thedrifter
12-31-02, 10:32 AM
The Fallout of War
Iraqi Ammo Debris Fell on Jim Stutts in '91. In Many Ways, He's Being Pelted Still.
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page C01
"I'm not the same person as I was when I left," says James Stutts, a physician who volunteered for ambulance duty during the Gulf War and is now disabled by dementia.
(J. Breck Smither For The Washington Post)
BEREA, Ky. -- The doctor sits at home, filling the hours with television, writing himself reminders that look like prescriptions. "From the desk of Dr. James Stutts," says his notepad, itself a reminder that he practiced medicine until, one day, he knew it was no longer safe. He could not remember faces and names.
Before he retired, Lt. Col. Stutts commanded medical staffs on military bases. He used to helicopter into combat zones to treat the wounded. He still keeps his Army uniform pressed and ready, as if someday he might return to duty.
He is 54 and disabled by dementia. He is a casualty of the Persian Gulf War -- one of the tens of thousands of men and women who left feeling healthy but fell sick after coming home. They filed disability claims at a rate far higher than veterans of other wars.
As the United States deploys troops in anticipation of another battle with Iraq, the Pentagon says it still has no answer for an enigma that has confounded experts for more than a decade: What caused all those Gulf veterans' symptoms? The memory lapses, fatigue, joint pains, rashes, headaches, dizzy spells . . . not to mention the cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease and birth defects.
Many vets speculated that they were poisoned by a combination of vaccines, pesticides, oil fire pollution and other battlefield toxins, including chemical and biological weapons stockpiled by Saddam Hussein. For years their maladies weren't taken seriously: It's stress, it happens after every war and it's all in your head, the military doctors said.
Stutts and his wife, Carol, believed as much. They doubted reports of this so-called Gulf War Syndrome. But by 1996, the doctor himself could no longer work. He suffered limb spasms and seizures that made him fall down stairs.
Bracing himself on a cane, Stutts deposits a pile of medical records on the kitchen counter. One file contains images of his brain. "It's like Swiss cheese," he says.
Here are notices from the Pentagon, saying he may have been exposed to the nerve gas sarin in the Persian Gulf. Here, too, is a recent determination from the Department of Veterans Affairs, ruling Stutts fully disabled and citing "neurotoxin exposure" during his deployment. Now he is a patient at a VA clinic in nearby Lexington, where 100 Gulf War vets -- most in their thirties and forties -- are being treated for symptoms of early Alzheimer's.
It's all evidence of . . . something. After 11 years, the VA and Pentagon no longer dispute that troops got sick. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying why.
With his medical training, Stutts understands that good science takes time and hypotheses must be rigorously tested. But as a patient, he has reached certain conclusions.
"I'm not the same person as I was when I left." And: "I would have preferred to have stepped on a land mine than to be exposed to what I was exposed to over there."
Out of the Blue?
THUD-THUD-THUD. Brown columns of smoke thrust from the desert floor into a milky blue horizon.
"Yeah, baby. Woo!" a soldier shouts. More explosions. "Let's get it on!"
The Army engineers ooh and aah like they're watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's March 4, 1991, and they're in southern Iraq, a few miles from a massive ammunition depot called Khamisiyah. They've rigged charges to blow up 39 of 100 ammo bunkers at the site. The engineers are finishing a job begun during the air war in January, when pilots targeted Hussein's conventional and chemical weapons facilities.
"Air Force, eat your heart out," somebody taunts on a videotape shot that afternoon. Thunderheads of dust and sand roil the sky, resembling nuclear mushrooms.
Suddenly -- incoming! Artillery shells and debris start raining down on troops observing the demolition. The "cook-offs" reach units up to 12 miles away.
"We felt all hell had broken loose," Sgt. Brian Martin of the 37th Engineer Battalion would later tell a congressional panel. His videotape became part of the evidence for a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee report that excoriated the military in 1997 for resisting "strong evidence" linking Gulf War illnesses to battlefield toxins.
