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thedrifter
01-15-03, 09:35 AM
Like thousands of Gulf War vets, James Stutts went to Iraq healthy and came back to illness. With new troops headed to the region, the government still can't explain the cause of their sickness

By Richard Leiby
THE WASHINGTON POST

January 15: 2003

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 30s and 40s - are being treated for symptoms of early Alzheimer's.

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."

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.

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."

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. 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, 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.

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 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 backyard or standing in the bathroom, he'd suddenly collapse. He had headaches, dizziness, temperature fluctuations.

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.

By late 1997, he was found "unfit for retention" by the National Guard.

One of his doctors, 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."

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?

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. "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."

A standard-issue gas mask and chemical protection suit decorate one corner of Steve Robinson's small office in Silver Spring, Md. 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 "postwar casualty rate" of America's last war with Iraq.

http://www.newsday.com/features/ny-p2cover3087458jan15,0,1239271.story

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.


Sempers,

Roger