it, but kept quiet
to avoid demoralizing the troops.
''We've had two previous situations that I don't want to
see happen again. We had atomic testing in the 1940s and '50s
in which a lot of people got sick and died. We've had the
Agent Orange situation with the Vietnam vets, in which the
government reacted very slowly.''
Military experts say a low-level chemical weapons attack
would have been consistent with the training Iraqi troops
received from the former Soviet Union.
Lt. Col. Roger Kaplan of the U.S. Army center for Military
History said Soviet tactics included the use of chemicals to
sicken enemies before a conventional firepower assault. Also,
Iraq had used chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels and
during its long war with Iran.
But Harvard biochemistry professor Matthew Meselson
believes it would be ''the height of putting on blinders'' to
focus only on ''the exotic and admittedly dramatic
possibility'' of chemical or biological warfare afflicting
U.S. troops.
''These men have had all kinds of experiences which they
otherwise would not have had,'' said Meselson, a specialist in
such weapons. ''Many of them have been vaccinated for things
they wouldn't ordinarily be vaccinated against. Modern
munitions and fuels contain all kinds of synthetic and organic
chemicals not ordinarily experienced in everyday life.''
At the
VA Hospital, Milner said ''Clearly, the 'Gulf War
Syndrome' is too broad an umbrella. It's very obvious to me
that it's a combination of multiple syndromes.
''The focus now should be on the clinical outcome,'' said
Milner, who hopes to be involved in more extensive research.
''We don't have the time to wait 20 years to see what's going
to happen.''
Perhaps more than many units that served in the Gulf, the
MP units from Michigan had fairly constant, close contact with
Iraqis, in addition to potential exposure to oil-fire smoke
and chemical hazards.
For four months, Heath frisked thousands of tired, grubby,
hungry Iraqi POWs, hand-patting each up and down the trouser
legs and across the back and sides. He looked through their
helmets, field jackets and gas masks for contraband or
weapons.
Heath's regular duties also included riding shotgun atop a
three-man Humvee (High Mobility Multi-Wheeled Vehicle), hands
on an M-60 machine gun, escorting convoys of Iraqi prisoners
from the front lines back 50 miles to a processing compound
dubbed Log Base Nellie. The 1776th sometimes rounded up Iraqi
stragglers behind the lines and flushed hold-outs from
bunkers.
After they were processed and checked for medical problems,
the prisoners were penned inside a barbed-wire compound and
fed.
Spec. 4 Curtis Seaborn, the company medic who treated the
sick among them, said ''the Iraqis sometimes hadn't eaten for
days. They had all kinds of ailments ... like lice and fleas
and rashes.''
''Some of the Iraqis clearly had nervous system problems
before we got them. Some had hallucinations. Some twitched and
shook. Others would go into convulsions.''
In a day or two, the POWs would be trucked south to a huge
camp at Hafr al Battin in Saudi Arabia, a tent city
three-quarters of a mile wide and a mile long, operated in
part by the 301st MPs. The compound held up to 17,000 POWs.
Staff Sgt. Lyn Burkett fingerprinted about 200 Iraqis a day
for three months. Sgt. 1st Class Earnest Horton brought food
and clothing to prisoners. Staff Sgt. Bill Lickman often broke
up fights between prisoners trying to best each other in the
chow line.
All have had health problems since coming home.
''Every day, I had some type of physical contact,'' said
Lickman, 38, of Chesaning, Mich., now beset with chronic skin
rashes and diarrhea.
Horton, 36, of Detroit, wore surgeon's gloves to avoid
touching prisoners. But one of his jobs was to collect the
often filthy clothing of new arrivals.
''Sometimes, I'd think: 'Boy, that guy looked bad. Wonder
what he has,''' Horton said. Now, he regularly finds blood in
his stool, wakes up in the middle of the night, and has
trouble remembering things.
At the time she was processing prisoners, Burkett never
gave a thought to any invisible problems she might be
touching.
''You were so busy you didn't have time to think,'' said
the 26-year-old Ecorse, Mich., woman. ''We just wanted to get
the war over with.''
The POW compounds were an hour, two at the most, downwind
from the enormous oil well fires that burned constantly in
Kuwait, freshly bombed Iraqi chemical plants and a massive
Iraqi ammunition center that was destroyed by U.S. forces.
