Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp
Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance
and shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The
readings were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the
desert rather than live in the station ruins.
"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching
depleted uranium."
Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for
sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.
Then they hired a lawyer.
.
ABC News
Sickened Iraq Vets Cite Depleted Uranium
Some Veterans Believe Depleted Uranium Weapons, a U.S. Armament in Iraq,
Have Sickened Them
By DEBORAH HASTINGS
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - It takes at least 10 minutes and a large glass of orange
juice to wash down all the pills morphine, methadone, a muscle relaxant,
an antidepressant, a stool softener. Viagra for sexual dysfunction.
Valium for his nerves.
Four hours later, Herbert Reed will swallow another 15 mg of morphine to
cut the pain clenching every part of his body. He will do it twice more
before the day is done.
Since he left a bombed-out train depot in Iraq, his gums bleed. There is
more blood in his urine, and still more in his stool. Bright light hurts
his eyes. A tumor has been removed from his thyroid. Rashes erupt
everywhere, itching so badly they seem to live inside his skin.
Migraines cleave his skull. His joints ache, grating like door hinges in
need of oil.
There is something massively wrong with Herbert Reed, though no one is
sure what it is. He believes he knows the cause, but he cannot convince
anyone caring for him that the military's new favorite weapon has made
him terrifyingly sick.
In the sprawling bureaucracy of the Department of Veterans Affairs, he
has many caretakers. An internist, a neurologist, a pain-management
specialist, a psychologist, an orthopedic surgeon and a dermatologist.
He cannot function without his stupefying arsenal of medications, but
they exact a high price.
"I'm just a zombie walking around," he says.
Reed believes depleted uranium has contaminated him and his life. He now
walks point in a vitriolic war over the Pentagon's arsenal of it
thousands of shells and hundreds of tanks coated with the metal that is
radioactive, chemically toxic, and nearly twice as dense as lead.
A shell coated with depleted uranium pierces a tank like a hot knife
through butter, exploding on impact into a charring inferno. As tank
armor, it repels artillery assaults. It also leaves behind a fine
radioactive dust with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Depleted uranium is the garbage left from producing enriched uranium for
nuclear weapons and energy plants. It is 60 percent as radioactive as
natural uranium. The U.S. has an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of it,
sitting in hazardous waste storage sites across the country. Meaning it
is plentiful and cheap as well as highly effective.
Reed says he unknowingly breathed DU dust while living with his unit in
Samawah, Iraq. He was med-evaced out in July 2003, nearly unable to walk
because of lightning-strike pains from herniated discs in his spine.
Then began a strange series of symptoms he'd never experienced in his
previously healthy life.
At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C, he ran into a
buddy from his unit. And another, and another, and in the tedium of
hospital life between doctor visits and the dispensing of meds, they
began to talk.
"We all had migraines. We all felt sick," Reed says. "The doctors said,
'It's all in your head.' "
Then the medic from their unit showed up. He too, was suffering. That
made eight sick soldiers from the 442nd Military Police, an Army
National Guard unit made up of mostly cops and correctional officers
from the New York area.
But the medic knew something the others didn't.
Dutch marines had taken over the abandoned train depot dubbed Camp
Smitty, which was surrounded by tank skeletons, unexploded ordnance and
shell casings. They'd brought radiation-detection devices. The readings
were so hot, the Dutch set up camp in the middle of the desert rather
than live in the station ruins.
"We got on the Internet," Reed said, "and we started researching
depleted uranium."
Then they contacted The New York Daily News, which paid for
sophisticated urine tests available only overseas.
Then they hired a lawyer.
Reed, Gerard Matthew, Raymond Ramos, Hector Vega, Augustin Matos,
Anthony Yonnone, Jerry Ojeda and Anthony Phillip all have depleted
uranium in their urine, according to tests done in December 2003, while
they bounced for months between Walter Reed and New Jersey's Fort Dix
medical center, seeking relief that never came.
The analyses were done in Germany, by a Frankfurt professor who
developed a depleted uranium test with Randall Parrish, a professor of
isotope geology at the University of Leicester in Britain.
The veterans, using their positive results as evidence, have sued the
U.S. Army, claiming officials knew the hazards of depleted uranium, but
concealed the risks.
The Department of Defense says depleted uranium is powerful and safe,
and not that worrisome.