Neither Martin nor anybody else on the ground realized that at least one of the bunkers -- No. 73 -- contained hundreds of Iraqi rockets filled with sarin and cyclosarin. Six days later, at a nearby open rubble pit, the troops detonated more rockets.
The CIA knew about this deadly stockpile, but its warnings didn't reach commanders in the field in time, documents show. For five years after the war, the Pentagon denied that U.S. troops were exposed to any chemical fallout.
Then after persistent pressure from Congress and veterans advocates, the military announced in June 1996 that 400 soldiers at Khamisiyah were "presumed exposed." A year later, the number swelled to 100,000, after experts studied the winds and movement of the Khamisiyah "plume." They determined that troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were within range. Personnel received notices saying they "may have been exposed to a very low level" of sarin, but "long-term health problems are unlikely."
How much nerve agent was released? About 818 pounds, according to a Pentagon study two years ago. But that's just the latest guesstimate; earlier intelligence reports said more than a ton was detonated in Bunker 73 alone. (One drop of sarin would kill a person within minutes.)
The Pentagon argues this point: Nobody died at Khamisiyah. Nobody showed obvious signs of being gassed. It wasn't until months later that young soldiers complained of feeling old and feeble.
"I am an ex-paratrooper who needs a cane and wheelchair to get around," Martin, 33, testified. "I get lost when I drive sometimes and forget where I am at sometimes."
In Range
In January 1991, then-Capt. Stutts deployed to Saudi Arabia with the 138th Medical Support Company. He recalls being bored. He had served as a medical corpsman during two tours in Vietnam, swooping into jungles amid bloodbaths. Operation Desert Storm, with its 100-hour ground war, produced relatively few casualties.
"I didn't come over here to twiddle my thumbs," he told fellow doctors. Stutts volunteered for air ambulance duty with the 316th Medical Detachment that choppered into southeastern Iraq.
Was he ever close enough to see or hear the explosions at Khamisiyah? Sitting on his living room couch nearly 12 years later, he squeezes his eyes shut and strains to fill his mental screen.
He must have been because he received Pentagon letters confirming it, in 1997 and 2000.
Otherwise, it's all a blank.
"That's the thing that I really hate from day to day," he says. "I can't remember things that are important."
The Volunteer
To prod her husband's recollections, Carol Stutts leafs through old military records and photo albums. Who's this handsome guy? She laughs, knowing the answer: It's Jim as a teenage sailor on a hospital ship.
One of six kids in a working-class Milwaukee household, Stutts joined the Navy in 1965, straight out of high school. He viewed the service as his only route to medical school. It took him 17 years to get there.
In between came active duty and the reserves and jobs in Philadelphia emergency rooms. Recalling the onslaught of gunshot victims, he says, "I went from one combat zone to another." He enrolled at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1982 on a full scholarship from the Army.
By 1988, Stutts was raising a daughter and working as director of health services at an Army base in Bayonne, N.J. He'd lost his first wife to cancer.
One day he noticed a personal ad in a local paper. It was placed by Carol -- a buoyant 29-year-old looking to get married and start a family. She quickly decided on Jim. He was stable, determined.
"I had energy I could bottle and sell," Stutts recalls. "I could work circles around the most avid worker."
When America launched Operation Desert Shield, he volunteered. He was 42.
In November 1990, before deploying, the doctor had his ruptured appendix removed. Surgeons also discovered Crohn's disease, a colon disorder, which he controlled with medication and diet. But he felt strong, an officer with taut muscles and no gray in his hair.
Falling Down
After four months at war, Stutts returned to take a medical command in Yuma, Ariz. He never before had had trouble completing the two-mile run and calisthenics for his semiannual fitness qualifications. But that summer his muscles and joints ached. He felt fatigued. "I guess I'm just getting old," he told himself.
In 1992 Stutts left active duty, moving the family (now including a young son) to take an emergency room job in Kentucky, near Berea, a charming college town in the Appalachian foothills. He also joined the National Guard.
Later he went into private practice, and did well financially. But his mind -- and overall health -- kept failing. Walking in the back yard or standing in the bathroom, he'd suddenly collapse. He had headaches, dizziness, strange temperature fluctuations.
continued.........
