The Fallout of War

[thedrifter]

The Fallout of War <br />
Iraqi Ammo Debris Fell on Jim Stutts in '91. In Many Ways, He's Being Pelted Still. <br />
By Richard Leiby <br />
Washington Post Staff Writer <br />
Monday, December 30, 2002; Page C01 <br />
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[thedrifter]

Just watching TV, sharp pains shot through his legs. He recalls retreating into his den, hoping not to alarm Carol and the children as he rolled on the floor, trying to deaden the pain.

In November 1996, he shut down his practice. But repeated visits to experts showed nothing medically wrong, except some progression of his Crohn's disease. The VA enrolled him in a stress management group.

Carol started to have doubts. Was Jim really sick?

"Knock it off," she screamed at him one day. "Get back to work."

He wanted to, he said. But with worsening memory lapses, he didn't trust himself to drive, let alone care for patients. By late 1997 he was found "unfit for retention" by the National Guard.

One of his doctors, J. Wesson Ashford, wrote in late 1998: "The concern is that these symptoms are caused by sarin neurotoxicity and that sarin is still present in his system."

By now Stutts sometimes needed a wheelchair. By now Carol was starting to feel less like a wife and more like a widow.

False Alarms?

Talk to Gulf War veterans around the country and you'll hear this refrain:

"I tell my wife, 'I feel like a 60-year-old man, like I'm falling apart,' " says Todd Kelly, 36, a former Army paratrooper now working as an engineer in Portland, Ore.

After the war, Kelly experienced joint pains and concentration problems; he still has irritable bowel syndrome. The VA gave him a 60 percent VA disability rating. He was near the Khamisiyah demolition, but like other vets, Kelly doesn't blame his symptoms on one possible toxic exposure.

"We cleaned our vehicles with scrub brushes and diesel fuel for a month," he says. "I'm sure it's not very good for you. It's not Palmolive."

The troops endured sandstorms. They inhaled ash and a mist of oil from destroyed wells. They breathed the dust of spent shells that contained depleted uranium. Bedeviled by bugs, they doused themselves with pesticides and wore flea collars.

During the air war, Kelly watched through night-vision goggles as coalition pilots pounded hundreds of targets in Iraq. Everybody knew Hussein was stockpiling nasty germs and chemicals. What became of that fallout?

The troops's chemical attack alarms sounded constantly. Stressed-out soldiers fumbled for their gas masks and heavy protective suits. They gobbled nerve agent pre-treatment pills.

The Pentagon says that the thousands of alarms were all false; that the equipment was overly sensitive. Eventually some commanders just shut them off.

Throughout the 1990s, Senate and House panels gathered documents and testimony suggesting that Gulf troops were harmed by chemical warfare agents. Today, after their own exhaustive studies, defense officials say it's all anecdotal, or wrong, and there's no proof.

But, citing "lessons learned," deployment health experts express confidence that, this time, alarms and protective equipment and training will all be better. The General Accounting Office isn't so sure; it recently cited "many problems in the Defense Department's capabilities to defend against chemical and biological weapons."

The lesson learned by vets like former Pfc. Kelly is not to trust the official story. "I'm a walking experiment for my government" is how he sees it. Like Agent Orange and the atomic tests, it may take decades for the entire truth to come out, he says.

"They knew all along there were chemicals released in the theater of operations, but they didn't want to tarnish the victory. They should be honest about it."

The Evidence

A standard-issue gas mask and chemical protection suit decorate one corner of Steve Robinson's small office in Silver Spring. A former Army Ranger sergeant, he's head of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans' advocacy group. Crunching recent VA statistics, he has come up with what he calls the "post-war casualty rate" of America's last war with Iraq.

In his view, the numbers demolish the notion of a clean or easy victory. Estimated veterans: 573,000. Number who have proved, to the satisfaction of government doctors, that they had a service-related medical problem: 160,000.

Which comes to nearly 28 percent -- a rate of approved disability claims exceeding World War II (6.6 percent), Korea (5 percent) and Vietnam (9.6 percent).

Some VA and Pentagon officials say the rate is inflated by the government's recent, more liberal policies of evaluating service-related illnesses. Others say the rigors of military life -- all that running and parachuting -- result in higher claims in categories like musculoskeletal woes. Others postulate that previous generations of vets were just tougher.

But, at both the VA and the Pentagon, the top doctors concur on one point: The Gulf vets are not fakers or malingerers.

"This is not a psychosomatic issue," says Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director for deployment health support in the Department of Defense.

Still, after years of study, military doctors say no research has established an etiology, an underlying physical cause.

As for exposure to sarin or other toxins, "I have not seen any scientific evidence to tie those exposures to the illnesses we've seen among Gulf War veterans," says VA toxicologist Mark Brown. "We know people came back with difficult-to-diagnose illnesses. We don't know the cause, but we can provide treatment."

Activists and congressional investigators say the Pentagon wasted years by focusing on a stress explanation. In the case of sarin -- developed as a pesticide in the 1930s -- the Army has long been aware of its effects.

In his book "Gassed in the Gulf," former CIA analyst Patrick Eddington cites an information sheet the Army distributed to troops a dozen years ago. It listed "symptoms of chronic, low dose exposure" to nerve agents, including sarin: "Memory loss, decreased alertness, decreased problem-solving ability, and language problems are suspected but have not been proved by scientific study."

The Pentagon's official position, as stated twice on its Web site: "Current medical evidence indicates that long term health problems from these levels of nerve agent are unlikely."

But in military-funded animal studies, evidence is slowly accumulating that exposure to non-lethal levels of sarin can later suppress the immune system, and cause brain changes and behavior problems. Other researchers have examined survivors of the Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995, finding neurological problems and memory loss as seen in Gulf War patients.

Francis L. O'Donnell, a Defense Department consultant who has reviewed Japanese studies of the incident, calls the data "fuzzy." Some of those hospitalized were later shown to have subtle nervous system changes, he says, but he also notes that among them were alcohol users. "Is that important or not? I don't know."

O'Donnell's bottom line: "It is unclear what were the effects of the sarin, versus what were the effects of the panic."

In other words, maybe stress caused their symptoms.

'These Guys Are Sick'

SQUEAK. SQUEAK. SQUEAK. A sharp sound, like a bad wheel on a shopping cart, echoes through the holiday-decorated hallways of the Lexington VA hospital.

"The tin man needs oil," Jim Stutts says, then offers a stoic smile.

It's the noisy metal brace attached to his left leg. As the gaunt doctor-patient limps by, staffers greet him warmly by name.

He's checking in with his physicians, Wes Ashford and Joel Stephenson. As usual they can't offer much optimism. His brain scans keep showing degeneration.

The doctors do have a new memory drug that may help the symptoms, even if there's no cure. And they believe him, just as they believe the other 153 area patients enrolled in the Gulf War clinic.

"These guys are sick," says Stephenson, who oversees the clinic. "Like Dr. Stutts, they are successful people on the outside. They don't want to be here."

Worst off are the combat troops, the doctors say. The men and women from medical units who treated them also report rashes, headaches, other pains.

"About everybody across the board has joint pains -- everybody, including me," says Linda Godfrey, the clinic's case manager. A nurse, she served in the Khamisiyah fallout zone.

A couple of months after returning, her body burned like fire, forcing her to wear ice packs at work. "It came and went without rhyme or reason for four years," says Godfrey.

Extensive neuropsychological tests have demonstrated that the brain damage in Gulf War patients is similar to that of elderly patients with Alzheimer's. "You can't dispute it," Stephenson says flatly.

Ashford, a psychiatrist, is an Alzheimer's specialist who runs the hospital's memory disorders clinic. On a hallway wall, he displays computer images of 10 vets' brains, pinpointing areas of reduced blood flow. Compared to the smooth gray hemispheres of a normal brain, these resemble landscapes pocked by gaping craters. Bombs come to mind.

"The striking thing is," Ashford says, "you don't see these problems in the Vietnam vets, the Korean War vets, the World War II vets."

Yes, one explanation could be sarin: "If you get a few molecules in a particular area . . ."

But that's "idle speculation," Ashford quickly amends. Such a hypothesis must be tested. "We don't have an explanation and I don't want to pretend that we do."

continued.........

[thedrifter]

Spreading the Blame

The service was Stutts's life: 32 years, counting the reserves and the National Guard.

He doesn't want it to be over. He blames, bitterly, Saddam Hussein; the Western weapons suppliers who sold Iraq its poisons; his own government, for its "deplorable" treatment of vets.

"All I want is my health back," he says, wearing an Army sweat shirt, which he will take off and put on repeatedly as he feels chills, then fevers. "I want my military command back. I want to wear the green uniform. I want my medical practice. I want to be able to get my social and family life back."

It's a long list, but one thing isn't on it. He doesn't ask for an answer. He believes he already has one.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company


Sempers,

Roger

[leroy8541]

ahh the V.A I try not to get mad, because they are very busy. most of them have up to 100 case loads each. The administrators can only follow orders just like we did as active marines. They cannot help what they cannot understand. I myself am suffering with this mysterious joint pain thing. It comes and goes I cannot associate it with anything it did not start until after i got out of the marines they want proof of service connected illness, like something in my med record where you will find only a broken ankle shot record and a few trips to the STD clinic typical for most recon marines. I have tried to explain to them that in the corp trips to sick bay for minor aches and pains was frowned upon by your peers and being a recon marine the tag sick bay commando will be put on you very quickly resulting in an enormous amount of harrassment and a quick trip out the gate back to the grunts. So now what? We can't play ball, go hunting, and maintaining employment is becoming a chore there are 6 of us here in my hometown and we are all in the same boat.