Four of the highest-registering samples from Frankfurt were sent to the
VA. Those results were negative, Reed said. "Their test just isn't as
sophisticated," he said. "And when we first asked to be tested, they
told us there wasn't one. They've lied to us all along."
The VA's testing methodology is safe and accurate, the agency says. More
than 2,100 soldiers from the current war have asked to be tested; only 8
had DU in their urine, the VA said.
The term depleted uranium is linguistically radioactive. Simply uttering
the words can prompt a reaction akin to preaching atheism at tent
revival. Heads shake, eyes roll, opinions are yelled from all sides.
"The Department of Defense takes the position that you can eat it for
breakfast and it poses no threat at all," said Steve Robinson of the
National Gulf War Resource Center, which helps veterans with various
problems, including navigating the labyrinth of VA health care. "Then
you have far-left groups that ... declare it a crime against humanity."
Several countries use it as weaponry, including Britain, which fired it
during the 2003 Iraq invasion.
An estimated 286 tons of DU munitions were fired by the U.S. in Iraq and
Kuwait in 1991. An estimated 130 tons were shot toppling Saddam Hussein.
Depleted uranium can enter the human body by inhalation, the most
dangerous method; by ingesting contaminated food or eating with
contaminated hands; by getting dust or debris in an open wound, or by
being struck by shrapnel, which often is not removed because doing so
would be more dangerous than leaving it.
Inhaled, it can lodge in the lungs. As with imbedded shrapnel, this is
doubly dangerous not only are the particles themselves physically
destructive, they emit radiation.
A moderate voice on the divisive DU spectrum belongs to Dan Fahey, a
doctoral student at the University of California at Berkeley, who has
studied the issue for years and also served in the Gulf War before
leaving the military as a conscientious objector.
"I've been working on this since '93 and I've just given up hope," he
said. "I've spoken to successive federal committees and elected
officials ... who then side with the Pentagon. Nothing changes."
At the other end are a collection of conspiracy-theorists and Internet
proselytizers who say using such weapons constitutes genocide. Two of
the most vocal opponents recently suggested that a depleted-uranium
missile, not a hijacked jetliner, struck the Pentagon in 2001.
"The bottom line is it's more hazardous than the Pentagon admits," Fahey
said, "but it's not as hazardous as the hard-line activist groups say it
is. And there's a real dearth of information about how DU affects humans."
There are several studies on how it affects animals, though their
results are not, of course, directly applicable to humans. Military
research on mice shows that depleted uranium can enter the bloodstream
and come to rest in bones, the brain, kidneys and lymph nodes. Other
research in rats shows that DU can result in cancerous tumors and
genetic mutations, and pass from mother to unborn child, resulting in
birth defects.
Iraqi doctors reported significant increases in birth defects and
childhood cancers after the 1991 invasion.
Iraqi authorities "found that uranium, which affected the blood cells,
had a serious impact on health: The number of cases of leukemia had
increased considerably, as had the incidence of fetal deformities," the
U.N. reported.
Depleted uranium can also contaminate soil and water, and coat buildings
with radioactive dust, which can by carried by wind and sandstorms.
In 2005, the U.N. Environmental Program identified 311 polluted sites in
Iraq. Cleaning them will take at least $40 million and several years,
the agency said. Nothing can start until the fighting stops.
Fifteen years after it was first used in battle, there is only one U.S.
government study monitoring veterans exposed to depleted uranium.
Number of soldiers in the survey: 32. Number of soldiers in both Iraq
wars: more than 900,000.
The study group's size is controversial far too small, say experts
including Fahey and so are the findings of the voluntary,
Baltimore-based study.
It has found "no clinically significant" health effects from depleted
uranium exposure in the study subjects, according to its researchers.
Critics say the VA has downplayed participants' health problems,
including not reporting one soldier who developed cancer, and another
who developed a bone tumor.
So for now, depleted uranium falls into the quagmire of Gulf War
Syndrome, from which no treatment has emerged despite the government's
spending of at least $300 million.
About 30 percent of the 700,000 men and women who served in the first
Gulf War still suffer a baffling array of symptoms very similar to those
reported by Reed's unit.
Depleted uranium has long been suspected as a possible contributor to
Gulf War Syndrome, and in the mid-90s, veterans helped push the military
into tracking soldiers exposed to it.
But for all their efforts, what they got in the end was a questionnaire
dispensed to homeward-bound soldiers asking about mental health,
nightmares, losing control, exposure to dangerous and radioactive chemicals.
