Low level exposure to Sarin, who will help us?

U.S. Nerve Gas Hit Our Own Troops in Iraq
BY BARBARA KOEPPEL 3/27/15 AT 11:52 AM
RTRIEMVU.S.
U.S. Marines carry an injured colleague to a helicopter near the city of Falluja, November 10, 2004. ELIANA APONTE/REUTERS
FILED UNDER:
U.S., Iraq War

During and immediately after the first Gulf War, more than 200,000 of 700,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq and Kuwait in January 1991 were exposed to nerve gas and other chemical agents. Though aware of this, the Department of Defense and CIA launched a campaign of lies and concocted a cover-up that continues today.

A quarter of a century later, the troops nearest the explosions are dying of brain cancer at two to three times the rate of those who were farther away. Others have lung cancer or debilitating chronic diseases, and pain.

More complications lie ahead.

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According to Dr. Linda Chao, a neurologist at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, “Because part of their brains, the hippocampus, has shrunk, they’re at greater risk for Alzheimer’s and other degenerative diseases.”

At first, the DOD was adamant: No troops were exposed.

“No information…indicates that chemical or biological weapons were used in the Persian Gulf,” wrote Secretary of Defense William Perry and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs John Shalikashvili in a 1994 memo to 20,000 Desert Storm veterans. Strictly speaking, they were right: No weapons were used. The nerve agent sarin was in the fallout from the U.S. bombing or detonating of Iraq’s weapons sites.


Perry and Shalikashvili knew.

As Alan Friedman wrote in The Spider Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq, the Reagan and Bush administrations, which backed Iraq in its 1980-1988 war with Iran, approved of U.S. companies selling chemical agents and equipment to Iraq, including “a huge petrochemicals complex called PC2. Western intelligence also knew that PC2 was capable of generating chemical compounds to make mustard and nerve gas.”

Donald Riegle, a Democratic U.S. Senator from Michigan, held hearings about the veterans illnesses in 1993 and 1994. He told me the decision by Reagan and Bush “to secretly help Saddam Hussein build his biological and chemical weapons was a monstrous strategic error that eventually led to the tragedy of Gulf War Syndrome, which killed and disabled so many unprotected American troops.”


Breathing Poison

During January and February 1991, when the U.S. bombed Iraq’s weapons plants and storage sites, poisonous plumes floated across the desert to thousands of U.S. troops based on the Saudi border. Sirens wailed daily, but officers in charge announced that the chemical-detection alarms were faulty.

They were not.

A Czech chemical-weapons detection unit found “trace concentrations of sarin, a nerve-paralyzing substance” drifting into Saudi Arabia. French, British and U.S. intelligence units found similar evidence.

Tracy Elledge, a former combat engineer and one of the veterans I interviewed, said, “Alarms went off all the time.… Our officers told us they were false and to disconnect them.”

However, Elledge and others were breathing poison.

In a 2012 Neuroepidemiology article, Jim Tuite, a Gulf War illness expert, and Dr. Robert Haley, an internist/epidemiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, wrote that “large numbers of U.S. and Coalition military personnel were exposed to levels of sarin … high enough to cause irreversible or other serious, long-lasting adverse health effects.”

Elledge was on a team setting C-4 plastic explosives at Khamisiyah, one of Iraq’s largest weapons sites. “We used timed fuses, which gave us 10 minutes to get a half mile away,” he said. “But even at that distance, the smoke was terrible. And we were sent back in to make sure we got everything. The officers never told us the old rockets were filled with sarin, so we didn’t wear any protective gear.”

Jim Bunker was a lieutenant with the First Infantry Division who had trained as a demolition expert. He told me that “before the DOD blew up the ammunition, it sent papers to the battalion officers and intelligence people with clear markings to help them identify chemical weapons. Then on March 2 or 3, the DOD sent the ordnance disposal team to verify which chemicals were there. We don’t know what they found, because once the troops started demolishing them and getting sick, the reports disappeared.”

Bunker said that when troops first became ill, his battalion commander, Col. John Gingrich, radioed headquarters to find out what was happening. He was told: “It’s the heat.”

“We knew this wasn’t true,” Bunker said. “It was only 85 degrees, and we’d trained in over 100 degrees—without people getting sick like this.” The next day, division commander Maj. General Thomas Rhame and Col. Michael Dodson came to their base. “They told Gingrich to be quiet about the men’s symptoms,” Bunker said.

Dodson, now head of the Armed Services YMCA, did not respond to calls. Rhame, retired and until recently, vice president of the Association of the U.S. Army, told me, “I don’t deny the troops were ill. But I don’t remember that incident and it’s not in my nature to tell a subordinate not to admit something, because it might embarrass us.” Gingrich told me he remembers the issue about the heat, but not that Rhame and Dodson visited the next day. What does Bunker think? “There’s no way for people to admit to what really happened to us.”

Ron Brown, a soldier with the 82nd Division, watched the demolitions from a mile away. “Within 15 minutes, I couldn’t breathe and my head was about to split open,” Brown said. “Soldiers were nauseous, dizzy and had diarrhea and muscle spasms. About 30 of us went to the medic, who gave us Motrin and told us to drink water.”

Later that month, Bunker almost died. As the demolitions continued, his symptoms became more severe. “First, I couldn’t control my muscles,” he said. “But in a couple days, I had convulsions and collapsed. After this, they medevacked me to hospitals in Saudi Arabia and Germany, and then to the U.S.”

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