The Home Affront

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About the Author

Seattle Weekly writer Rick Anderson started his newspaper career as a copy boy for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. From there, he went to the Skagit Valley Herald, the Daily Olympian, the Hayward, Calif., Daily Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Tri-City Herald, the P-I again, The Seattle Times, then Seattle Weekly. And he's still broke.

This article is drawn from Home Front: The Government's War on Soldiers (Clarity Press, 2004), a book that grew out of a story Anderson wrote for SW—"Crippled Home Front" (April 9, 2003). That article drew wide response and is displayed at numerous Web sites, including that of Arlington National Cemetery.

Anderson will read from and sign Home Front on July 30 at 6 p.m. at Third Place Books in Bothell; Aug. 10, 7:30 p.m., at Elliott Bay Book Co. in Seattle; Aug. 26, 7 p.m., at University Book Store in Seattle; and Aug. 27, 7:30 p.m., at Village Bookstore in Bellingham.

Toney Edwards met his daughter around midnight in the hallway at Fort Sam Houston's Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas. Prepare for a shock, she told Toney and his wife as they entered the hospital room that night in 1998. The father edged to the bedside and peered down at the distorted face of his Army son, Kevin. Toney flinched. The boy's face reminded him of something he'd seen in Vietnam: a battered, swollen GI, the victim of friendly fire. One of America's 26.4 million war veterans, father Toney had joined the Army 30 years earlier, going from the backwoods of Virginia to become an airborne soldier in the Vietnam jungles, where he was exposed to the herbicide Agent Orange. "The Army gave me a life," he liked to say—and then add that the life included post-traumatic stress disorder and maybe prostate cancer, linked, he thinks, to the chemical defoliants he was told were harmless to humans. It had been tough to live with his military memories. Now he had to face living with his son's as well. Hovering over Kevin, Toney was confused. How could the boy suffer such an injury? The father had witnessed members of his own unit in 'Nam after they were hit with napalm fired by U.S. aircraft. Their faces looked seared, inflated, cockeyed. Did Kevin's Army truck turn over? Was there a fire? An explosion? Say what? An inoculation? Moments after being given, under orders, a shot of anthrax vaccine while on duty in Korea, Army Spc. Kevin Edwards lapsed into a partial coma and stopped breathing. While being airlifted by helicopter to a hospital, he was given a tracheotomy. The stab of vaccine was supposed to protect him. Instead, it put him near death and cost him part of his eyesight.

Kevin Edwards survived, though he will never fully recover. The Army sent him to the Boston Foundation for Sight—a year after he began complaining about his fading vision—where he was fitted with special lubricated lenses.

His father says he's convinced by what he's read in medical journals and heard from doctors and other veterans that his son's condition was caused by an adverse reaction to the anthrax vaccine.

Injections of the vaccine, which was considered experimental and was not fully approved for the way the military uses it, were often given without informed consent and other precautions required in civilian medical practice. The drug has never undergone controlled testing in humans for long-term effects. But under the military oath, recruits solemnly swear or affirm they will support and defend the Constitution and obey the orders of their president and commanders, an oath that concludes, appropriately, "So help me God."

Refusing the vaccination is out of the question, unless soldiers are willing to face being drummed out of the corps. Congress approved the law enabling the president to order inoculations. Some soldiers say their commanders have threatened to tie them down and forcibly inject them if they decline to follow orders.

Army cook Sandra Larson of Spokane, for example, likely wished she had refused. She was 32 when she died for her country. She was shot six times, but there were no medals, no homecoming parades, no purple heart. The killer, says her family and investigators, was the anthrax vaccine, known as AVA. It was, in the most profound and painful sense, death by friendly fire.

Like most other soldiers at the time, Sandra Larson was not informed that the AVA being given to combat inhalation anthrax was not fully licensed and that neither its safety nor efficacy could be assured. Almost immediately after her first injection, the young mother had an adverse reaction to the shot. She felt exhausted, developed skin rashes, and experienced numbness and pain in her hands. When the symptoms persisted for days, she was granted a two-week leave to recover. She never did. Sandra Larson died suddenly June 13, 2000, at Madigan Army Hospital near Tacoma. Similarly, David Bloom, the popular NBC television correspondent, became a sudden civilian battlefield casualty in Iraq last year, dying of a blood clot several weeks after receiving smallpox and anthrax vaccinations. Some think there could be a connection.

A company called BioPort, a private corporation whose investors include former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. William Crowe, was and is today the only authorized manufacturer of AVA in the U.S. It hopes that someday all of America, soldiers and citizens, will use its product to combat terrorists.

The Pentagon insists its vaccine is safe and effective, that it has the studies—its own—to prove it. But this much Toney Edwards knows: One day his son was marched into an Army vaccination tent and wound up a casualty of war. He even had to undergo an operation to remove his tear ducts.

"Imagine," Toney says, "being in a position in which you cannot even cry."

There are other Kevin Edwardses and Sandra Larsons. They're the soldiers and veterans who have increasingly been injected, gassed, medicated, experimented on, and exposed to chemicals by their own government in recent decades. Some may have died from chemicals we sold to our enemies. Anthrax, for one, was provided to Saddam Hussein by American firms in the years just before Gulf War I. (After Saddam began using weapons of mass destruction on Iranians and his own people, the U.S. sent then-envoy and now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to shake Saddam's hand as the U.S. renewed its ties and later provided intelligence and steered more arms and chemicals to Iraq to ensure the defeat of Iran.)