Soldiers of Misfortune

The alarm’s eerie, monotonous drone whines out into the silent Saudi Arabian desert sands. The troops stir with adrenaline, but again, they’re told it is just another false alarm. Gas masks are removed as they look to one another nervously. Puzzled, some wonder if their test equipment could be faulty again.

Cassandra Garner, 27, didn’t think this is where she would be when she joined the Army on a youthful whim. "They set out to deceive you and they take you in when you’re really young and it’s not like you’ve really made up your mind what you really wanted to do," she says. "I was into playing basketball. I had applied with the Oakland Police Department. I had other things going on for me in my life that were just kind of stolen from me. My life was taken from me because I decided to go into the military." Garner is a Gulf War Veteran. Today her life is much different, she says. "I hurt all over."

Seven years after the Gulf War, a storm of complaints like Garner’s have poured in. Nearly 130,000 veterans have filed for service connected disabilities as of September 1997. The House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight recently reported contacts with nerve gas, depleted uranium, insecticides, anti-nerve gas pills and burning oil fields in the Gulf War were the primary causes of Gulf War Syndrome illness.

Today as Garner sits in the waiting room at the dreary cold and white Palo Alto VA hospital, bereft of cheery coffee table magazines, she seems vacant. "A typical day for me is a medical appointment." She stares blankly as she talks about the person she used to be, with no more expression than the room. With her eyes closed, fighting back the tears, she pauses long and says with pain and sadness in her voice, "I’m not who I used to be." While doctors argue over defining Gulf War Syndrome, veterans say their symptoms aren’t getting diagnosed and treated properly. Veterans say this has snagged their claims for disability compensation in the Department of Veterans Affairs bureaucracy.

Garner has so much pain in her hands and arms that she can’t do the thing she likes most: play basketball. She wears wrist, knee and back braces. Because of asthma she uses an inhaler to breathe if conversation is long. Garner blames the Department of Defense for her pains. "Alarms were going off all the time. You gonna send your people out there with faulty equipment or are you gonna have them out there with equipment that’s gonna detect. Those alarms were going off so there was detection."

Six years after the war, the Pentagon admitted soldiers had contact with chemicals. After a long battle, Garner got a letter from the Pentagon this year acknowledging she was stationed in an area that came in contact with the nerve gas sarin. She was near Kamisiyah in Southern Iraq where the U.S. destroyed a chemical weapons depot. The fallout is estimated to affect as many as 100,000 soldiers, according to the Pentagon. She says that the Department of Veterans Affairs should clean up their mess. "The least they can do is provide the best health care even if there is no cure and not with these mediocre doctors. They don’t know what they’re doing and they want to push little tests off on you. You’re an experiment, a lab rat," she says.

San Francisco VA Hospital's environmental health physician, Dr. Robert Owen, disputes claims that the troops exposure to nerve gas was at a toxic level. "There isn’t any medical experience of people having a low dose exposure that doesn’t make them sick at the time that somehow makes them sick sometime later, we don’t know, but that’s not been the experience from what we have seen before."

But Garner complains of multiple chemical contact. Garner says their captains allowed them to explore the desert -- fun that put them in heavy contact with depleted uranium. The U.S. used depleted uranium bullets able to pierce through tanks, but some say consideration had not been given to the troops exposure to the bullets residual toxins. Owen criticizes claims that depleted uranium had an effect on veterans. He contends that unless there was a high radiation exposure where there could be various things that would show up, such as a bad sunburn, or anemia, levels of exposure were too low to cause harm. "But at the low level of depleted uranium, I don’t know of anything that has been validated of depleted uranium."

Garner was collecting souvenirs at Basra Road. She carries pictures of the long highway’s shot up tanks, cars and seared bodies all scattered about the desert sand, roadside frozen horror scenes of Iraqi’s fleeing Kuwait along Basra Road, also called the Highway of Death. "I have a picture of this charred person." She carries pictures to show her doctors what she has been in contact with. "Some of the doctors that we deal with are just students so they’re learning themselves and I wind up having to teach them what’s going on with this."

Researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas are finding answers. Chief investigator, Dr. Robert Haley, said in a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, "Our findings provide the first evidence of association between symptoms in the Gulf War veterans and exposure to chemicals, including chemical nerve agents." Another study at UT Southwestern recently revealed that some Gulf War veterans have brain damage as a result of chemical exposure. Researchers there recently received $3 million from the Department of Defense to continue their study in brain and nerve damage in Gulf War Syndrome patients. They are looking for methods to screen, diagnose and treat the illness.

Diagnosis of the illness will help veterans to seek claims. The Persian Gulf War Veterans Compensation Act of 1994 guarantees veterans compensation for service connected illness without proof of diagnosed illness. Veterans feel that the act is not being carried out. Veterans Affairs spokesman, Everett Chasen, says, "What that act told us is which illnesses are compensable, it allowed us to determine certain illnesses for Gulf War Syndrome giving them the benefit of the doubt." Chasen contends that the Department of Veteran’s Affair is doing a better job. Chasen points out that benefits have vastly improved. Nearly 95 percent of veterans claims were denied in July 1995. Today, out of the 127,061 claims that have been filed, 107,955 have been processed and 69,610 receive compensation. Yet in many cases compensation is only partial.

Veterans still have to show symptoms that are service related. This is where the gray area of doctor interpretation comes into play which can affect their diagnosis and ultimately their benefits. If doctors show that the symptoms could have just as easily occurred after or before the war, veterans might lose out on benefits. A lot of Gulf War Syndrome symptoms match everyday problems.

Garner says she has spent over two years trying to get full compensation but only receives 50 percent. She says it is because they don’t understand her condition. She says she has nerve damage affecting all of her limbs. "The EMG report says it’s carpal tunnel syndrome. But the neurosurgeons say it’s nerve damage and they say we can’t do anything for you because we don’t know where it’s located." This diagnosis, she says, doesn’t help her condition and prevents her from getting benefits.

Duane Mowrer, a Gulf War veteran, also says that his claim has been poorly handled. He recently had his claim processed. When it came back it didn’t cover any of his Gulf War injuries, the horrible headaches, the nausea and the loss of equilibrium that he says makes his life extremely difficult. He says he can’t do his favorite thing: play drums. He says that since working as an Oakland firefighter he has had to take off a total of two and a half years out of the last six years because it’s been so debilitating. "I never wanted this, the only thing I want to be able to do is work. I love my job," he says with a flicker in his eyes. "To be in the middle of a big fire fighting, there’s no other feeling like it. But the thing I regret the most is that I am not the person that I would like to be for my kids and family."

The Department of Veterans Affairs bills his Oakland Fire Department insurance for his service connected exams. He says this is part of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs inability to understand the Veterans Compensation Act. He says billing has been a problem for many veterans. He is taking his battle to Washington, D.C., where he is meeting with members of Congress and attending Gulf War Veterans conferences. Yet while Gulf War Veterans still battle for treatment and benefits, there is already another battlefront on the horizon.

Once again there is cause for alarm as tension flares up with Iraq over chemical and biological warfare. The United Nations has asked Saddam Hussein repeatedly to comply with UN inspections and remove chemical and biological weapons. It was reported that no one in the White House administration has ruled out military confrontation. Yet, if the U.S. is prepared to go to war again and destroy weapon depots, the question remains as to whether more soldiers will be put at risk.

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