But, the veterans persisted, how would soldiers know they'd been
exposed? Radiation is invisible, tasteless, and has no smell. And what
exhausted, homesick, war-addled soldier would check a box that would
only send him or her to a military medical center to be poked and
prodded and questioned and tested?
It will take years to determine how depleted uranium affected soldiers
from this war. After Vietnam, veterans, in numbers that grew with the
passage of time, complained of joint aches, night sweats, bloody feces,
migraine headaches, unexplained rashes and violent behavior; some
developed cancers.
It took more than 25 years for the Pentagon to acknowledge that Agent
Orange a corrosive defoliant used to melt the jungles of Vietnam and
flush out the enemy was linked to those sufferings.
It took 40 years for the military to compensate sick World War II vets
exposed to massive blasts of radiation during tests of the atomic bomb.
In 2002, Congress voted to not let that happen again.
It established the Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans'
Illnesses comprised of scientists, physicians and veterans advocates. It
reports to the secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Its mandate is to judge all research and all efforts to treat Gulf War
Syndrome patients against a single standard: Have sick soldiers been
made better?
The answer, according to the committee, is no.
"Regrettably, after four years of operation neither the Committee nor
(the) VA can report progress toward this goal," stated its December 2005
report. "Research has not produced effective treatments for these
conditions nor shown that existing treatments are significantly effective."
And so time marches on, as do soldiers going to, and returning from, the
deserts of Iraq.
Herbert Reed is an imposing man, broad shouldered and tall. He strides
into the VA Medical Center in the Bronx with the presence of a cop or a
soldier. Since the Vietnam War, he has been both.
His hair is perfect, his shirt spotless, his jeans sharply creased. But
there is something wrong, a niggling imperfection made more noticeable
by a bearing so disciplined. It is a limp more like a hitch in his
get-along.
It is the only sign, albeit a tiny one, that he is extremely sick.
Even sleep offers no release. He dreams of gunfire and bombs and
soldiers who scream for help. No matter how hard he tries, he never gets
there in time.
At 54, he is a veteran of two wars and a 20-year veteran of the New York
Police Department, where he last served as an assistant warden at the
Riker's Island prison.
He was in perfect health, he says, before being deployed to Iraq.
According to military guidelines, he should have heard the words
depleted uranium long before he ended up at Walter Reed. He should have
been trained about its dangers, and how to avoid prolonged exposure to
its toxicity and radioactivity. He says he didn't get anything of the
kind. Neither did other reservists and National Guard soldiers called up
for the current war, according to veterans' groups.
Reed and the seven brothers from his unit hate what has happened to
them, and they speak of it at public seminars and in politicians'
offices. It is something no VA doctor can explain; something that leaves
them feeling like so many spent shell rounds, kicked to the side of battle.
But for every outspoken soldier like them, there are silent veterans
like Raphael Naboa, an Army artillery scout who served 11 months in the
northern Sunni Triangle, only to come home and fall apart.
Some days he feels fine. "Some days I can't get out of bed," he said
from his home in Colorado.
Now 29, he's had growths removed from his brain. He has suffered a small
stroke one morning he was shaving, having put down the razor to rinse
his face. In that moment, he blacked out and pitched over.
"Just as quickly as I lost consciousness, I regained it," he said.
"Except I couldn't move the right side of my body."
After about 15 minutes, the paralysis ebbed.
He has mentioned depleted uranium to his VA doctors, who say he suffers
from a series of "non-related conditions." He knows he was exposed to DU.
"A lot of guys went trophy-hunting, grabbing bayonets, helmets, stuff
that was in the vehicles that were destroyed by depleted uranium. My
guys were rooting around in it. I was trying to get them out of the
vehicles."
No one in the military talked to him about depleted uranium, he said.
His knowledge, like Reed's, is self-taught from the Internet.
Unlike Reed, he has not gone to war over it. He doesn't feel up to the
fight. There is no known cure for what ails him, and so no possible
victory in battle.
He'd really just like to feel normal again. And he knows of others who
feel the same.
"I was an artillery scout, these are folks who are in pretty good shape.
Your Rangers, your Special Forces guys, they're in as good as shape as a
professional athlete.
"Then we come back and we're all sick."
They feel like men who once were warriors and now are old before their
time, with no hope for relief from a multitude of miseries that has no name.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material
may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures
