ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608120063
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The New York Times
NOTE: Below
After years of Pentagon denials, a group of veterans of the Persian Gulf War is offering the first compelling evidence that American troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons, and says that nerve gas and other chemical agents have begun to ravage their bodies.
The soldiers and former soldiers were members of the 37th Engineer Battalion of the U.S. Army. And unlike thousands of other Americans who have complained that they suffer from the ailments collectively described as Gulf War Syndrome, the men of the 37th can pinpoint the time and place they believe they were exposed to chemical weapons: 2:05 p.m., March 4, 1991, when the battalion blew up 33 Iraqi bunkers in the southern Iraqi desert.
The Pentagon acknowledged this summer - more than five years after the end of the war, more than four years after the United Nations made the first evidence public - that one of the concrete bunkers probably held shells containing sarin, a deadly nerve agent, and mustard gas, a blister agent that can burn flesh. The bunkers were destroyed to keep the Iraqis from re-arming immediately after the war.
Defense Department officials say their initial review of the medical records of the battalion offers no evidence of an unusual pattern of health problems. While it concedes that chemical weapons were probably at the arsenal, the Pentagon has said that it still has no clinical evidence that the soldiers were exposed.
But the veterans of the 37th tell a different story. Many say they are sick. In interviews with 37 of the nearly 150 battalion members who were reported in the vicinity of the arsenal at the time of the explosion, 27 said they had suffered serious health problems since the war.
Their ailments, they said, include mysterious infections and rashes, serious gastrointestinal problems, fierce headaches and constant fatigue. Many have been hospitalized for unexplained ailments; some have had surgery.
``We just want to know what's wrong with us,'' said Christian Tullius, a veteran of the 37th from Copperas Cove, Texas, who left the Army only last month.
``We were paratroopers - elite troops, in great shape - and now we're all sick as dogs,'' said Tullius, 28, who has been operated on nine times for intestinal ailments since the war and had much of the muscle wall around his stomach removed.
So far, medical experts have not been able to determine a cause for the reports of illness, and have disagreed over whether the syndrome has a medical basis. More than 60,000 Gulf War veterans have asked for special government health screenings to determine if they suffer from ailments related to the war.
The accounts given by members of the 37th, however, have raised concerns about the credibility of the Defense Department, which until recently insisted it had no evidence that Americans might have been exposed to Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. There is the possibility that tens of thousands of other soldiers downwind from the explosion were exposed as well.
An investigation of the incident at the Kamisiyah arsenal, including interviews with officials at the Pentagon and a review of classified Army reports on the explosion, has shown several things:
* The Pentagon paid little, if any, attention to early reports that chemical agents might have been released at Kamisiyah, even though U.N. investigators made the information public in at least three reports to the Security Council in 1992. The United Nations said that copies of the report were also provided immediately to the U.S. government, including several federal libraries.
* Some veterans of the 37th Battalion dispute crucial elements of the Pentagon's initial account of what happened at Kamisiyah. The Pentagon has said that according to battlefield reports, soldiers conducted an extensive inspection of the site for chemical weapons before the blast, and that detectors found no chemical agents after the explosion. Some veterans said both assertions were incorrect. They said chemical-weapon alarms went off shortly after the blast, leading many soldiers to don rubberized chemical-warfare suits immediately.
* The battalion ran short of the chemical suits, and troops were encouraged not to unwrap new suits even when chemical-gas alarms went off. The alarms went off frequently during the war - several times a week, with most dismissed as false alarms by commanders. Several soldiers said they often wore only gas masks when the alarms went off, leaving their skin exposed.
``We were just told to put our masks on and get inside the tent,'' said Dale Cook, 28, a veteran from Fremont, Mich., who said he was suffering from kidney stones, a mysterious fungus that is causing his fingernails to drop off, rashes across much of the rest of his body and chronic fatigue that causes him to nod off at work.
Even as the Defense Department has suggested that exposure to low levels of chemical weapons does not carry long-term health risks, Pentagon officials acknowledge that little is known about the long-term effects. One of the few studies ever done on the issue, a 1974 report in a Swedish research journal, said low levels of chemical weapons could produce cancers and ``chronic illnesses'' of the central nervous system.
The former members of the battalion, which is based at Fort Bragg, N.C., were located through Army records and referrals by other veterans. While those interviewed are not a random sample, there still seems to be a remarkable amount of illness among a group of young men who, as paratroopers in the war, were required to be in peak physical condition.
The concrete bunkers at Kamisiyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, covered 20 square miles of desert. When the war ended in a cease-fire on Feb. 28, 1991, the United States and its Western allies were eager to destroy what remained of the Iraqi arsenal, so the 37th Engineer Battalion was ordered to demolish the bunkers.
The explosion was so large that it rocked the desert floor miles away and created a plume of smoke that covered hundreds of square miles. Soldiers made a videotape of the scene, and it shows a vast black cloud rising into the sky, fed by several smaller explosions. The video also shows that soldiers, who were about three miles away from some of the bunkers, were not wearing chemical-weapon suits or gas masks.
``We're going to follow up and further investigate,'' said Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.
Still, he said that a preliminary review of the health records suggested that veterans of the 37th were not suffering an unusual number of health problems.
The findings would tend to support larger studies that have found no evidence to support the concept of Gulf War Syndrome. A study released in January by the Institute of Medicine, which is affiliated with the National Academy of Sciences, found that veterans' ailments ``are not the result of chemical, biological or toxin warfare, or accidental exposures to stored weapons.''
Several veterans of the 37th, including some soldiers who are still in the Army, say they do not trust the Pentagon to carry out an honest investigation.
Brian Martin, a 33-year-old veteran from Niles, Mich., who had been a driver with the battalion, was so disabled after his service in the gulf that the Pentagon has already agreed to provide him with full disability pay. His doctors report that he suffers from chronic diarrhea, insomnia and headaches. He does not have enough energy to walk more than 200 feet before collapsing.
The military has been unwilling to concede until now that soldiers were exposed to chemical weapons ``because it's such a huge black eye - they have to admit that they put us in harm's way during the war,'' Martin said. ``I'm not out to embarrass the military. I'm not out to hurt the military. But we are sick, and we're asking the military to please acknowledge that.''
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