Iraqi Ammo Debris Fell on Jim Stutts in '91. In Many Ways, He's Being Pelted Still.
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page C01
"I'm not the same person as I was when I left," says James Stutts, a physician who volunteered for ambulance duty during the Gulf War and is now disabled by dementia.
(J. Breck Smither For The Washington Post)
BEREA, Ky. -- The doctor sits at home, filling the hours with television, writing himself reminders that look like prescriptions. "From the desk of Dr. James Stutts," says his notepad, itself a reminder that he practiced medicine until, one day, he knew it was no longer safe. He could not remember faces and names.
Before he retired, Lt. Col. Stutts commanded medical staffs on military bases. He used to helicopter into combat zones to treat the wounded. He still keeps his Army uniform pressed and ready, as if someday he might return to duty.
He is 54 and disabled by dementia. He is a casualty of the Persian Gulf War -- one of the tens of thousands of men and women who left feeling healthy but fell sick after coming home. They filed disability claims at a rate far higher than veterans of other wars.
As the United States deploys troops in anticipation of another battle with Iraq, the Pentagon says it still has no answer for an enigma that has confounded experts for more than a decade: What caused all those Gulf veterans' symptoms? The memory lapses, fatigue, joint pains, rashes, headaches, dizzy spells . . . not to mention the cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease and birth defects.
Many vets speculated that they were poisoned by a combination of vaccines, pesticides, oil fire pollution and other battlefield toxins, including chemical and biological weapons stockpiled by Saddam Hussein. For years their maladies weren't taken seriously: It's stress, it happens after every war and it's all in your head, the military doctors said.
Stutts and his wife, Carol, believed as much. They doubted reports of this so-called Gulf War Syndrome. But by 1996, the doctor himself could no longer work. He suffered limb spasms and seizures that made him fall down stairs.
Bracing himself on a cane, Stutts deposits a pile of medical records on the kitchen counter. One file contains images of his brain. "It's like Swiss cheese," he says.
Here are notices from the Pentagon, saying he may have been exposed to the nerve gas sarin in the Persian Gulf. Here, too, is a recent determination from the Department of Veterans Affairs, ruling Stutts fully disabled and citing "neurotoxin exposure" during his deployment. Now he is a patient at a VA clinic in nearby Lexington, where 100 Gulf War vets -- most in their thirties and forties -- are being treated for symptoms of early Alzheimer's.
It's all evidence of . . . something. After 11 years, the VA and Pentagon no longer dispute that troops got sick. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars studying why.
With his medical training, Stutts understands that good science takes time and hypotheses must be rigorously tested. But as a patient, he has reached certain conclusions.
"I'm not the same person as I was when I left." And: "I would have preferred to have stepped on a land mine than to be exposed to what I was exposed to over there."
Out of the Blue?
THUD-THUD-THUD. Brown columns of smoke thrust from the desert floor into a milky blue horizon.
"Yeah, baby. Woo!" a soldier shouts. More explosions. "Let's get it on!"
The Army engineers ooh and aah like they're watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's March 4, 1991, and they're in southern Iraq, a few miles from a massive ammunition depot called Khamisiyah. They've rigged charges to blow up 39 of 100 ammo bunkers at the site. The engineers are finishing a job begun during the air war in January, when pilots targeted Hussein's conventional and chemical weapons facilities.
"Air Force, eat your heart out," somebody taunts on a videotape shot that afternoon. Thunderheads of dust and sand roil the sky, resembling nuclear mushrooms.
Suddenly -- incoming! Artillery shells and debris start raining down on troops observing the demolition. The "cook-offs" reach units up to 12 miles away.
"We felt all hell had broken loose," Sgt. Brian Martin of the 37th Engineer Battalion would later tell a congressional panel. His videotape became part of the evidence for a House Government Reform and Oversight Committee report that excoriated the military in 1997 for resisting "strong evidence" linking Gulf War illnesses to battlefield toxins.
Neither Martin nor anybody else on the ground realized that at least one of the bunkers -- No. 73 -- contained hundreds of Iraqi rockets filled with sarin and cyclosarin. Six days later, at a nearby open rubble pit, the troops detonated more rockets.
The CIA knew about this deadly stockpile, but its warnings didn't reach commanders in the field in time, documents show. For five years after the war, the Pentagon denied that U.S. troops were exposed to any chemical fallout.
Then after persistent pressure from Congress and veterans advocates, the military announced in June 1996 that 400 soldiers at Khamisiyah were "presumed exposed." A year later, the number swelled to 100,000, after experts studied the winds and movement of the Khamisiyah "plume." They determined that troops in Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia were within range. Personnel received notices saying they "may have been exposed to a very low level" of sarin, but "long-term health problems are unlikely."
How much nerve agent was released? About 818 pounds, according to a Pentagon study two years ago. But that's just the latest guesstimate; earlier intelligence reports said more than a ton was detonated in Bunker 73 alone. (One drop of sarin would kill a person within minutes.)
The Pentagon argues this point: Nobody died at Khamisiyah. Nobody showed obvious signs of being gassed. It wasn't until months later that young soldiers complained of feeling old and feeble.
"I am an ex-paratrooper who needs a cane and wheelchair to get around," Martin, 33, testified. "I get lost when I drive sometimes and forget where I am at sometimes."
In Range
In January 1991, then-Capt. Stutts deployed to Saudi Arabia with the 138th Medical Support Company. He recalls being bored. He had served as a medical corpsman during two tours in Vietnam, swooping into jungles amid bloodbaths. Operation Desert Storm, with its 100-hour ground war, produced relatively few casualties.
"I didn't come over here to twiddle my thumbs," he told fellow doctors. Stutts volunteered for air ambulance duty with the 316th Medical Detachment that choppered into southeastern Iraq.
Was he ever close enough to see or hear the explosions at Khamisiyah? Sitting on his living room couch nearly 12 years later, he squeezes his eyes shut and strains to fill his mental screen.
He must have been because he received Pentagon letters confirming it, in 1997 and 2000.
Otherwise, it's all a blank.
"That's the thing that I really hate from day to day," he says. "I can't remember things that are important."
The Volunteer
To prod her husband's recollections, Carol Stutts leafs through old military records and photo albums. Who's this handsome guy? She laughs, knowing the answer: It's Jim as a teenage sailor on a hospital ship.
One of six kids in a working-class Milwaukee household, Stutts joined the Navy in 1965, straight out of high school. He viewed the service as his only route to medical school. It took him 17 years to get there.
In between came active duty and the reserves and jobs in Philadelphia emergency rooms. Recalling the onslaught of gunshot victims, he says, "I went from one combat zone to another." He enrolled at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1982 on a full scholarship from the Army.
By 1988, Stutts was raising a daughter and working as director of health services at an Army base in Bayonne, N.J. He'd lost his first wife to cancer.
One day he noticed a personal ad in a local paper. It was placed by Carol -- a buoyant 29-year-old looking to get married and start a family. She quickly decided on Jim. He was stable, determined.
"I had energy I could bottle and sell," Stutts recalls. "I could work circles around the most avid worker."
When America launched Operation Desert Shield, he volunteered. He was 42.
In November 1990, before deploying, the doctor had his ruptured appendix removed. Surgeons also discovered Crohn's disease, a colon disorder, which he controlled with medication and diet. But he felt strong, an officer with taut muscles and no gray in his hair.
Falling Down
After four months at war, Stutts returned to take a medical command in Yuma, Ariz. He never before had had trouble completing the two-mile run and calisthenics for his semiannual fitness qualifications. But that summer his muscles and joints ached. He felt fatigued. "I guess I'm just getting old," he told himself.
In 1992 Stutts left active duty, moving the family (now including a young son) to take an emergency room job in Kentucky, near Berea, a charming college town in the Appalachian foothills. He also joined the National Guard.
Later he went into private practice, and did well financially. But his mind -- and overall health -- kept failing. Walking in the back yard or standing in the bathroom, he'd suddenly collapse. He had headaches, dizziness, strange temperature fluctuations.
continued.........