Capt. Tom Howko, the former commanding officer of the
1776th, recalls getting a report that when the oil clouds hung
over Hafr al Battin for a day, oil began dripping from the
lamp posts on the town's main street.
On days the wind pushed to the west, the skies over the the
1776th's position literally blackened. Heath and others tell
of temperatures dropping from 103 degrees Fahrenheit to the
70s in minutes.
Sgt. 1st Class Jim Combs of the same company said that when
he landed back in Indiana in May 1991, he checked into the
Omni Hotel in Indianapolis and climbed into a nice hot bathtub
for the first time in months.
He took three baths before he got clean. His wife,
Kathleen, had to call room service to get the tub scrubbed out
because black oil tar kept coming out of his pores and leaving
a black film.
Members of the 301st MPs recall one April day where they
never saw the sun because the sky was pitch black from smoke.
''When it cleared, you could still smell the smoke in the
air,'' Horton said. ''It was very strong.''
Besids what they touched and breathed, the Gulf vets are
wondering about what they took -- specifically anti-nerve-gas
pills and vaccinations against Anthrax and other types of
biological warfare.
The pill, pyridostigmine bromide, is a longstanding
treatment for patients with myasthenia gravis, a rare
neuromuscular disorder.
Army officials maintain the pill could not be the cause of
the severe and long-term problems plaguing Gulf veterans.
Rudy Richardson, a professor of toxicology at the
University of Michigan, agrees. ''This drug is designed to be
relatively short-acting,'' he said. ''Once you stop the drug,
it should be cleared from the body and the effects should be
reversed.''
But the Gulf War was the first time the pill was used on a
mass scale as an anti-nerve-gas measure in healthy people. The
pill had been tested on about 250 Army soldiers and several
thousand Air Force servicemen during the 1980s, said Chuck
Dasey, a spokesman for the Army's Medical Research and
Development Command.
About 250,000 Persian Gulf troops were issued the pills.
Soldiers were typically given a 21-pill package, enough for
seven days. The prescribed dosage was one pill every eight
hours as long as the threat of chemical warfare was present.
Soldiers were not supposed to take the pills unless ordered by
their unit commanders.
But some soldiers may have taken too much. Some symptoms of
pyridostigmine overdose documented in myasthenia gravis
patients are similar to some of the veterans' health problems.
Soldiers in several units said there was a lot of confusion
about how the pills were to be administered.
As the company medic, Spec. 4 Curtis Seaborn was in charge
of making sure everyone took their pill.
Several men in the unit, nervous about chemical attacks,
''took bromide the wrong way,'' Seaborn said. They took too
many, hoping to build up immunity rapidly in case an attack
came sooner. They got sick, mainly with nausea.
''But I think part of that was intense worry, too,''
Seaborn said.
Soldiers in other units reported racing hearts, shortness
of breath and temporarily impaired eyesight.
Many Gulf veterans also have reported an increase in
agressive behavior, the kind of thing that happened to Heath
in his sleep, and it deeply worries them in part because of an
incident in November 1991, six months after their return.
Spec. John Copeman, who was living with his girlfriend,
attacked her parents and beat them to death with a baseball
bat at their home in South Rockwood, Mich.
Copeman then set the house on fire and ran from police. He
got as far as the Ambassador Bridge. He jumped from the span
into the freezing waters of Detroit River but survived when he
was picked up by a passing mail boat. He now is serving life
in prison for murder.
Most of the soldiers of the 1776th reject any connection
with the war, and say Copeman was eccentric to begin with.
But it nags at some of them.
''When we talk about it, we talk about not wanting to do
'The Copeman Thing,''' Seaborn said.
As part of his research, Milner is collecting data on the
sleep patterns of the 1776th, ''which is very disturbed from
what I can see,'' he said.
But the doctors are lacking in a measuring stick.
''An important comparison group would be the people who
were called up, given the same drugs, same injections and got
all ready and were housed together, and ended up not going
over,'' Axelrod said.
''We know that 59 percent complained of joint pain,''
Axelrod said. ''What's the incidence in an other group that
didn't go? If the count is much lower, then we've really got
something.''
The soldiers are more anxious than the doctors to get some
answers.
Horton recalls Saddam's threats to unleash a terrible
attack on the enemies of Iraq. ''That stays in the back of my
mind,'' Horton said. ''I think he used some chemical weapons
over there ... I wonder about what's going to happen 10 or 15
years down the road. Did I go over there and get something
that's going to kill me later on in life?'' |
